Peter McDonald talks to Sheffield City Council’s Chief Executive, Kate Josephs, about her move to the regions and what devolution may mean for those at the centre
This conversation took place before the Prime Minister’s announcement on future devolution (Rewiring the State – Cabinet Statement, 31st July 2026). The Government statement covers many themes raised in the conversation and is an excellent parallel read.
Kate Josephs walks to work through a council estate where persistent fly-tipping has yet to be tamed, through an underpass brightened by community street-art, past the Crucible Theatre, where a new deal has secured it as the home of world snooker, and into a listed Victorian town hall in dire need of restoration. “It matters that I walk past the consequences of decisions I’m part of every day in this city,” she says.
Few in central government have such a commute. How Kate came to be here – and what she learnt from it – is the subject of today’s conversation. She spent twenty years at the centre of national government, including HM Treasury, the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, the Department for Education, a spell in Washington running the White House’s Performance Improvement Council and finally the Cabinet Office’s Covid-19 Taskforce.
Since January 2021, she has been Chief Executive of Sheffield City Council, a role that has reshaped how she thinks about public service. Nevertheless, Kate still feels deeply attached to the Civil Service and wants it “to be as good as it can be”. What follows should be read in that spirit – the observations of someone who knows how the machine works, now sees it from the other side and wants it to get devolution right.
The Crubicle Theatre, Sheffield
The signal and the noise
There was no thunderclap. “It was probably a slower realisation than it should have been,” she says of discovering how different the new world was. Coming to Sheffield, she knew she had many things to learn but did not expect that working with elected politicians would be one of them. That confidence turned out to be the thing that needed rewiring.
The lesson began when elected members raised issues that struck her Whitehall-trained mind as small in scale. She had to “hack the immediate reaction” and learn to treat them as signals, not noise. “These were local members deep in their communities and they knew what was going on,” she explains. Such signals are critical for understanding how real people actually experience government.
At a national level, it is all too easy to under-appreciate the impact that ‘small’ issues can have on people’s lives. For understandable reasons, central government tends to put a strategic framework around most issues. Within it, departments can often afford to deal in averages – indeed, painting in broad strokes is often the only option. But in a city, a hyper-local issue “can be the difference between a project succeeding or failing.” So Kate came to recognise that she needed to be “more curious and humble” about how she worked within a local democratic set-up. It could be messy, yes, but it was the reality of the communities she served.
Answerable to many
In a Whitehall department, accountability is well understood; in Sheffield, the picture is far more intricate. Kate holds statutory responsibilities in her own right. She is accountable to the Council leader. And in Sheffield’s novel committee system, she serves a ‘no overall control’ Council comprising more than four political parties leading different policy committees, in effect a local parliament – “fundamentally, those 84 elected members in Sheffield need to feel I am delivering for all of them.”
On any given issue, Kate must consider the different accountabilities she holds. Far from resenting the complication, she sees it as “a discipline that I’m really grateful for having had to learn in this job.”
She reflects on what this means, especially set against her Whitehall background. The first point is that, for all the complexity, “each level of government is ultimately accountable to the people we are here to serve.” In the case of Westminster departments, the direct accountability to ministers is the mechanism for this, not a countervailing force. The second is continuity: when accountability runs to a whole city rather than a single office-holder, it is not disrupted by ministerial turnover. And the third is emotional involvement. The walk to work is the governance chart made real – the snooker, the community street-art project, the fly-tipping, the town hall. “It definitely takes more out of you,” she concedes, “but it also gives more back.”
Sheffield Town Hall
The grip reflex
Kate’s time in the centre of national government formed her convictions about the importance of joined-up government. She was, in her own words, “permanently frustrated” that cross-government working went against the grain, beginning with her work on the Public Service Agreements of the Blair and Brown years, and lasting until she left the Covid-19 Taskforce twenty years later. She kept asking: “Why is joining up harder than it should be? Why do people get so protective of their space? And why are we so focused on the elegant solution when the world is not elegant?”
