Walking down Wembley Way to LOTI CON 2026, I felt a familiar sense of excitement and anticipation. It was the second time I’d made the walk in recent months, the first to see my hometown club and lifelong obsession, Hull City, reach the Premier League.  

LOTI CON didn’t quite match the same levels of euphoria but it was certainly another highlight of the summer.  

Having worked closely with LOTI on public service reform at London Councils, I knew the event would be peppered with creativity and innovation, but I was blown away by the energy and thought that had gone into the programme of activity. It is always a pleasure to be in a room with likeminded people: public servants who think about services in a different way, who are inquisitive, innovative and ultimately help to deliver better services for the people and communities they serve.  

Despite this, I couldn’t help but feel a bit hopeless. In one session, in which we were asked to design the “Worst Service in the World”, I had a realisation. I haven’t worked in service design for six years, yet the experiences of those working in boroughs chimed with the more frustrating moments of my time working in transformation and change. Institutional barriers still blight the sector, and ultimately stop good and incredibly talented people from making more of a positive impact on people’s lives.  

If we were to rethink public services, we would take a totally different approach. Institutional rules and boundaries would not be the core operating principle – it would be the citizen, the community.  

Of course, some things have changed, and new innovations and methodologies are being put into practice. But they are applied inconsistently across the sector, service reform is piecemeal, and transformation feels less about prevention and improving outcomes and more about saving money.  

Of course, this is not to point the finger of blame at councils. Local government finances are dire and those working in authorities are fighting year on year to balance budgets. Both service improvement through driving efficiencies and more fundamental reforms are required. But if we don’t meet citizens’ needs and aspirations, demands on services will only worsen.   

There is, however, an opportunity on the horizon. For the thousandth time this month I am talking about the Rewiring the State Cabinet Statement. More devolution is always welcome (as a localist it would be remiss of me not to say this) but Rewiring the State goes much further than devolution. It opens up the conversation about how we can rewire services to drive better outcomes for citizens, communities and the country.  

You can have services that don’t work for people in any institutional framework – this is why LOTI, or our colleagues at the London Innovation and Improvement Alliance, Warmer Homes London and the Ending Homelessness Accelerator Programme are critical to fundamental public service reform. They have the skills and capabilities to drive change and innovation at every level.. With bolstered layers of regional, sub-regional and local capability, local authorities can drive change and innovation for their communities as the leaders of place and the principal units of service delivery. 

This approach has been critical to our work at London Councils on the Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn and Grow Programme. We are working in partnership with Cabinet Office, London boroughs, LOTI, the GLA (Greater London Authority) and MOPAC (Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime) to think of new approaches to tackling Violence Against Women and Girls, one of the most frankly depressing challenges of our time, and one that cuts across service areas and impacts lives significantly – it is the second most common cause or circumstance for homelessness nationally and one woman is killed by a current or former partner every 5 days in England and Wales.  

By taking a relational, test and learn approach, we are paying equal attention to testing small interventions at local and hyper-local levels, learning from them, and growing and implementing what works across places. By learning from what doesn’t work, and thinking about the conditions that enable success, we wholeheartedly believe that this starts to rewire services, the state and ultimately improve people’s lives. 

It feels like an opportune moment to change the way things are done. Let’s not waste this momentum by falling back into uncomfortably familiar old habits of risk aversion, red tape and bureaucracy – our communities don’t need that, they just want to live good lives. We owe them that at the very least.   

This blog is written by Joe Kinsella, Associate Director – Public Service Reform & Improvement at London Councils.