A renewed intention in governance

In the fall of 2019, as former mayor Boris Johnson attempted to break the Brexit deadlock and revive his party, the Center for Governance and Scrutiny (CfGS) and Localis had a different vision: how could good decision-making by local governments withstand the twin pressures of rising demand and falling incomes?

Slightly delayed but not negated by the pandemic, our response was published in March 2021. The Risk and Resilience Governance Framework provided local authorities with a practical way to identify and discuss governance conditions that support organizational resilience, helping councils recognize and manage governance risks before they develop into governance failures.

Since then, the framework has informed governance reviews, improvement activities and assurance work across the sector. Referenced in Best Value’s statutory guidance, it has become a fundamental document for improving governance and understanding governance risks and organizational resilience within local government.

But five years later, when another metropolitan mayor seems determined to save another government, it seems like a good time to revisit this issue. In the meantime, the pressures we took as a starting point for our research – and described in our article, Decline and fall – have only exacerbated the entire sector.

Currently, government plans to forge a universal model of mayoral devolution in tandem with a vast reorganization of English local government pose new questions of governance at all levels – regional, sub-regional, unitary local and neighborhood hyperlocal.

Governance risk and resilience are not simply a question of whether an organization is well managed. More fundamentally, it is about whether the broader system of local leadership, decision-making and accountability at a place level can hold up under pressure, respond to change and maintain public legitimacy.

In our work, we will take a systems perspective to examine governance risks and resilience shared within a location rather than contained within a single organization. This will test how risks arising within councils, combined authorities, partnerships, providers, parishes or neighborhood arrangements can influence each other, and identify the common thread that connects them.

Weak governance rarely stands on its own. The fragility of an institution, partnership or level of governance can have repercussions elsewhere: unclear accountability, distortion of decision-making, erosion of trust and increasing pressure on neighboring organizations or system partners. Resilience, too, is interdependent. Stronger governance in one part of a place can support better relationships, clearer assurance and greater adaptability across the local system.

The initial Governance Risk and Resilience Management Framework has provided valuable common language for identifying and discussing warning signs that may not constitute outright failure, but nevertheless signal that governance arrangements are under strain. However, since its publication, the operational context has changed significantly. Financial tensions, political fragmentation, decentralization, local government reorganization, more complex partnership arrangements, and increased expectations for transparency and community voice all argue for a refresh.

In this context, Localis and CfGS will undertake a focused collaborative project to comprehensively review and update the framework. The intention will be to preserve the strengths and logic behind the original, while significantly updating its language, examples, and usability to reflect significant changes in the industry since its publication. The resulting framework will be rooted in a local understanding of governance risks and resilience, while remaining practical for everyday use by those working in and around local government.

Initial outcomes will include a shared place-based framework, supported by best practice products, including for advisors, practitioners and one for policy authorities. The updated hardware will also be designed with the possibility of further customized applications in partnership contexts. These could include parish and city governance, neighborhood governance, and other civic and community contexts.

In our work, we will take a systems perspective to examine governance risks and resilience shared within a location rather than contained within a single organization. This will test how risks arising within councils, combined authorities, partnerships, providers, parishes or neighborhood arrangements can influence each other, and identify the common thread that connects them.

We will also update the conceptual framework to review the underlying concepts, language and examples used in the original framework to ensure they meet today’s pressures. This includes governance fragility and resilience, political volatility and lack of overarching control arrangements, decentralization and reorganization of local government, partnership governance, culture and behaviors, assurance relationships, organizational improvement and community legitimacy.

And we will seek to make the material usable live. The refresh will focus not only on what the framework says, but also on how it can be used. We hope this will also be informed by lessons learned from the experiences of authorities, to understand how the original framework was adopted and used. In doing so, we hope to ensure that the guidance framework and products – tailored to the specific needs of advisors and leaders – can support real conversations within teams, committees, executives, peer challenges, assurance, monitoring and improvement activities.

We will use our joint drinks reception at Bournemouth Highcliff Marriot Hotel on the evening of July 8, during the Local Government Associations Conference, to officially launch our program. In doing so, we will seek advice from our friends across the sector for this essential work, which will be published at the Center for Governance and Scrutiny conference in February 2027.

Mel Stevens is chief executive of the Center for Governance and Scrutiny, and Jonathan Werran is chief executive of Localis.