moving you from crisis to prevention by helping you to turn strategy into delivery & building trust

LocalGov Reform Innovation Systems Thinking

moving you from crisis to prevention by helping you to turn strategy into delivery & building trust

LocalGov Reform Innovation Systems Thinking

About Myself

Working in Public Service Reform as a System Thinking Practitioner, I am motivated by delivering positive outcomes through transforming complex environments - and do so by creating high performing and happy teams.

I design, story tell, implement, and govern, sustainable operating models for organisations that provide city and community solutions - places where we live, invest, work, learn, visit and play.

With a particular interest in how the World’s systems work and connect, and how macro trends and policies translate into micro impact and the opportunities this presents to us locally, I help organisations define, deliver and measure success of large-scale change.

I would love to connect and collaborate with anybody whose purpose is to improve outcomes for social justice, create better places and fairer services for all, and who has a commitment to tackling inequality and poverty in our cities and communities.

About my Experience

Over the last two decades, I have led on some of the most impactful public sector transformations in the UK and helped reshape the priorities of 13 local authorities, cities and their partners. I enjoy the challenges it brings with it, in times of perm-austerity, environmental and health crises, technology disruptions, and the certainty of demographic changes.

Comfortable at board level, I help organisations define, deliver and measure success of large-scale change, managing and influencing behaviour and expectations of senior stakeholders and promoting a culture where risks are measured in terms of time and cost and the reality of political trade-offs. Funding, tight budgeting, effective commissioning and implementing governance that sticks are always part of the mix.

I further served as an e-Government adviser as part of the UK Prime Minister’s Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club from 2002-2003. In 2023, I was "Highly Commended" for 2 National Director of the Year Awards by the "Institute of Directors (IoD)", for the categories "Public & Third Sector" and "Sustainability", and then "Finalist" at the same awards in 2025 for the categories "Innovation" and for "Turnaround".

Living Council: A Manifesto for Practice

Living Council: A Manifesto for Practice, explores the philosophy and purpose behind public service renewal, presenting local government as a living, adaptive system built on trust, prevention and human connection. It reimagines councils as intelligent, self-learning organisations capable of thinking, feeling and acting early, before crisis hits.

Part I: The case for change
1. The death of the old council
2. The era of permanent austerity
3. False dawns and expensive fixes

Part II: The Living Council model
4. A council that breathes
5. From data-rich to data-driven
6. Prevention is a mindset, not a department
7. The AI-native council
8. Culture, courage, and breaking the school rules

Part III: Putting it into practice
9. Designing the Living Council
10. The money bit
11. The people side
12. Governance, risk, and politics
13. The first 100 days of a Living Council

Part IV: Looking ahead
14. A letter to the next generation
15. Final thoughts

Part V: Appendices & tools
Appendix 1: The Living Council checklist
Appendix 2: First 100 days roadmap
Appendix 3: Living Council structure model
Appendix 4: Financial reframing workbook
Appendix 5: Ethics and governance prompts for AI
Appendix 6: Community co-design toolkit

Part VI: Essential readings
White Paper: From Pyramid to Platform – Rethinking the Council as a Living System
Green Paper: Turning the Living Council from Blueprint to Build

Order your copy here:

The Anatomy of the Local State: Systems thinking for the AI-native, prevention-first council

The Anatomy of the Local State: Systems-thinking for the AI-native, prevention-first council, translates the philosophy of the Living Council into practice. It applies systems thinking to the organisational architecture of the modern council, describing how prevention, data, and AI can combine to create structures and a system that are both financially sustainable and socially intelligent.

Together, the two books form a single body of work. Living Council provides the heart and belief that transformation is possible; The Anatomy of the Local State provides the method, design and plans for how to make it real. Both aim to help leaders move from compliance-driven management to purpose-led, prevention-first delivery, enabling local government to thrive as a living system in the age of AI.

