How can public service leaders build the right conditions for prevention to succeed?

From the NHS ten-year plan and the rollout of Neighbourhood Health, to the largest reorganisation of local councils in a generation, to the expansion of Family Hubs and Families First, the Pride in Place programme, and the new Crisis Resilience Fund launched this week, reform is happening everywhere.   

Prevention sits visibly at the heart of these reforms. In a landscape that is crowded with overlapping initiatives and expectations, the intent behind reforms can easily get lost and with it the potential for real impact. To guard against this risk, public service leaders can focus on three priorities: 

1. Creating a clear and shared local narrative that explains why reform matters and what it means for your communities. 
2. Strengthening intelligence and partnerships so that reforms are rooted in a deep understanding of local need. 
3. Investing in delivery capabilities that connect insight to action and enable continuous learning across organisations 

With rising complexity of demand and constrained budgets, financial pressures are adding an imperative to get prevention right -  ensuring resources are directed upstream where they can have a far greater impact, preventing or delaying crisis and the significant costs that follow. Several reforms draw on the same principles – recognising multiple interconnected root causes of need, designing early support that is integrated, and deploying holistic, multidisciplinary and person-centred approaches. Yet for leaders across public services, implementation is anything but simple.  

New changes, such as the Crisis Resilience Fund guidance launched this week, do not land in a vacuum. They arrive in systems that are already stretched, in organisations managing other large scale changes, among staff who have long felt the pressure of limited funding, rising demand and continuous transformation.  

At a practical level different people are driving responses to different agendas in different organisations and these responses often compete for attention, resource, airtime and delivery capacity. Across the country, major transformation programmes are mobilising at scale including those preparing to bring organisations together into new unitaries and those focused on closing gaps in their medium term financial strategy.  

Creating space for a shared vision and narrative of reform  

To cut through, organisation leaders must create space to step back to create a shared vision and ambition with partners that can guide change with clarity. Clarifying the local story of change is vital work and it is not a one-off task. Leadership at organisational and partnership level must cut through competing terminology, structures and pressures to develop a coherent and continually evolving account of what reform means and why it matters for local people. Only with this narrative in place is it possible to galvanise partners and ensure that each policy change, each reform and each funding opportunity becomes a lever to tackle the underlying causes of need. 

Being clear who change must be for  

At the centre of this narrative must be a clear focus on who change must benefit. What do we know about people who are most at risk of tipping into crisis and what combination of factors is driving that risk. Addressing connected root causes in areas such as housing, health, money or relationships requires deep intelligence and strong local networks. Sophisticated predictive analytics can help but they are only one part of the picture. Places need well-connected public and community sectors that share knowledge, understand lived experience and interpret reforms through the lens of local context.  

Building the delivery engine room that can support a Test, Learn & Grow approach  

Now is an ideal opportunity to design the capabilities that new operating models need in order to make reform work locally and maximise the impact of collective resources. We need to build central delivery capabilities for innovation and service design that can learn continuously and connect opportunities for change across partners. Alongside high level vision and front-line service delivery must sit agile and highly networked delivery functions that can help translate insight into practical action, test approaches, learn quickly and build impact over time. The Test, Learn and Grow movement emerging from the Cabinet Office offers valuable principles for this work, encouraging places to start small, learn, refine and build momentum. 

With the need for prevention undisputed, the real work of reform lies not in reacting to each policy in isolation but in redefining the shared ambition that connects them and creating the preventative delivery capability that turns change into improved outcomes for people, and tangible savings for public services. At IMPOWER we are working with organisations across public services to identify prevention opportunities at service, organisation and system level. We help convene people and insight across partners to understand how effectively they are using limited resources to create stronger outcomes and to support a more sustainable system as well as balance the budget. Our work focuses on unlocking the delivery machine, the people, relationships, intelligence and practical levers that bring reform to life and make it meaningful. To find out more, please get in touch.