Jamie Ounan calls for local authorities to lead economic transformation through mission-based approaches—focusing on bold, long-term goals, collaboration, and aligning resources to community needs—to achieve fairer, greener, and more inclusive local economies.
If you’re a Chief Executive in a Local Authority or Combined Authority right now, you’re in the driving seat for a generational opportunity to redesign the system. Yet this comes at a time when you’re likely experiencing pressure from every angle. Alice Pugh’s October 2024 evidence review for the Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Hub lays bare the scale of this challenge, but it also hints at the way forward. This blog seeks to draw out some actionable insights for place-based leaders and calls all leaders to get involved in our research programme.
Alice’s paper paints a familiar picture: fragmented funding, national policy churn, siloed policymaking, overstretched teams, complex subnational governance, all contributing toward deep spatial inequality. Yet, beneath the sobering diagnosis lies a profound opportunity that those in the sector have long championed. Local Authorities are uniquely placed to lead inclusive and sustainable local economic transformation.
The work of sector leaders and the Greater London Authority has been crystal clear with the Government (who are now listening): this transformation won’t come from better bids or smarter spreadsheets alone. It requires a mission-based approach to government, where bold goals are backed by deep partnerships, adaptive learning, and a relentless focus on outcomes that matter to each of our communities.
The old way has not served the sector well for decades
Alice’s review pulls no punches: the UK remains one of the most spatially unequal countries in the OECD. Years of centralised control, competitive short-term funding pots, business cases that only back the south’s ‘viability models’, and institutional churn have eroded capacity can confidence at the local level. The result? Councils are expected to drive growth without statutory powers, adequate resourcing, or the ability to plan beyond the next funding cycle. When it doesn’t happen, many are quick to say I told you so.
The Levelling Up White Paper left many authorities playing a reactive game. The new wave of devolution, local government reform, backed by positive approaches to innovation from the Cabinet Office and a shift in the Greenbook Treasury orthodoxy, offers some glimmers of progress.
In my experience, Local Authority Chief Executives are eternal optimists as well as pragmatics, so with that mindset let’s move quickly past the bleak structural diagnosis, embrace the glimmers of hope and get to the positive conclusion of Alice’s work: place-based institutions are best placed to understand and act on local needs. The consensus is that transformation must be locally led, locally shaped, and locally accountable.
From projects to purpose: embracing missions
For many, the North Star guiding the desired transformation and therefore policy impact lies in a mission-based model of local governance. Mission-based leadership starts with a bold, measurable, long-term mission. Then we align all tools, partners, and spending in a place to achieve it. As Pugh’s review and international case studies show, it’s this kind of clear, shared purpose that enables places like Nantes, Cleveland and Leipzig to drive real change.
For example:
- “By 2030, eliminate long-term unemployment for under-25s in X ward.”
- “By 2030, no child in [Place] will grow up in a household below the Minimum Income Standard.”
Missions can create focus, urgency, and legitimacy. And critically, they shift local institutions from grant seekers to place-shapers, collectively convening and orchestrating the wider system around shared outcomes.
Leaders as system stewards
Leading through missions means many CEOs I know are fundamentally rethinking their role. Each is no longer ‘simply’ managing statutory services (which is extraordinarily hard in its own right). Each is stewarding a complex, adaptive system to help enable a good life for all.
This involves:
- Setting long-term, mission-based strategies
- Creating new forms of partnership governance as spaces for collaboration, not a concentration of power around old ways of working.
- Building cross-functional mission teams, backed with time and resources
- Creating space for experimentation and learning at all levels in organisations and partnerships, not just delivery programming that locks down risk and with it innovation
- Focusing on each organisation’s budget, procurement, and influence on outcomes, and working across the system through a quasi Total-Place model.
- Sharing leadership with anchor institutions, businesses, communities and citizens, defining and adapting roles as required for each mission.
What practical steps are CEOs taking now?
All blogs seem to require a numbered step-by-step call to action. So here are five actions every Local Authority CEO can take to begin embedding mission-based transformation:
1. Start with a mission audit
What are the biggest, most persistent problems in your place that your community and partners care deeply about? Everyone in the place will know what they are. The audit is not scientific, but the process will help highlight issues and perspectives, and draw out people willing to join the mission group. I’d strongly recommend the process picks just one where there is appetite for collaboration and visible leadership. Start with a single mission. In my opinion, that’s the shift to health and wellbeing (from health and care services as emergency management), because health is a driver of human flourishing and growth through its impact on workforce productivity. That also means national good health is the way to stabilise and reverse our local and national fiscal position.
2. Build a core mission team
Bring together a cross-cutting team from, say, housing, public health, economic development, and data. This group is not a traditional project group assembled to deliver a project, but a collective to co-design and lead the mission. This includes external partners from community anchor networks and businesses from day one. Research work from the LPIP Hub would strongly advocate that local civic universities are placed at the heart of the mission.
3. Align your budget and procurement
Identify what percentage of your spend can be aligned with mission outcomes. Where resources are focused is the most telling aspect of how seriously the mission-based approach is being taken in a place. Some short-term compromises may be required, but solving big issues such as homelessness will transform the demand for local services and overburdened crisis management budgets.
4. Invest in monitoring, evaluation, and storytelling
Make learning visible. Track progress through data and through stories that bring impact to life. Partnering with local universities or evidence experts can help build robust evaluation models. These can inform decisions as you go, as well as help shape the evolution of local priorities and national policy.
5. Secure political and civic buy-in
Missions take time, and they likely need to survive election cycles. Where possible, seek to build cross-party support through mission compacts, and ensure residents are shaping priorities through assemblies or participatory processes.
Place-based leadership is here to stay: today’s leaders will shape it for decades to come
Alice Pugh’s research is clear: we have reached the limits of project-based, short-termism. If we want to unlock genuine, lasting transformation, where growth is not only faster but fairer and greener, we need to help local place-based leaders boldly step forward. The emerging mission-based local government is part of the democratic, strategic reimagining of what local authorities are for. Success will be measured in achieving the conditions where your place, and the folk in it, flourish.
Reaching out to the reader: Many leaders are trying out versions of the ideas in this blog. We know it’s hard to crack, but so much progress is being made. The LPIP hub has launched its Place Leaders research programme, which will offer more shared insight and learning in the coming months.
Following in the collaborative spirit of this blog, if any Local Authority or Combined Authority Leaders wish to share their journey, experience and insight with the LPIP Hub, then please get in touch.
This blog was written by Jamie Ounan, Executive Chair & Founder of Inner Circle. Jamie is also part of the LPIP Hub Leadership team.
Find out more about the Local Policy Innovation Partnership Hub.
Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.