Spend time working with local authorities, the combined authority, voluntary and community organisations in Liverpool City Region and you’ll see a consistent pattern. Public services don’t have an ideas problem, they have a capacity problem. Across the UK, it’s the same story – places rich in ideas and poor in ways to deliver them. This blog explores what we’re thinking and doing in Liverpool City Region to turn those ideas into something that sticks – change that people can see and feel.
Local government, statutory bodies, social enterprises and community organisations are doing the hard stuff every day. Delivering services, managing demand and trying to improve outcomes in complex conditions. Our role as ‘backbone organisations’ is to work alongside – helping to connect people, share learning and support the move from good ideas to implementation.
Here’s some of what we’re learning at Capacity and the Office for Public Service Innovation (OPSI) and what that might mean for how regional and national organisations support public service reform.
The real constraint is capacity, not ideas
Programmes like OPSI Lab, Social Climbers and emerging neighbourhood approaches combine strong ideas, credible pilots and committed partnerships. But, like local authorities in Liverpool City Region, they’re dealing with multiple reforms landing at once, workforce constraints, financial pressures and limited time to move from design to delivery. It’s not hard to see why implementation becomes the most challenging part of public service reform.
Change happens through small coalitions
System change doesn’t happen through governance. It happens because of small, usually informal, coalitions of committed people working across organisational boundaries. They bring together expertise, leadership and trusted relationships. The glue between councils, health, VCSE organisations and communities that keeps the work moving, even when formal alignment is slow. It reinforces something we see in our neighbourhood work – structures matter, networks help, but it’s relationships that do the real enabling work.
The missing layer is implementation support
The good news is we’re getting better at spotting problems, generating insight and designing solutions. But we’re not as good at funding the infrastructure that supports ‘the doing’. It means promising pilots struggle to scale; strategies are all too often disconnected from delivery and community solutions with no way of landing into mainstream commissioning. The implementation gap isn’t just technical. It’s the harder work of culture change – getting a system to do something differently, together, and keep doing it. This is exactly what we’re testing with OPSI Lab – what’s needed to get change to stick and grow, and how do we get what is in the way of that, out of the way.
Community organisations are the glue
Right across our work in communities and the impact economy work, we see the role of social enterprises, charities and community organisations. Organisations, like Options for Supported Living and You Matter, quietly and effectively hold many public services together. They’re trusted by communities, reaching people earlier and providing flexible preventative support in ways statutory systems struggle to match. It’s time for a shift. Because too often, they’re treated as subcontractors waiting to be commissioned – not vital parts of the system.
And so are relationships
We think about roads and broadband as vital infrastructure. In public services, relationships are vital infrastructure too. The spaces where commissioners, providers, community organisations and frontline teams meet and come to trust one another are not a nice-to-have stuck onto the real work. They are the real work. These relationships are what unlock collaboration, learning, practical problem-solving, and ultimately what enables the system to better connect and change.
Learning makes change sticky
Sharing learning isn’t enough. What makes change stick is implementing it – across organisations, places and systems. That means networks, communities of practice and convening people around the same problem. It’s the spaces between organisations where systems don’t quite join up. And a big part of why OPSI exists – to create the connective, learning infrastructure between organisations. We haven’t got it all figured out yet. Maybe we never will. But the Regional Capability Fund will help us get closer.
Co-production: from method to how decisions are made
Our co-production work with children, young people and families tells a story of lived experiences that don’t fit neatly on a spreadsheet. Ask young people, and they say the same thing – relationships matter most. Along with trust and consistency, relationships make the biggest difference to whether co-production feels real or not. Local authorities are trying to work this through. Co-production is understood in principle, but it’s harder to sustain when services are under pressure, how decisions get made is unclear, and there are questions about where this work ‘sits’ in the system. Through our work on OPSI Lab, we’re working side by side with teams to create the time and space to do it and understand together how it can be embedded and sustained.
What this means for regional and national partners?
If implementation is the constraint, fund implementation – not another initiative. Start protecting time to land the reforms already in motion before launching the next ones. Stop making places stitch competing programmes together and align them around shared outcomes. Missions work is a great start, but to go further this needs to understand what matters on the ground in communities and how strengths locally best deliver these outcomes. Bring community organisations in at the start as trusted partners and invest in the ‘culture layer’ of reform – capability, learning, leadership development and new ways of working.
Final thoughts
The goal of public service reform isn’t a collection of projects. It’s a system that turns small changes into lasting breakthroughs. Building capability that can identify and frame challenges; generate and test solutions; align partners across boundaries; support implementation in real time; mobilise investment; scale what works and share learning across places.
Our role, as backbone organisations in Liverpool City Region, along with Kindred, Right to Succeed and many others, is to help strengthen the conditions for change. Connecting people, surfacing what works while it’s still happening and helping new ideas and ways of working to take hold. Not just through what we do directly, but through the wider system we’re part of.
It’s early days. We’re still working out what that looks like in practice. But we’re excited to be part of a city region working at edges of systems change in public services.
