The Innovation Challenge
Local Authorities delivery billions of pounds worth of public services every year ranging from children's education, to housing, social care, and refuse collection. They have a central role in tackling the big social challenges ahead: social mobility, an ageing population, chronic disease, and climate change.
Yet local government struggles to innovate. It does not invest in innovation, it lacks innovation capacity, and it tends to have a risk adverse culture.
Some Local Authorities buck this trend. We worked with four of them to see how we could support them to innovate. Our focus was innovation to reduce youth crime in Essex, Knowsley, Westminster and Sheffield.
Our Approach
Throughout the period between October 2008 and March 2009, Innovation Unit provided intensive support for the four Local Authorities to develop and incubate new approaches to tackling youth crime focused on:
- Reducing the fear of youth crime,
- Alternatives to custody programmes,
- Developing staff to work with complex families,
- Working with young people at risk of offending.
We ran a series of events for the staff in each Local Authority focused on innovation methodology, defining and redefining the problem, evidence from innovations around the world, service design and involving young people in innovation among others.
We also provided the Local Authorities with UK and international case studies of innovative approaches to crime prevention and enforcement. This was combined with detailed ethnographic research with young people at risk of offending or who have committed offences, in order to better understand their motivations, attitudes and contexts.
Outcomes
Sheffield and Essex were given further funding by IDeA to implement their work on induction into the Intensive Support and Supervision Programme, and to develop staff to work with complex families.
Westminster has attracted a small amount of funding to develop an intergenerational forum, run by a volunteer and open to, and accessible to, residents of all ages. The residents on the estate we worked with were inspired to organise a fun day in August 2009 and held a sponsored walk to raise money. For the first time there will now be young people on the residents assocation.
You can download a booklet with full details or the individual case studies:
Innovation Catalyst booklet
Essex Case Study
Knowsley Case Study
Sheffield Case Study
Westminster Case Study
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