Building on earlier seminars that sought to adapt the recommendations of the TUC’s A Better Recovery report for local and regional government, this seminar focuses on how to create resilient public services at the local level.

Guest speakers include:

• Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester
• Caroline Molloy, OpenDemocracy, journalist
• Clare Williams, Unison, Northern Regional Secretary
• Dr Halima Begum, Director of the Runnymede Trust

The Covid crisis has exposed how funding cuts and outsourcing have hollowed out public service capacity over the last ten years, including regional and local public health capacity. It has also revealed a dysfunctional relationship between centre and local: centralised decisions are made without crucial information from the frontline and then run into implementation problems because of the absence of levers to drive change at local level.

As the government’s strategy for dealing with the pandemic becomes more localised, there is an increasingly urgent need to strengthen the resilience of local public services and improve local and regional coordination across different public services. This seminar will ask what unions, local authorities and other actors can do to achieve this in the absence of national-level change, asking:

• What has the crisis revealed about local public service management and delivery? What lessons should we learn?
• What are the opportunities for local public bodies to do things differently within current policy constraints?
• What role can unions play in public services innovation?
• How can we develop a platform for campaigning for local reform?
• How do we tackle inequalities in public service access and delivery?