Research and analysis

Partnerships for People and Place (PfPP): foreword

Published 10 April 2024

Applies to England

Everyone wants to receive quality public services, enjoy good life chances for them and their families, and live in thriving communities where people get on well together.

Good joined–up, place–based working - between central government, local authorities and communities – is core to delivering these aims, which are at the heart of our Levelling Up mission to create opportunities for everyone across the UK.

Recent work provides some good examples of this type of work in action – the vaccine rollout during Covid-19, the preparation and delivery of the Coronation last year, and the country’s ongoing support for people arriving from Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Ukraine.

All developed and delivered by central and local teams, collaborating and working in partnership to deliver shared goals.

But, while there are many things to celebrate about such strong central-local partnership working, there is always room for improvement.

Many Civil Service departments’ programmes can overlap - in both their reach and outcomes. This can happen both during the development phase, when ideas are being worked up, and the delivery phase, when work is being rolled out.

This causes issues for local people and places. On occasions, central government might be working on different priorities, or different timelines to local government and communities.

Objectives might be repeated across multiple programmes in the same area. Complex centralised funding programmes often  do not naturally align with local needs or timescales. Institutions which mean to help can quickly become siloed. And, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, these siloes can reduce the quality of the support or investment people receive, which in turn can reduce the flexibility and dynamism of local partners.

It can also reduce opportunities to learn from each other and our experiences – including mistakes that we might be making, or other glitches in the system.

PfPP was created to tackle issues like this. To show the benefits on offer when we join up across central and local teams.

We wanted to unblock barriers to partnership working and bring place to the centre of our policy – aiming to deliver better outcomes for local people.

But, how do we even begin to tackle such complex challenges?

Firstly, we should acknowledge that the answers to local challenges most likely do not sit in the head of a civil servant sitting in an office in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast.

Instead, we should look to our communities, who have shown time and again that they are experts in their place, able and willing to develop and deliver innovative locally led work to tackle the challenges they face.

There are so many incredible examples of local partnerships like this, across the country where local partners have shown that, even in times of real challenge, people can come together in new ways to improve lives.

From mobilising neighbourhood level groups to deliver food and medicines during the recent pandemic, to providing housing and support for those fleeing persecution or war in Hong Kong, Afghanistan and Ukraine, for example.

This was the central hypothesis of the Partnerships for People and Place (‘PfPP’) programme, whose final report and evaluation material is below.

Essentially, could cross-government working to address such challenges enable financial and time/resource savings for both central government and local places? And what would that look like in reality?

Funded through the HM Treasury’s Shared Outcomes Fund, PfPP sought to analyse the impact and effectiveness of government’s work to address specific local challenges – spanning mental health, energy efficiency, fuel poverty, youth unemployment and more – to identify new, more efficient ways to address the delivery barriers that a lack of central government join up causes.

To do this, we brought together 11 different parts of central government, who were all working in the same places, delivering work to improve the lives of residents who live there.

While the work we were delivering was different, our overall departmental objectives were all closely aligned.

We then selected 13 of these ‘cross-over’ places and funded them to trial projects to tackle the hyper-local, thorny policy issues that they felt held their places back - issues that mattered most to local people.

• In Hastings, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero joined a local council pilot to tackle fuel poverty and poor energy efficiency in the private rental sector.
• In Luton, the Home Office and local partners combined to tackle anti-social behaviour in the town centre.
• In Bradford, we brought together Health Department colleagues with the local authority and NHS partners, to show how community hubs can support young people and families facing mental health challenges.

PfPP also aimed to build on previous place-based initiatives, such as Total Place, and work alongside current place-based initiatives like government’s work on Funding Simplification and Levelling Up Partnerships amongst other areas, to help address these challenges and improve the way central government works with local places.

Working together with local areas and across government, it tested innovative, collaborative approaches, flexing delivery plans as the landscapes required - and sought to explore how to drive long-term change across both central and local government.

A big part of the programme involved getting out and about, to see the issues on the ground.

Local meetings and site visits attended by both central departments and local officials have offered a chance to challenge misconceptions, grapple with local issues together and build a shared understanding of what effective delivery in person, in place looks like.

Many of our pilots have continued to deliver on their local challenges by seeking additional funding, changing working practices, influencing corporate strategies, continuing working and funding relationships for the benefit of their communities.

We hope that the learning we have captured below will help to shape future policy and inform better, more joined-up ways of working. Learnings from the programme are being fed into government wide programmes and strategies, including Levelling Up Partnerships, funding simplification work and into cross-government skills and capacity building programmes.

Most importantly, however, the programme continues to help improve outcomes for local communities and people; our proudest legacy.

Finally, we would like to express our thanks to colleagues and officials in the 13 PfPP pilot places (Birmingham, Bradford, Cornwall, Durham, East Sussex, Hackney, Liverpool, Luton, Newcastle, Northumberland, Southwark, Sunderland and Wakefield) for their insights into their local areas, their commitment to the programme and the many hours of hard work they put in to deliver this work.

We’d also like to thank our 11 government departments and arms-length bodies for their contributions to the programme which was often challenging due to this being a new way of working that required constant adaptation to the way we delivered depending on the needs of our places.

And we’d like to thank Ipsos UK and Grant Thornton who have led the evaluation process and report right from the start, and who also had to flex their approach as we learnt together on the way.

Without these many contributions, we would not have been able to deliver for the 13 communities who took part or build this set of recommendations. We now hope to share our learning far and wide, to improve place-based working and deliver better outcomes for communities across the country in the years to come.

Catherine Frances, Director General for Local Government, Resilience and Communities

Will Garton, Director General for Levelling Up