For more than 20 years there has been a succession of place pilot programmes – national programmes piloted locally to explore the benefits of linking delivery across agencies and funding streams in a place. This has included Local Area Agreements, Total Place and devolution deals.

Finding a way to do this well remains pressing. Money in local public services is ever tighter; demand rising; and users in the digital age expect join up among the professionals they and their families deal with.

Shared Intelligence was commissioned by LGA to distil the lessons from 20 years of place pilot programmes for policy makers in central and local government.  The work involved interviews with many of the key players in eight programmes, hearing the experience of politicians, practitioners and programme designers who work or had worked in local or central government, or both.  Deep dive literature reviews produced a series of short meta evaluations of eight programmes.

Together the research highlighted a huge body of ground-breaking work at different local scales. It was striking how for many people involved, the flagship programmes had been career defining and established individuals’ lasting passion for place-based collaboration.

The benefits of central – local collaboration were a recurring theme, despite perennial frustrations. But maintaining and scaling up gains beyond the pilot concept was a challenge. The research highlighted the danger of a “bolt on, roll out, and move on” phenomenon that prevented the model from shifting to mainstream practice.

This highlighted a very clear lesson for local government – the importance of establishing a local vision, shared across partners. This should guide mainstream working, and also means that when central pilot funding is available, the vision provides a guideline for adapting it to break the mould in a way that best serves real needs of local cohorts and communities. This requires support from Whitehall – if place-based working is to deliver more than incremental change, ministers must empower strong local leadership and foster sustained collaboration between localities and Westminster.

Over the past six years, Shared Intelligence has played a vital role in informing the commissioning of Southwark Council’s services to ensure they meet the needs of local residents, particularly those who face the poorest outcomes. Most recently, Shared Intelligence completed two research and engagement projects for the council’s public health team. The first was for the Sexual and Reproductive Health team to inform the recommissioning of sexual and reproductive health services and the design of a new sexual health outreach service. The second was for the Inclusion Health team to inform a new Inclusion Health Outreach offer, focussed on streamlining existing services that address local needs of inclusion health groups and addressing gaps in existing offers.

Some groups of residents in Southwark are facing poorer health outcomes than the general population. Sex workers are at an increased risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections and the resulting health complications if left untreated. Rough sleepers have an average life expectancy of 47 years, 30 years lower than the general population. Gypsy and Irish Travellers face higher rates of suicide. Other groups who face the poorest health outcomes include Latin American and Black communities, people with learning disabilities, vulnerable migrants, people in contact with the criminal justice system, and people who use substances.

Working in close collaboration with services and community-based groups, we explored the health needs and lived experiences of all these groups. We invited residents to attend group discussions, workshops and 1:1 interviews to understand more about how health services could better meet their needs.

For each project, we worked closely with our clients to develop a series of recommendations that were specific to the health services being designed and delivered and tailored to the needs of particular resident groups. Cutting across all recommendations were three themes: the need to ensure:

• the availability of health advice and education services across different resident groups,
• providers of health services are accommodating to the needs of different groups, and
• the power of trusted and knowledgeable community-based organisations is harnessed and valued in facilitating residents’ access to information and care.

For more information on either of these projects, or our broader research to explore lived experiences, please contact Claire.nott@sharedintelligence.net