Across Liverpool City Region, a growing network of people, public service leaders, socially trading organisations, community activists, and funders is coming together with a shared purpose – to rethink how we deliver for people and places.
This is not just a reform programme. It’s a movement grounded in the belief that public services and community enterprise, working side by side, can tackle root causes, build resilience, and create a more inclusive, locally-owned economy. By connecting bold leadership with lived experience and social innovation, this work is laying the foundation for a region where everyone has the chance to thrive.
But it’s not about patching up broken systems. It’s about shifting from reactive, overstretched services to proactive, community-rooted models that prevent harm before it happens. LCR has two powerful assets to make this real: a public sector committed to innovation and a social economy made up of STOs that deliver services, create jobs, and build local wealth.
The real opportunity lies in bringing these two forces together. When STOs and public services collaborate, sharing risk, designing solutions together, and aligning their funding, a different kind of system becomes possible. One that reduces demand by tackling problems at their root, builds trust within communities and unlocks new forms of economic participation.
The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority has a key role to play. Not only as an investor and strategic enabler, but as a convener of this growing network. Through initiatives like the Office for Public Service Innovation (OPSI), the CA is creating space for bold experimentation, collective learning and system-wide reflection.
OPSI, co-designed with partners across health, local government, policing, fire and rescue, and the voluntary sector, is starting to demonstrate how the region can work differently – testing ideas at a small scale, learning quickly, and scaling what works.
In practice, this means facilitating multi-agency collaboration, supporting information sharing, and embedding lived experience at the heart of service design. It also means holding space for regular reflection through retrospectives, “show and tell” sessions, and peer learning to ensure progress is built on real insight. OPSI doesn’t own the change, but it enables it by helping the system learn, adapt, and act together.
What’s taking shape is a model for systemic, place-based change. A network of changemakers. Leaders, funders, commissioners, and social entrepreneurs are actively testing new ideas, sharing learning, and scaling what works.
OPSI can help accelerate this momentum, supporting collaboration, surfacing learning, and helping to build the conditions for more joined-up, preventative approaches.
This progress reflects the collective efforts of many. Organisations like ourselves and Kindred, alongside others across the public and social sectors,
This progress reflects the collective efforts of many. Organisations like ourselves and Kindred, alongside others across the public and social sectors (Lyva Labs, Right to Succeed, Open Door, Pathfinder and many more – we’re looking at you!) have played a role in building the relationships, shared insight, and local energy that underpin this work.
These approaches have been co-developed with the people who use them and with partners across the system, yet they sit deliberately outside traditional structures. This positioning creates space for new ways of working to emerge, free from institutional constraints, while still being deeply informed by lived experience and frontline realities.
National funders and government partners are being invited to back this work, not just as a promising local initiative, but as a live testbed for reform across the UK.
In a time of deep pressure on public services, Liverpool City Region is showing what’s possible when committed public leadership meets the creativity and strength of community-driven enterprise.
The work ahead is ambitious, but the direction is clear: transformation through partnership, purpose, and shared learning.
