Donna Hall CBE, the future of public services

If you aspire to being part of the impending revolution in public services, don’t miss out on this podcast. Professor Donna Hall CBE is Chair of Bolton NHS Foundation Trust, and also Integrated Care System Advisor to NHS England, Chair of the New Local Government Network (NLGN) think tank, Professor of Politics at Manchester University, and former Wigan Chief Executive. You can find her on Twitter @profdonnahall.Donna studied Politics and English at the University of Leeds, following which she started her career in Human Resources with Leeds City Council. Since then she has worked in various roles in local government (and briefly in the private, and community and voluntary sectors). Most recently she spent 8 years as Chief Executive of Wigan Council, where the Council developed ‘The Wigan Deal.’ Prior to that she was at Chorley, where ‘The Chorley Smile’ was a forerunner of The Deal.In 2009 Donna was awarded a CBE for innovation in public services in connection with the DWP ‘Tell Us Once’ programme, which allows a person to report a death to all government departments with a single phone call, reducing stress for members of the public at a difficult time.The Wigan Deal started in earnest in 2011, with Wigan Council, the ninth largest metropolitan council in the UK, having to make £160m is savings over an 8-year period. The Institute of Fiscal Studies calculated that proportionately they were the third worst affected Council in the UK in terms of the impact of austerity. Lord Peter Smith, the members of the Council, and the officers realised that a conventional cost cutting approach was not viable.The Council brokered a new deal with its citizens, in which instead of trying to ‘fix’ people, the Council sought to nurture their strengths. The Council invested some £13m in grass roots community projects. One of the outcomes was that healthy life expectancy has been improved by seven years in the most deprived parts of the borough, and satisfaction with the Council increased by 50% across the borough.Organisations such as the Kings Fund that have evaluated its success have credited “constancy of purpose” as playing a major role - see ‘The Kings Fund (2019), A Citizen-Led Approach to Health and Care: Lessons from the Wigan Deal’, available at https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/sites/default/files/2019-06/A_citizen-led_approach_to_health_and_care_lessons_from_the_Wigan_Deal_summary.pdf.Last month Donna presented at the NHS England “Leading Change with People and Communities Conference”, which was a sell out in both Manchester and London. She believes that we are on the cusp of a public services revolution in the UK. It’s not just The Wigan Deal and similar initiatives, but the coronavirus crisis has illustrated how communities can pull together and how public servants can work with those communities differently.In her own time she chairs The New Local Government Network think tank, which is working with 70 of the most progressive councils and will shortly be working with their first NHS Trust to drive through whole-place, whole-system transformation, and deliver ‘The Community Paradigm’: the 1940s saw the emergence of the state paradigm, which was very transactional and top down; in the 1980s the market paradigm sought to address the deficits in the state paradigm; the new “community paradigm… shifts power back to communities.”The Councils engaging with the community paradigm are all political colours. The original thinking came from economist Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize winner in 2009. Whilst Donna says that she can’t understand why everyone isn’t doing it, she concedes that it takes a different type of political and managerial leadership. It involves giving staff on the front...