Total Place: Leadership Lessons for Local Government Reform

The Leadership Centre was set up in 2004 because government saw the need for a funded leadership development offer that would drive real change in local government. The Centre invested in political as well as managerial leadership and worked directly with more than 100 councils.That funding also created space for more disruptive ideas: the ‘Counting Cumbria' and ‘Calling Cumbria' initiatives stemmed from the ground up, counting all public sector spend in an area and working directly with communities to explore how those funds could be used differently. Total Place was born.What happened next is a fascinating study in how leadership can make or break an idea and how bottom-up ideas can get appropriated by top-down institutions and ultimately absorbed.Sensing a savings opportunity, the initial experiments scaled up into the Treasury's Operational Efficiency Programme – 13 pilots in 2009 – then, after a change of government, morphed into four ‘whole place' community budget pilots and 11 neighbourhood budget pilots in 2011.A downbeat 2013 National Audit Office evaluation concluded it could not be proved the approach had saved significant money and that the challenge was complex.That killed the specific approach, though arguably it left behind a mindset that went on to underpin the City Deals and devolution deals that followed.Political and managerial leaders across central and local government drove this story and we invited many of them to The Leadership Centre's Summer Event on 21 July.With Total Place 2.0 now gaining traction – Place Based Budgets piloted in five areas, Test, Learn and Grow initiatives under way, the Local Government Association's Total Place handbook just launched and a devolution-experienced former mayor now Prime Minister – it was the right time to reflect on the opportunities and challenges for leaders.Some might say an idea taking decades to reach widespread fruition proves it is flawed. We think otherwise.The case for shaping local public services around people and places, rather than around organisations and the services they provide, has been overwhelmingly made, but the journey from big idea to new reality is complex and multi-faceted.Government encouragement is real but the system lags well behind. The McKinsey 7S framework holds that the soft S's – skills, shared values, style and staff – may not be enough to drive change if the hard S's – structure, strategy and systems – are not aligned.While progress is being made on this latter set we are by no means there and that represents a risk for leaders choosing to move beyond the current paradigm.It is telling that the history of Total Place 1.0 is a history of pilots. Chunka Mui, in Pilots Can Be Deadly for Product Innovation, distinguishes pilots from prototypes. Pilots treat ideas as scaled-down finished products, which kills inventions that need more development, not premature evaluation.Participants at the summit were honest in saying that many parts of government remain instinctively suspicious of devolution and place leadership, even threatened by it. So pilots are seen as ideal, holding ideas at arm's-length – the ‘Should we do this? We're thinking about it.' Prototypes commit: ‘We're doing this, we're working out how.'Attendees agreed the stakes are high for leaders working this agenda, because it often means:l-Working beyond narrow organisational goals toward system goals, which can be career-compromising.l-Tracking outcomes for people and communities, instead of institutionally-focused performance frameworks, generates feedback that those institutions would rather ignore.l-Funding preventative spending whose benefits may take years to materialise or accrue to other organisations, while budgets are severely constrained, can appear unrealistic.How should leaders act? This is what renowned leadership experts Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky (Leadership on the Line, 2002) would call both a technical challenge (systems and processes) and an adaptive one (hearts and minds).Good leadership means sailing the place-leadership boat – drawing strength from the tailwinds of government policy on devolution and integrated settlements and from the Total Place 2.0 community – while staying clear-eyed about the rocks below the surface.Rock 1 is organisational v systems leadership: as British theorist, management consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School Anthony Stafford Beer put it: ‘There is no point in claiming the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do'. The existing system is hardwired by legislation, training, occupational frameworks, targets and performance management, so changing it is not easy.Senior leaders need to create a new authorising environment by asking: how will our staff work in future, how will they need to be led, and how do we get from here to there?Shared outcomes frameworks are an excellent way to agree goals across organisations, unlocking tools like Test Learn and Grow, Place Based Budgeting and Total Place demonstrations. Teams can then work differently, led by managers who value relationships and outcomes over transactions and targets. There is a welcome bonus: more engaged communities, greater productivity and more fulfilling public sector work.Rock 2 is cure v prevention. Prevention is better than a cure, for those concerned and for the public purse – that has long been known, yet it is usually the first spend cut under pressure. Why?There is no money for prevention because it is all spent on cure.Measuring the value of preventative spend is not an exact science.Politicians may ask, why spend now, when benefits appear years later under a different administration.There is a temptation to cut preventative programmes now for immediately visible results, leaving successors to face the consequences.Some of this is technical: identifying and categorising preventative spend, modelling interventions and their payback. That technical work lays the ground for the adaptive challenge. It lets leaders ‘get on the balcony' and point out the current trajectory's dysfunction, build political consensus for the long-term work and make clear that only rationalising spend across the system creates headroom to invest in prevention.Rock 3, the biggest, is local v central accountability. Central government holds on to funding partly from fear that letting go locally risks profligacy. The 2023 English Devolution Accountability Framework states that ‘central government must ensure centrally provided funds support UK government priorities and deliver value for money'.Again, there is a technical task to build the business case to demonstrate how funds devolved and spent locally deliver better outcomes. Doing this enables the adaptive work of building trust, shifting perceptions and developing relationships to begin.Nearly 20 years on from Total Place 1.0 the issues facing the sector are more urgent and the choices more stark.Much work has been done to show the power of devolution and the power of communities. But what has not changed in two decades, and will not change ahead, is the need for bold, mature, constructive local leadership – leaders who steer away from the rocks, toward a system that works better in everyone's interest.We will not do this by pretending the rocks are not there and the Leadership Centre stands ready, now as then, to work with those leaders on the quest and those who find it hard to change.Stephen Taylor was chief executive of The Leadership Centre 2005-2009 and Max Wide is interim chief executive of The Leadership Centre 2026

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PUBLIC SERVICE REFORM

Total Place: Still all about leadership

By Max Wide, Stephen Taylor | 29 July 2026

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