Georgia Gould – 2024 Speech to the National Leadership Forum

The speech made by Georgia Gould, the Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office, at the QEII Conference Centre in London on 14 November 2024.

I am really delighted to be here

I was keen to be here to firstly say thank you.

I have been in local government for 14 years, with seven years as a leader.

And I have seen firsthand how hard things have been.

But also the extraordinary love, care and dedication of public sector leaders at every level.

How an under-valued public sector stepped up to support communities through covid.

How so many people risked their lives to keep others safe.

How leaders had to create new systems quickly.

And how the work has continued through recovery and the cost of living crisis.

And too often I have seen that political decision making has failed citizens and those trying to serve them.

Drastic cuts, short term budgets , top down decisions, constantly changing priorities.

Resources wasted on bidding for small pots of money rather than real partnerships for change.

It has often felt that serving people and communities has required you to work against the system.

Overworked staff handling growing caseloads and demand.

Citizens experiencing longer waiting lists for help and finding they have to battle to get support.

Lord Darzi’s report showed the NHS is in a ‘critical condition’, with 6.4 million people on the waiting list for elective treatment in England and 10 % of patients waiting over 12 hours in A&E, deepening health inequalities.

And local government budgets are increasingly taken up with supporting people in crisis.

Today 80% of children services spend is on acute service, while just 7% is on prevention spend.

But I don’t want to just focus on how hard it has been – everyone in this room has lived it.

Because there has been another story.

Across the public sector people haven’t just accepted the status quo, they are working to change it.

They have come together across different organisations to wrap support around people when it would have been easier to stay in silos.

They have brought together the VCs and private sector to create new coalitions for change.

They have developed new solutions that make it easier for people to navigate services.

They have found a way to innovate under extreme pressure.

In Manchester, I visited health and care hubs where local police, council and NHS services had come together to provide a joined up service, so citizens didn’t have to spend months waiting for different organisations to speak to each other.

In Sheffield, teams coming together to design a new joined up service for those facing multiple disadvantages saw reduced ambulance call outs, reduced rough sleeping, pressure on social care, hospital admissions and police.

Public services are under pressure but they are also full of passionate, committed innovators.

I know that many innovators are in this room and you need a government that will get behind you.

We want to get behind those working for change and make it easier to come together to serve citizens.

And the service of citizens is what connects us all.

People have to be at the heart of how we deliver public services.

In local government I saw the transformation that can be unlocked when you build services around people.

But also the risks when you don’t hear their voices.

I became leader of Camden council in 2017 and shortly afterwards we had the awful tragedy at Grenfell, 5 years later the memory of that awful night still feels very as does the terror felt by every resident living in a tower block. This was heightened in five blocks in Camden which had the same cladding.

I will never forget the visceral fear in a packed room full of residents after this was confirmed – parents terrified for their children, and tenants running through a list of safety concerns.

The next day the fire brigade inspected and told us the blocks were not safe for people to stay in due to a combination of the cladding and a list of internal issues.

The thing was most of the issues that they picked up on were the same ones our tenants had alerted us to the night before.

We hadn’t been listening hard enough to their voices – a reminder that people know their homes and communities best and not hearing them is dangerous.

But we need to ask ourselves where else are we failing to hear people? What risks is that exposing us to?

It can’t take a terrible tragedy for us to do the hard work of deeply listening to communities and taking action on what they say– this has to be the default way of operating.

But when services do listen to people, the results can be transformative.

When they pay attention to their aspirations, their strengths and understand their whole lives.

When I led a council and we started to work differently with families in the child protection system we saw extraordinary results.

We introduced family group conferences bringing together all the people involved in a child’s life to develop a plan to support them, and families came up with ideas that social workers would never have come up with alone.

We saved millions, were judged by ofsted to have outstanding services and critically more children thriving within their family networks.

There are these green shoots of change in communities around the UK but we need to get behind the leaders that are doing the hard work of designing public services around people.

To help people at the earliest point so they don’t fall into crisis.

To stop people bouncing between services and intervene early.

To save money that can be invested back into public services.

To achieve this we need a new partnership approach.

Missions give us a clear shared purpose.

A golden thread that connects the work of public servants across the UK.

And we need public services to be at the heart of delivering these missions as they are big ambitions for the country…

… to kickstart economic growth…

…make Britain a clean energy superpower…

…take back our streets…

…break down barriers to opportunity…

…and build an NHS fit for the future.

To deliver these we need to work at a pace an ambition we haven’t seen before.

We will need to draw on all the energy and ideas of our communities, and to use every lever available to us to make progress.

We will need to build new coalitions with partners across different sectors, and your role as collaborative leaders is so important.

Today for me is an important step in a new partnership.

We won’t make policy in a closed room in whitehall but we will make it alongside you, working together to change how things are done on the ground and in the centre.

We want to do away with what so many people are sick of…

…politicians pursuing vanity projects…

…ignoring the voices of those who use and deliver public services…

…top down expensive projects that pay no attention to what is happening on the ground.

The Budget was the start of a new era…

…one that values public services…

…that invests in our NHS…

…guaranteeing more appointments to get waiting lists and times down…

…using technology to improve productivity…

…and a move to community based prevention.

A budget that recognised there is no growth without investment in our public services…

…in our schools, our hospitals, our public transport infrastructure.

And as part of this was the introduction of the Public Sector Reform and Innovation Fund

…backed with £165 million to create policy differently…

…to help us develop new partnerships in place, that use the levers of local, regional and central government to solve the big issues we face like spiralling temporary accommodation costs.

New approaches, developed in partnership with citizens.

That creates real change in communities.

And help us to develop policy that delivers for communities.

We need the help of everyone in this room.

We want to hear what is working in your services, to shine a light on the innovation happening across the public sector.

And to work together to renew the public services our communities rely on.

Thank you.