The role of relationships in modern government

Ray Shostak, Richard Bell and David Robinson explore the power of human connection in public services

Frontline services are, as their name suggests, delivered at the frontline – in communities. As a result a person’s experience of government is shaped as much by the quality of the interactions they have with doctors, nurses, police officers, teachers and social workers as it is by the institutional structures and processes which are the stuff of policy briefs. Yet when public servants and frontline practitioners listen, empathise and connect with service users on a personal level – as a great many do – we are slightly surprised and praise them as having ‘gone the extra mile’.

The reality is that empathy and trust should be essential building blocks of effective public service delivery – especially when, as the digital government innovator Richard Pope has shown in his book Platformland, a service is seeking to meet a complex human need. Without the capacity to interpret and respond to emotional and contextual cues, those responsible for designing and delivering services cannot hope to identify – let alone address – the causes of deep-rooted social and economic challenges. Without trust, public servants and citizens can’t work together effectively, even towards shared goals.

How can public services be optimised for empathy, trust or the human relationships which grow and sustain them? By the same token, how can ‘relational value’ be prioritised in the development of policy and the practice of governance?

In this article, we explore how a guiding focus on relationships might be woven into these core dimensions of modern government – and consider how this could lead to better outcomes for everyone.

Relational services

Over the last decade, a growing number of policymakers and practitioners within local government have begun to develop and apply models that prioritise relationships and responsiveness.

Wigan Council has redesigned adult social care services to allow care workers to have open-ended conversations with service users – coming to know them as people and to understand what matters to them – and to identify the personal capabilities and community ‘assets’ that they might draw on to live healthier, more independent lives. Camden Council has developed a children’s social care model in which building bonds of mutual trust with children and families, and empowering them to shape their own journeys, takes precedence over meeting narrow performance metrics. Through the Changing Futures Northumbria initiative delivered by Gateshead Council and its local authority, health and voluntary sector partners, caseworkers work in a high-discretion, ‘liberated’ manner with adults experiencing multiple disadvantage. They are thus able to forge relationships of trust that allow them to co-design a bespoke support plan with the individual, rather than attempting to funnel them into predetermined service pathways.

Green shoots are also emerging in Whitehall. One is evident in the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), which plans to expand the Community Health and Wellbeing Worker (CHWW) model through its ten-year plan for the NHS. CHWWs are specially trained members of primary care teams who visit every household within a defined geographic area at least once a month and get to know community members. They spot health issues, signpost people to community spaces and services and provide support directly to those experiencing loneliness or low-level mental health problems. Further promise can be found in the Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn and Grow public service reform initiative, which has been designed to put the transformative potential of relationships at the centre of service delivery.

Building on this trailblazing work will require more empowerment of frontline service workers – decentralising decision-making and establishing supportive permission structures. Competitive tendering practices which lead to churn among service providers, disincentivising them from becoming embedded within communities, must also be reformed. And we need ‘feedback loops’ to enable insights from frontline workers and service users to be incorporated into the design of programmes and services.

Accelerating this trend will, furthermore, necessitate action not just to create the conditions in which those responsible for designing and delivering public services might harness the power of relationships, but to actively support them to do so. Policymakers should be trained to interrogate when transactions are not sufficient to achieve their goals, and to redeploy resources freed up through doing so. This would in turn enable those on the frontline to build relationships where they will make the most difference (a practice we call ‘relational offsetting’). Frontline workers need support to develop core ‘relational skills’, such as listening deeply and fostering psychological safety.

Relational policy

Each of the examples highlighted above relate fundamentally to relationships between public servants and members of the public. Policymakers, though, in addition to building these relationships, must also develop measures and strategies aimed specifically and directly at nurturing relationships between citizens.

These measures and strategies often do not relate exclusively, or even mainly, to the design and delivery of public services, but rather to public policy more broadly. Indeed, the policy thinker James Plunkett has suggested that we should consider the “relational capacity” of the state – its capacity “to do things with people, or to enable people to do things with other people.”¹

A recent initiative which illustrates the potential impact of policy designed to facilitate the formation of good relationships between citizens is the Homes for Ukraine programme, which matched Ukrainian refugees with UK residents who hosted them and provided an intensely relational form of support. Studies suggest models that enable private citizens to play an active role in supporting refugees to settle in their areas deliver better integration and cohesion outcomes than those that locate that responsibility exclusively with the state.

In fact, interventions aimed at supporting people from different social and ethnic backgrounds to build cross-community ties have been a central pillar of cohesion policy for decades. As other social problems stemming from a lack of trusting and productive relationships within communities have risen in prominence, however, policymakers have begun to extend relationship‑centred approaches into other policy domains.

Take health and care, for instance. The neuroscientist Julianne Holt-Lunstad has repeatedly demonstrated that social connection is among the most important determinants of our overall health and that chronic loneliness constitutes a risk factor comparable with smoking and obesity. It follows that pivoting from treatment to prevention will require policymakers to tackle isolation and build preventative networks of community and connection.