Part I – The Skeleton
The structural framework of the living local state: how prevention-first design, systems thinking, governance, data, and finance form the backbone of an AI-native council. It introduces the prevention-first DNA, the anatomy metaphor, and the organising architecture that holds the local system together.

Part II – The Organs
The working core of the system:

The Heart: community purpose and the human pulse of prevention.
The Lungs: financial resilience, breathing space, and flow.
The Liver: cleansing risk, detoxifying demand, and managing capacity.
The Stomach: digesting delivery into value.
The Brain: foresight, intelligence, and learning.

Together, they show how each part sustains the health of the whole.

Part III – The Connective Tissue
The ligaments and fibres that make the system move: culture, workforce, innovation, and place-based collaboration. It explores partnerships, local ecosystems, digital marketplaces, and citizen engagement as the connective tissue of the local state.

Part IV – The Organs in Practice
Detailed models of prevention and AI across key service areas: children’s services, adult social care, housing, public health, streets and place. Each chapter translates philosophy into daily practice, showing how data, foresight, and early intervention reduce demand and build trust.

Part V – The Roadmaps
Guidance for delivery and rhythm: how to start, sustain, and scale. From the first 100 days to three-year cycles, this section covers leadership patterns, capability growth, and learning loops (the pulse that keeps the living local state evolving).

Part VI – The Future Anatomy
A forward look at prevention as default, AI as everyday utility, and councils as adaptive ecosystems of wellbeing: agile, transparent, and human-centred.

A to Z of Prevention (Appendices)
Comprehensive toolkits and frameworks that turn ideas into practice, including:

System-mapping, diagnostics, and maturity models.
Leadership calendars and behavioural frameworks.
AI ethics, governance, and local sovereignty guides.
Budget, finance, and prevention models.
Templates for building data ecosystems and innovation marketplaces.
Reflections on language, storytelling, and purpose.

Order your copy here:

Conversations: Recruiting from Private to Public Sector

Recruiting the right person is becoming increasingly hard. Good people are high in demand, so we took the opportunity to discuss how local government can start to look beyond its own industry to identify new candidates who will not only fit into the culture but also add to it.

Many thanks to Andy Tromans, Senior Consultant, Public Sector Executive Search at Penna and Amin Aziz, Consultant and Assessment Specialist, Penna Public Sector Executive Search.

Conversations: HomeShare & Early Intervention

This webinar focused on "Reducing The Cost Burden for Councils Via Early Intervention" using Homeshare.

Chaired by former Shadow Health Secretary Luciana Berger, the event featured contributions from Claire Kennedy (co-founder & Joint Chief Executive at public sector social enterprise PPL) and myself. Philip Monaghan (Partnerships Director, Two Generations) shared how Homeshare helps Councils and, as always, the audience highlight was hearing from Gretta & Rick, long-time Homesharer.

Case Study: Plymouth City Council

Plymouth is the home to over 260,000 residents, a city shaped by its past and present, strengthened by its communities, and energised by ambition and potential to thrive. Together, we face a shared reality, economic challenges, social inequalities, and the escalating effects of climate change are testing us like never before. Yet, it is through these challenges that our greatest opportunities emerge.

To continue meeting our residents’ needs, we must recognise that ongoing budget challenge through Directorate or Departmental savings alone is no longer sustainable. A more cross-cutting and transformative approach to demand management and cost avoidance is needed, and which must be aligned with the direction being set by Central Government as part of our Local Government Reform agenda.

Failure to be prevention focussed continues to drive demand for services and widen inequalities in our communities. Intervening early has the potential to have a profound effect on the life outcomes of our residents. Families in crisis often require costly emergency interventions, from temporary housing to hospital care. These interventions address immediate needs but do little to resolve underlying issues, leaving families trapped in cycles of dependence and vulnerability. While the financial cost of this reactive model is unsustainable, the human costs are even greater. Lives are disrupted, opportunities are lost, and inequalities deepen. Inaction is not an option.

