Picture two residents in the same care home.

They sit in the same lounge, eat the same meals, and are helped to bed by the same overstretched staff. One is paying over £1,200 a week from the sale of their family home and the slow liquidation of a lifetime’s savings. The other, with no assets at all, has their place funded by the local council. They receive the same service.

This is not a rare injustice or a quirk of the system. It is the system: a structure that manages to be fiscally unsustainable, politically explosive, and morally questionable all at once.

The public sector owns an enormous amount of property; offices, clinics, depots, civic centres – and is constantly working out how to manage it. The approaches we usually see involve using less space, selling off property, and bringing separate teams under the same roof. But for the power of the portfolio to work in the service of communities and their needs, true transformation and system change is needed.

In the long and complicated history of English devolution, most milestones have been invisible to anyone not paid to follow them closely. Spending Review settlements, statutory instruments, deal-signing ceremonies: these were all hard-won moments, expanding the room for local leaders to act. But helping people connect that progress to their daily lives has been tougher work. All too often, translating the machinery of devolution to tangible impact has remained regional government’s thorniest problem.

English devolution has developed unevenly over the past decade. New institutions have been created with more responsibility, more visibility and more expectation, but only partial control over the resources needed to meet them. The deeper question has remained unresolved: how far is national government really willing to go in letting places shape their own economic futures? 

Our high streets these days seem portents of doom, suggesting something fundamental has failed. Headlines warn of Britons who don’t visit their high street regularly and the impact this has on society, politics and sentiment. “Too many empty shops” is an undeniable observation, but it is an incomplete one. Our neighbourhoods and communities need better understanding.

We are delighted to announce two important Director arrivals at ICC to support our mission to improve lives through a relentless focus on growth and prevention. Both share our purpose and passion for delivery 

Vicky Armstrong, a specialist in technology-enabled and digital transformation across the public sector, brings extensive experience from Deloitte, PwC, and independent consulting. James Pemble, who joins from PwC, specialises in large‑scale transformation across local and central government including deep involvement in the recent LGR of North Yorkshire. Both bring enormous experience in driving tangible results for public sector organisations and communities across the UK.

Incremental efficiencies and “salami slicing” are no longer enough to manage local government finances. If councils are to build true financial resilience, they must redesign their operating models around two fundamentals: growth and prevention. Growth expands the tax base and stimulates investment, while prevention tackles demand at its source by supporting people and communities earlier. Both are vital, and both require finance leaders to think differently about risk, purpose, and value.

Chris is a highly experienced management consultant with over 35 years’ experience of working with private and public sectors to deliver better strategy, change, improvement and transformation. He specialises in advising local government on complex change and transformation strategy and is a former Partner with PwC, where he led the firm's local government and devolution businesses. He has worked with a range of councils to deliver their LGR ambitions, including Cheshire West & Chester, Durham, Northumberland, Somerset, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire, Greater Essex and Suffolk.

Everything, everywhere, all at once.   

No, not a review of the 2022, Oscar winning, genre-bending, Hollywood movie. Instead, the summary of a vital movement of public service reform that seeks to connect the energy, effort and commitment of those innovating and learning on the ground with those innovating and learning through design. A movement that consciously ignores long-held practices of top-down decision-making, linear methods of change, and grid-obsessed communication and instead seeks to shift power from the centre to local areas, from institutions to people, from organisations to places. 

New towns present a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make transformative change.  And the scale of the new towns movement provides us with the opportunity to test and learn from new models of delivery that will help us not only shape these new communities but also to inform the way we deliver growth and regeneration projects across the country.

The Autumn Budget has significant implications for local government, public services, and the communities we work side by side with. Rather than offer a single view, we've asked our team to share their individual perspectives on what stood out to them in this Budget. What follows is a collection of short reflections from across our team of practitioners

We’re proud to share that Inner Circle Consulting has achieved our strongest showing yet at the Management Consultancy Association Awards 2025, with five finalist nominations and two major wins celebrating the transformative work we’ve delivered this year for our public sector clients

This recognition reflects the hard work and dedication of our teams and clients towards unlocking a better future for communities across the UK.

Across England, the devolution experiment has largely centred on single-city regions – but as devolution widens, regions containing multiple urban areas with mixed economies, geographies and identities will become the norm. The challenge is how they best organise for growth in a way that can engage investors and communities alike.

A great deal has changed since the first Garden Cities at the beginning of the Twentieth Century – the ways we assemble land, fund infrastructure and develop housing have clearly shifted. But the movement for Garden and New Towns has always been about people and places first and building them well depends on understanding how we combine all the key ingredients to enable good lives and successful places. 

Last Sunday the final report from the New Towns Taskforce was published, marking a significant milestone in shaping the future of large-scale housing development in the UK. After months of anticipation, the report was an encouraging read with strong weight given to placemaking principles and local economic growth. 

But the hard work starts now. 

15 August 2025

by Jonny Moore, Managing Consultant

The new UK Infrastructure Strategy sets out a long-term vision to guide national investment and delivery across economic and social infrastructure.  It is part of a broader national and regional framework that includes the UK Industrial Strategy, planning reforms, devolution agreements, and Local Growth Plans — all intended to unlock housing delivery, support the economy, and coordinate investment more effectively.

Local authorities face an uncomfortable truth: the strategy of selling off public assets to plug revenue gaps is not only unsustainable but is actively eroding their ability to shape places and serve communities.

In 2025–26, 29 many councils will make the hard choice of relying on MHCLG permission to use capital receipts to fund day-to-day services – an option that was once considered exceptional. These one-off sales of public property may prevent bankruptcy today, but they also accelerate long-term decline.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Strategic asset optimisation is one of the most powerful tools councils have. Done well, it can generate sustainable revenue, build economic resilience and transform local places.

Across England, local government is in the grip of an unprecedented financial squeeze. Adult and Children’s Social Care often consumes more than 70% of total council budgets. Rising homelessness, increasing complexity in SEND provision and surging demand in frontline services are stretching resources to the limit. Councils are often stuck in survival mode. The question every one must now ask is: what are we for? 

Our communities face unrelenting challenges – stagnant growth, fiscal restraint, rising inequality, intergenerational poverty, and a catastrophic loss of trust in institutions.

Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) offers a vital opportunity to address these issues, yet some see it as a short term cost-saving exercise through the creation of a small number of large councils. It’s an approach that relies on basic number crunching, zooming out on maps and adopting outdated models of local government service delivery. At best this approach is insucient. At worst it will be a hugely costly and disruptive process that will simply create larger versions of semi-functional or dysfunctional arrangements that aren’t delivering for those that need it the most or for the nation as a whole.

The Government's programme of devolution is a long-awaited opportunity for local government transformation. But, if we only focus on how councils operate, we may still fail to improve outcomes for communities and places. The question of where central government fits into this dynamic – what kind of Whitehall works – must be answered.

The reverberations from December's English Devolution White Paper were felt in areas with single tier and two-tier structures, within the Devolution Priority Programme and outside it. Many areas across England have called for more opportunities to take the initiative for their people and places. But they have also highlighted the need for central government to get out of the way, citing among other things, mandated central government policies that are insensitive to local contexts and a tendency for Whitehall to engage directly with communities without talking to local leaders or truly understanding the spirit of devolution.