CFGS: Opportunity Knocks

This is an overview of the keynote speech that I gave at the CFGS conference. Clearly I am biased as the chair but I thought it was a brilliant conference, really carefully curated and hosted and with a real buzz about it as people came together to talk about the role of governance and scrutiny in democracy.

I was asked to talk about whether or not opportunity is knocking for governance scrutiny and if it is how we can be bold and courageous.

I started by talking about the fact that there are a lot of challenges:

• Everything is changing everywhere all at once – the pace is challenging and doesn’t provide space to reflect
• We are exhausted as a sector; austerity, a pandemic, a financial crisis and now LGR have challenged everyone’s resilience
• Going deeper, we’re also stuck between two worlds as we see structures, process and skills that were invented in a different age come up against new ways of working and new tools. As a sector we don’t yet have the skills we need for the future or necessarily a path to get them
• Democracy is being challenged by ‘strong man’ leadership and populism which makes it harder to use evidence collaboration to hold people to account
• And for our communities, Beveridge’s evils of 1942 are front and centre again with new names; Want (poverty), Disease, Ignorance (lack of education), Squalor (poor housing), and Idleness (unemployment)

These are big challenges but there are also a lot of opportunities:

• Devolution is a huge opportunity to put power closer to people’s lives and while governance and accountability models will need careful design, this is a generational opportunity to shift power out of the centre and closer to peoples lives.
• Local government reorganisation is also an opportunity. Two tier local government is basically the same age as I am and while we are both aging well its vital that the way we work is relevant and up to date
• Public service reform is another massive opportunity if we want do something about those evils that Beveridge talked about then we have to do things differently.

To do all of this we have to be relevant to a modern world and that means using new tools and techniques and not being afraid of them. This means leaning into data, digital and the opportunity of AI and doing it with a strong ethical compass and a desire to take people with us. We should be thinking about skills transition for our communities, our workforce and our members as we need politicians who are comfortable able to work in these new ways.

We also need to embrace design skills. Design is a discipline that enables us to think together – its about outcomes – and its a powerful way to bring all of those new skills together to create new solutions to old problems.

I also touched on the potential of mission led government and how that will need governance and scrutiny to work outside silos and across places and organisations. Missions bring huge purpose and pace if done well, that means they need careful decision making built into them from the start.

I ended by suggesting that there are three things that we need in order to take advantage of these opportunities and address some of those challenges:

• We need clarity not just transparency – that means making sure the we are proving information in a way which people can engage with and make sense of. The 1000 page expert report is the easy bit – distilling it into something that a wide audience can make sense of in order to participate in is harder
• We need the ability to balance agility with deep reflection. The ability to work at different paces and know when to zoom out and when to zoom in is a key skill as we work in complexity
• We need both courage and kindness. Speaking truth to power, and landing difficult decisions carefully require both – its not a choice between the two

I think if we can do these things then I think there is the opportunity to strengthen our democracy using better governance and accountability. So the answer to the question is yes, opportunity is knocking, we just have to find the right door to knock on.