To address the complex challenges facing Plymouth, our response emphasises a systemic shift from reactive measures to proactive and preventative approaches. Our Prevention-First Strategy, integrates early intervention, data-driven decision-making, and collaborative solutions to ensure we tackle root causes and deliver sustainable, equitable outcomes for all residents. By focusing on early identification and intervention, leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data insights, and building resilience through existing and new community partnerships, we will shift how services are designed and delivered. This is not about pulling departments or partners together under one roof; it is about creating an improved operating model and place centered system that:

Uses data and insight to understand our residents and their communities better to help shape the prevention focus.
Adapt the help and support they may need, putting the resident at the centre of co-production.
Always seeks to find solutions that exist in the community and within our city partners – building a platform that enables this network of resources to grow and be sustained.
Provides integrated universal public sector support where this is helpful or directs people to more targeted specialist support as required.
Integrates pathways into specialist early help for children or life course services.
Inspires confidence and trust from our residents through being clear about what our services can do and accepting when we get things wrong.
Manages our resources effectively by keeping residents and staff safe, targeting our work on the things that residents really need and driving toward carbon neutrality.

To download a copy of the "MTFP Delivery & Prevention-First Transformation Strategy", please follow the link below.

Case Study: London Borough of Southwark

With 57,000 homes, the London Borough of Southwark is the largest social housing provider in England.

This paper sets out the "Case for Change" of how Southwark Council will repair and maintain its existing homes. It is about transforming how our teams work and where they work and understanding the connectivity and relationships between the various functions of our Council wide system while stabilising our repairs service. It is a call for a more interventionist approach and step change to improving our Repairs and Maintenance services and do so in a much more structured way than we have done so far.

Over a decade into austerity, local government finances have been eroded to tipping point, and so we face many more years of fiscal restraint as we move into a new era of permanent austerity. Meanwhile demand for our services is rising, partly as a result of the impact of austerity on some of our communities and partly because of the macro-economic reality we find ourselves in. All this is happening in the context of increasing climate targets and a new Housing Regulatory Framework coming into effect in 2024 and which are driving up investment requirements for our Council owned assets and the Borough’s housing stock.

2022 has also seen the start of the end of cheap money, with inflation and monetary policies driving up prices and interest rates and with it the cost of borrowing (debt), creating uncertainty around future funding options. The pandemic and inflation that followed has had a negative impact upon our own finances and operations, creating significant pressures on our Housing Revenue Account (HRA) which has been depleted to its lowest ever point.

With the rent cap firmly remaining in place, there is limited room within the HRA to absorb ever increasing demands, and the new burdens arising from government directives around building safety are further exacerbating this. Not only does there need to be significant re-prioritisation of existing resources to those areas of highest need, but also a focus on identifying additional resources to continue to fund our capital programme and investment into improving services.

Now more than ever, our Borough is facing significant on-going financial challenges and risks – doing nothing or to continue doing what we have done in the past is not an option, nor is doing less. We need to find our own ways to plan and then gear up for a future in which we can operate effectively, independently and do so within a reduced financial envelope - this requires us to have a response and then move at pace.

To download a copy of the "Case for Change - Transforming Asset Management", please follow the link below.

Case Study: City of Peterborough

My response to the political, macro and socio-economic challenges we are facing in the UK and locally in Peterborough City and the region, the findings and recommendations which were agreed and institutionalised by Full Council within 6 months of initiation.

The "Sustainable Future City Council Strategy 2022-25" and "City Priorities" set out the proposed direction of travel for Peterborough City Council so that it can deliver its long-term vision for the region and our four priority outcomes. It is a positive vision for the City of Peterborough and one which will materialise on the huge opportunities the City presents:

The Economy & Inclusive Growth - maximising economic growth and prosperity for Peterborough as a City of Opportunity, and do so in an inclusive and environmentally sustainable way, together with our City partners and communities;
Our Places & Communities – creating healthy and safe environments where people want to live, work, visit and play, enabled by effective community engagement and strong partnerships;
Prevention, Independence & Resilience - help & support our residents early on in their lives and prevent them from slipping into crisis;
supported by a Sustainable Future City Council- adjust how we Work, Serve and Enable, informed by strong Data & Insight capability and led by a culture of strong Leadership.

