What it will really take to Rewire the State

This piece was authored by Sarah Gillinson and Dawn Plimmer and first appeared in Municipal Journal. Sarah is CEO at Innovation Unit and Dawn is CEO at Collaborate CIC.

Rewiring the State is the biggest opportunity for public service reform we’ve seen in decades. Government has set out a vision: good growth, less inequality, places that integrate services around people. 

The structural changes outlined matter. But they will fail unless we reignite power and agency among public servants at every level to believe in and feel confident to do this work. 

At Innovation Unit and Collaborate, we’ve spent 20 years helping communities build genuinely better services and systems. We know from experience that there are 3 things the Government must do to see real change, quickly, over the next 2-3 years.

1. Develop all local leaders to lead for people and place — not just strategic authorities

Strategic authorities will rightly convene and lead. But if place-based leadership development stops there, we move top-down power to regions rather than out to communities. 

If we want to turn the dial quickly on how public services work, and how residents experience them, local authority, VCFSE and health leaders at every level need the same.

Invest in building the skills and confidence of all these leaders - to trust communities, be accountable to them, work across boundaries, and make learning their way forward a core way of working. Get this right at scale, and these leaders create the conditions for their workforces to change how they work. Fast.

Leaders want to deliver the outcomes their communities most care about. Most have spent careers held back from doing so by narrow, service-level targets with too little time or money for meaningful work across service and organisational boundaries. 

But there are places where leaders have been freed (or freed themselves) to organise services around people. They’ve shown that the case for doing so isn’t just right — it pays for itself. 

2. Codesign a workforce charter for preventative services, and train people in it

Public services are built by people: doctors, teachers, social workers, occupational therapists, debt advisors, VCFSE staff and volunteers. For 70 years we’ve trained and incentivised them to succeed within their own lane. Social workers keep people safe. Doctors treat illness. Teachers help children pass exams.

Now we’re asking them all to do something fundamentally different: to see the whole person, to join up around a life rather than a service, and to work across boundaries that were never designed to be crossed. That is not just a process change. It is a personal one.

Rewiring the State is silent on the critical role of on-the-ground practitioners in delivering the integrated services that actually tackle inequalities. Yet every successful integration model we’ve seen — Live Well, Changing Futures, Always Hope among them — works because it reignites the agency of staff to exercise judgment about how to support people, and reshape how they do their job. Places like Wigan and Sutton, and models like Living Well have shown that codifying behaviours gives a whole workforce a shared, concrete picture of what “good” looks like.

A workforce charter, spanning statutory and voluntary sectors alike, would name the skills, practices and behaviours this new way of working demands, and support people to build them. Train even 30% of the workforce in these over the next two to three years and you’d trigger a bottom-up revolution: better outcomes for people, delivered by a more motivated workforce.

3. Take a serious approach to spreading what works

We have no shortage of pilots.

What Works Centres have grown the evidence base for new models, but we’ve made far less progress helping places do the hard work of adapting and adopting them. The rate at which models spread is still painfully slow.

Scaling doesn’t have to mean standardising. Pick a handful of proven models and codify them to distil their core success ingredients. Actively encourage every place in the country to learn about them, choose one, and get real support to implement it locally. Help them adapt proven models to their context — supporting leaders to create the decision-making, commissioning and financial models that enable them to take root.

Do that, and you build an engine for national change from the ground up.

The real measure of success

Change must be felt by real people before the next election. Not described in a white paper, not evidenced in an evaluation three years from now. 

The places at the sharp end of the inverse care law, where public services are weakest exactly where need is greatest, are the ones that must feel the change first. 

Succeeding in this requires us to unlock the power and agency of everyone delivering public services to work very differently, now - starting where it matters most. This is how we stand a chance of seeing the vision of Rewiring the State become a reality.

Want to explore this more?

Join us at our online events series throughout Autumn and Winter 2026/27, where we’ll be discussing each of these ideas in more detail with experts from across the public, private and VCSFE sector. Hear from those who’ve done it locally, and discuss how we can help make Rewiring the State a reality at scale.