The best-known health policy approach with this objective is ‘social prescribing’, through which ‘link’ workers refer individuals from GP surgeries to community services and activities which might meet their emotional needs.²

Within local government, Ealing Council’s Let’s Go Southall initiative leverages active-living and community programmes as opportunities to foster bonds within and across communities, improving public health in multiple ways. Barking and Dagenham council and North East London NHS Foundation Trust have co-founded a community interest company, Care City, which supports those recently discharged from hospital to connect with others who share their interests or passions. Helping these individuals to attain a sense of emotional security and develop new routines reduces the likelihood of their being re-hospitalised or experiencing health problems associated with isolation.

Such policy approaches have the potential to meet a wide range of social needs. Reflecting in 2023 on a career which had even then encompassed high-level government service across multiple departments and two countries, the now-Defra Permanent Secretary Paul Kissack wrote that “so many of the public services we were working on were clearly trying to patch up tears in the social fabric. We were building services where relationships should be.” And the former Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane has argued in a series of recent reports and lectures that social capital (“connections among individuals… and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”) is vital to economic growth, dubbing human relationships “the hidden wealth of nations.” ³

Policy can create the conditions for relationships to develop without itself being relationship-centred. Nonetheless, it has now been nearly three decades since the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam first thrust the concept of social capital into the policy spotlight on both sides of the Atlantic.⁴ In that time, politicians and government officials have largely struggled to develop a convincing account of what the state could and should do to generate it.

Embracing the notion that the purpose of policy can be to cultivate good relationships between citizens will be key – as will be taking active steps to grow the UK state’s relational capacity. The Treasury’s recent Green Book Review suggests that the potential impact of interventions on social capital may soon be more explicitly incorporated into its appraisals and decision-making. The Government should build on this by introducing tools to enable officials to assess how policy measures might affect relationships within communities; deploying frameworks to help them identify opportunities for, and roadblocks in the way of, building or strengthening social connections; and deepening their understanding of the conditions under which different forms of social capital develop.

Relational governance

Building strong relationships – of both the public servant-citizen and citizen-citizen varieties – should be understood as vital to improving decision-making within government.

A wealth of evidence suggests that meaningfully involving citizens and stakeholders in policy-setting and the design and delivery of public services leads to better outcomes, drawing on experiences and voices that would otherwise be missed. The result is a stronger sense of shared ownership over decisions – deepening commitment, opening up new opportunities for partnership-working and generating efficiencies.

At the local level, the use of both participatory budgeting exercises and citizens assemblies and juries is increasingly common. At the national level, the current Government’s focus on empowering people within communities is producing new collaborative governance structures – arrangements that formally transfer a degree of decision-making power to stakeholders, including local residents.

Most notably, the intention is to administer the Government’s Pride in Place economic regeneration programme through Neighbourhood Boards comprising local people, community organisations, local businesses and faith leaders as well as ward councillors and the area’s MP. A similar focus on co-operative decision-making flows through plans for a layer of new neighbourhood governance arrangements to be established across England; the new Civil Society Covenant and ‘Covenant Partnerships’ being assembled to bring it to life it at a local level; and the aforementioned Test, Learn and Grow work, which has been explicitly designed on the principle that communities understand the challenges they face better than Whitehall.

Policymakers sometimes describe these sorts of initiatives as ‘place-based’. Perhaps a better description would be ‘relationship-based’, as what enables them to promote fruitful collaboration isn’t only their geographic scale but rather whether they are underpinned by – and designed to enable the formation of – trusting and productive relationships.

Many of the Neighbourhood Boards formed to administer the Pride in Place programme will, for example, need to address not only the underlying tensions and latent conflict within their communities but also a lack of trust and understanding between local people and the local authority.

A government committed to harnessing the power of relationships should ensure that these boards and various other governance structures are shaped to represent the diversity of their communities, foster open discussion and enable collaborative decision-making. It would also support those involved to develop the skills and capabilities required to navigate power imbalances, bridge differences of background and perspective and harness conflict as fuel for change.

Finally, it would recognise that a culture of citizen participation and collaboration cannot simply be retro-fitted onto the system in its present form. It would, then, launch a drive to enable officials to become skilled in the open and empowering ways of working and co-production techniques required to deliver on this ambition.

Conclusion

Relationships between frontline service workers and service users, as well as between citizens themselves, are a powerful yet underutilised engine of change. Cultivating good relationships within communities should be a key objective of modern policymaking. Effective collaborative governance structures must be anchored in relationships of mutual understanding and trust. Relationships can, then, serve as both the means and ends of public policy – “the root and the flower.”⁵

Making relationships the first step rather than the extra mile should be regarded as at least as foundational to 21st century government as the strategic use of data or digital transformation.

Ray Shostak is an international adviser in government performance, public service reform and education.

Rich Bell is a policy professional with a focus on issues of social capital and an adviser to The Relationships Project.

David Robinson is a founder of The Relationships Project and previously led the Prime Minister’s Council on Social Action.