Connected Prevention
Integrating local digital systems for better public services
Last year’s Localis report ‘Connected Devolution’ set out the operating context for digital reform under English devolution and local government reorganisation: fragmented legacy estates, uneven capability, incomplete national rails, and the need for stronger governance, sequencing and market discipline.
Our follow-up project, ‘Connected Prevention’, will move the policy dial from integration for back-office functionality to integration as a practical enabler of preventative public service reform.
This is where the next phase of the argument becomes most valuable. If local digital integration is to matter beyond safer vesting and lower administrative friction, it must help places intervene earlier, coordinate support better, and redesign services around risk before it hardens into crisis. That points towards shared intelligence infrastructure, jointly governed data arrangements, and clearer operating models across councils, strategic authorities, NHS partners, housing providers and relevant civil society organisations.
When published in December 2024, the English Devolution White Paper asserted not only that ‘public services are on their knees with outcomes at historic lows’, but also argued the remedy is the urgent ‘need to reform public services to focus on prevention, with programmes built more closely around people and the places they live’. The paper also spoke of wanting to ‘make reform and prevention the default setting’ in local authorities, with the support of strategic authorities, for the sake of ending ‘the cycle of system failure’ with better aligned public services delivering better outcomes.
In contemporary reform debates, prevention is often affirmed in principle but left under-specified in institutional terms. Connected Prevention will narrow that gap, and will examine:
- what digital, data and governance arrangements are realistic, lawful and useful in practice;
- which early use cases offer the clearest value; and
- how transparency, assisted access, contestability and public legitimacy can be designed in from the outset rather than added later.
Against this context, Localis will undertake an in-depth study of how integrated local digital systems can support preventative, place-based public service reform, using case studies of places already attempting aspects of this well to identify transferable lessons.
The research will examine how such models operate across the reorganised local state, including local authorities, strategic authorities, ICB and wider NHS partners, housing associations, suppliers, regulators and community-facing institutions.
Drawing on such an analysis, and two years on from publication of the English Devolution White Paper, Localis will set out a suite of place-based, evidence-led recommendations, alongside a practical framework for place leaders on shared intelligence, governance design, service prioritisation and delivery sequencing over the medium term.
Connected Prevention – policy aims and objectives
- Examine how integrated local digital systems can support preventative, place-based public service reform
- Move from integration for back-office functionality (as established within Connected Devolution) to integration as an enabler of earlier service intervention
- Identify the shared intelligence, data governance and operating models needed across councils, strategic authorities, NHS, housing, civil society partners, etc.
- Test where digital preventative use cases offer the clearest early value and transferable lessons
- Build a practical framework for place leaders on shared intelligence, governance design, service prioritisation and delivery sequencing
- Explore how resident legitimacy, transparency, assisted access, contestability and data ethics can be designed in from the outset
- Develop place-based, evidence-led recommendations for local, regional and national actors
Research programme kindly sponsored by:
