**This article was first published in The MJ on 29th July 2026**
Stephen Taylor, CEO Leadership Centre 2005-2009, and Max Wide, CEO Leadership Centre 2026, reflect on the lessons from Total Place 1 and the implications for Total Place 2.
The Leadership Centre was set up in 2004 because government saw the need for a funded leadership development offer that would drive real change in local government. The Centre invested in political as well as managerial leadership and worked directly with more than a hundred councils. That funding also created space for more disruptive ideas: the “Counting Cumbria” and “Calling Cumbria” initiatives stemmed from the ground up, counting all public sector spend in an area and working directly with communities to explore how those funds could be used differently. Total Place was born.
What happened next is a fascinating study in how leadership can make or break an idea, and how bottom-up ideas can get appropriated by top-down institutions and ultimately absorbed. Sensing a savings opportunity, the initial experiments scaled up into the Treasury’s Operational Efficiency Programme – 13 pilots in 2009 – then, after a change of government, morphed into four “whole place” community budget and eleven neighbourhood budget pilots in 2011. A downbeat 2013 NAO evaluation concluded it couldn’t be proved the approach had saved significant money and that the challenge was complex. That killed the specific approach, though arguably it left behind a mindset that went on to underpin the city deals and devolution deals that followed.
Political and managerial leaders across central and local government drove this story and we invited many of them to The Leadership Centre’s Summer Event on 21 July. With Total Place 2.0 now gaining traction – Place Based Budgets piloted in five areas, Test Learn and Grow initiatives underway, the LGA’s Total Place handbook just launched, and a devolution-experienced former mayor now prime minister – it was the right time to reflect on the opportunities and challenges for leaders.
Some might say that an idea taking decades to reach widespread fruition proves it’s flawed. We think otherwise. The case for shaping local public services around people and places, rather than around organisations and the services they provide, has been overwhelmingly made, but the journey from big idea to new reality is complex and multifaceted. Government encouragement is real but the system lags well behind. The McKinsey 7S framework holds that the soft S’s – skills, shared values, style and staff – may not be enough to drive change if the hard S’s – structure, strategy and systems- are not aligned. Whilst progress is being made on this latter set we are by no means there and that represents a risk for leaders choosing to move beyond the current paradigm.
It’s telling that the history of Total Place 1 is essentially a history of pilots. Chunka Mui, in “Pilots Can Be Deadly for Product Innovation,” distinguishes pilots from prototypes: pilots treat ideas as scaled-down finished products, which kills inventions that need more development, not premature evaluation. Participants at the summit were honest in saying that many parts of government remain instinctively suspicious of devolution and place leadership, even threatened by it. So pilots are seen as ideal, holding ideas at arm’s length – “Should we do this? We’re thinking about it” – whereas prototypes commit: “We’re doing this, we’re working out how.”
Attendees agreed the stakes are high for leaders working this agenda, because it often means:
- Working beyond narrow organisational goals toward system goals, which can be career-compromising.
- Tracking outcomes for people and communities, instead of institutionally focused performance frameworks, generates feedback that those institutions would rather ignore.
- Funding preventative spending whose benefits may take years to materialise or accrue to other organisations, while budgets are severely constrained, can appear unrealistic.
How should leaders act? This is what Heifetz and Linsky (Leadership on the Line, 2002) would call both a technical challenge (systems and processes) and an adaptive one (hearts and minds). Good leadership means sailing the place-leadership boat – drawing strength from the tailwinds of government policy on devolution and integrated settlements, and from the Total Place 2.0 community – while staying clear-eyed about the rocks below the surface.
Rock 1 is organisational vs systems leadership: as Stafford Beer put it, “there is no point in claiming the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” The existing system is hardwired by legislation, training, occupational frameworks, targets and performance management, so changing it isn’t easy. Senior leaders need to create a new authorising environment by asking should ask: how will our staff work in future, how will they need to be led, and how do we get from here to there?
Shared Outcomes Frameworks are an excellent way to agree goals across organisations, unlocking tools like Test Learn and Grow, Place Based Budgeting and Total Place demonstrations. Teams can then work differently, led by managers who value relationships and outcomes over transactions and targets. There is a welcome bonus: more engaged communities, greater productivity and more fulfilling public sector work.
Rock 2 is cure vs prevention. Prevention is better than cure, for those concerned and for the public purse – that’s long been known, yet it’s usually the first spend cut under pressure. Why?
- There’s no money for prevention because it’s all spent on cure.
- Measuring the value of preventative spend isn’t an exact science.
- Politicians may ask why spend now when benefits appear years later, under a different administration.
- Worse, there’s a temptation to cut preventative programmes now for immediately visible results, leaving successors to face the consequences.
Some of this is technical: identifying and categorising preventative spend, modelling interventions and their payback. That technical work lays the ground for the adaptive challenge. It lets leaders “get on the balcony,” point out the current trajectory’s dysfunction, build political consensus for the long-term work, and make clear that only rationalising spend across the system creates headroom to invest in prevention.
Rock 3, the biggest, is local vs central accountability. Central government holds on to funding partly from fear that letting go locally risks profligacy. The 2023 English Devolution Accountability Framework states that “central government must ensure centrally provided funds support UK government priorities and deliver value for money.” Again, there is a technical task to build the business case to demonstrate how funds devolved and spent locally deliver better outcomes. Doing this enables the adaptive work of building trust, shifting perceptions and developing relationships to begin.
Nearly 20 years on from Total Place 1 the issues facing the sector are more urgent, the choices more stark. Much work has been done to show the power of devolution and the power of communities. But what hasn’t changed in two decades, and won’t change ahead, is the need for bold, mature, constructive local leadership: leaders who steer away from the rocks, toward a system that works better in everyone’s interest. We won’t do this by pretending the rocks aren’t there, and the Leadership Centre stands ready, now as then, to work with those leaders on the quest and those who find it hard to change.