We are living in arguably the most challenging times facing Peterborough since the Second World War. Following the pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, mainly driven by inflation and exponential price increases across all sectors is putting further demand on an already fragile support system and which is most felt by our communities while the UK is moving into recession.

A different response, yet within the safety of a tried and tested model was required. A Sustainable Future City Council requires the City Council to have an organisational structure that is build around needs using a 'OneCity – OnePartnership' approach. This means looking at all aspects of not only what it does but how it does it.

The starting point was the challenge of finding significant savings over the coming years and to provide for the required long term financial sustainability – only then, the Council could invest into the City’s future. It's done by implementing an operating model which enables the City Council to manage demand and help & support people before they reach crisis point while finding new ways to tackle inequality in our communities by maximising inclusive, sustainable economic growth that benefits everyone.

To download a copy of the "Sustainable Future City Council Strategy 2022-25" and Peterborough's "City Priorities", please follow the link below.

Case Study: City of Birmingham

Working with the CEO and Deputy Leader, I joined the Council during the most challenging times facing Birmingham since the Second World War. Coronavirus has caused untold tragedy and economic damage and with a decade into austerity the City faces many more years of fiscal restraint while demand for services is rising. A different response, yet within the safety of a tried and tested model was required, one that builds on the huge opportunities presented to us by the City and do so in a way that empowers staff and partners to showcase their innovation and creativity.

Build and led a portfolio team to design, test and agree with Cabinet a Blueprint for leadership, on the design and organisation of Birmingham so that it can deliver the administration’s long-term vision for the City and its priority outcomes; a Blueprint that invests into the City's future and that addresses:

Challenges and Opportunities - why we believe there are opportunities that can address the challenges we face and what it means in practice to benefit from these opportunities;
A new model of leadership and service delivery - the changes we need to make inside the Council;
A new approach to officer governance - how we give Members and wider stakeholders confidence that we will deliver what we say we will deliver;
Making it happen – a comprehensive set of Business Cases, Org Design Structures and Plans that underpin a timely implementation of our proposals.

To download a summary of the “Investing in Our Future” Blueprint for the City of Birmingham, please follow the link below.

Case Study: London Borough of Barking & Dagenham

Working with the CEO and as a member of the Corporate Leadership Team, I initially led on transforming the Council’s housing offer and prepared it for the successful transition into an external entity. This was done by migrating the redesigned services into two new entities, ‘My Place’ and ‘Home Services’ and which operate within a newly set up commissioning model.

I then led on the design and implementation of Barking & Dagenham’s Ambition 2020 Reform, with the creation of an entirely new Council and which saw improved outcomes and a 20% reduction in demand within 3 years of initiation. This was done through an ambitious Growth and a Health and Wellbeing Agenda and by tackling the root causes of civic inequality and poverty while putting data & insight and community participation at the core of decision making. Mobilised and managed a team of 100+ and successfully transitioned the programme into BAU.

The outcomes of our work have received national and international recognition. Today the model inspires other like-minded organisations, to tackle poverty through early intervention and by increasing economic and social wellbeing in our communities.

To find out more about my journey with the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham incl. Testimonials, please follow the link below.

LocalGov Reform Innovation Systems Thinking

LocalGov Reform Innovation Systems Thinking

About Myself

About my Experience

Living Council: A Manifesto for Practice

The Anatomy of the Local State: Systems thinking for the AI-native, prevention-first council

Connect with me

Conversations: Recruiting from Private to Public Sector

Conversations: HomeShare & Early Intervention

Case Study: Plymouth City Council

Case Study: London Borough of Southwark

Case Study: City of Peterborough

Case Study: City of Birmingham

Case Study: London Borough of Barking & Dagenham

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