It is an age-old critique and just as true in local government. But the experience of being at the receiving end has sharpened her diagnosis. “So much energy, cost and human effort goes into making sense of things which come down to us from different bits of Whitehall,” she explains; while departments issue their instructions separately, a ‘place’ receives them all at once. Each instruction may be logical and legitimate but the totality may not reflect “how they’ll be delivered in different places, with different capacities, capabilities and realities.”
Why is the centre like this? Kate’s hypothesis has three parts. First, the UK remains a highly centralised country. Second, it is very difficult for central government to be on top of every issue in every place, especially in today’s complex world. Third, the Whitehall system – civil servants and ministers alike – tends to reward ‘grip’.
This has implications for empowering others outside the centre. Kate describes how the typical senior civil servant is not generally encouraged to come to a minister with the following proposition: “here’s a really complex, nuanced proposal that’s going to be different in every place and will be hard for you to explain, monitor and evaluate.”
But she knows what such realism can achieve. When Sheffield needed to lift vaccination rates in certain communities that the national machinery struggled to reach, the council let go. Responsibility was devolved to trusted community leaders and “the uptake in deprived and specific global majority communities was higher than in other comparable places.” That required the council to strike a different bargain with its own centre: “we are not going to know for sure in the moment; we are not going to be able to show live results on a dashboard.”
Clearly, different circumstances call for different degrees of grip. And when things go wrong (as they do), the first question asked is ‘who knew what and when?’ Nevertheless, Kate believes we must find ways to make it safer to try different things and experiment, especially for those in the centre. It is a prerequisite for further devolution.
Kate is sympathetic to this challenge and offers two thoughts. The first is that having a plan makes bravery possible. “The centre needs to have a really clear set of priorities,” she argues. A selective centre that knows what matters most also knows where it can afford to take a risk and endure the criticism.
The second is that long-term goals can sometimes be easier to hold onto at a local level. National strategy, however cogent and evidence-based, can feel abstract and out of reach. In a specific place, it is not esoteric to say: “You see that site there that’s empty? The plan is that’s going to be this and it’s going to take this long, so bear with us.” Local leaders can tell tangible stories and give people a stake in change – “it might take a bit longer, but it tends to last, it tends to be better and it tends to withstand scrutiny.”
On the same side
I invite Kate to turn the telescope around: what would she say in defence of the centre? To start, she worries about an increasing sense of the “othering of civil servants”, by which she means behaving as if we are not all public servants, paid for by the same taxpayers, driven by common motivations.
It is too easy in local government to use national government as the reason that things are hard. A frequent refrain is “the Treasury won’t let us do that”, which, as Kate notes, is no different from the generic “Finance says no.” The cliché may sometimes be true, but it often obscures the fact that the Treasury is doing a job on behalf of the Cabinet to manage overall costs. There are usually policy reasons; engage with the reasons, not the label.
Alongside the ‘othering’ sits a misperception of omnipotence. “There’s an assumption that the centre of government is all-seeing, all-knowing,” Kate explains. She offers a story – anonymised here – of a project that carried every senior blessing going: ministers enthusiastic, the department signed up, local partners agreed. It got done, but it was slowed by multiple layers of middle-management governance, where something novel kept meeting civil servants who felt they had no freedom to act. Even the centre is not immune to administrative sludge. “If you get what feels to be the ‘wrong’ answer, keep trying,” she advises; “do not assume everything is intentional.”
A product of its time
For this readership, there is merit in reflecting on her spell in the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit between 2007 and 2010, a much-exported idea in modern British government (which she herself took to Washington). Kate’s summary assessment is positive but qualified. “It was a product of its time,” she reflects, that ‘time’ being a relatively benign fiscal environment and a simpler delivery landscape.
She begins by praising the approach of “bringing together small, multidisciplinary teams with a variety of knowledge and perspective.” There was also an effective logic in analysing the relationship between inputs, outputs and outcomes against clearly defined, measurable targets.
None of this is wrong, “but it’s simplistic to imagine the methodologies work for the very complex, very stretched and underfunded system within which we now exist.” In short, Kate argues, we need a more nuanced lens. What was missing? People and capability. “I don’t think we ever asked ourselves much about leadership capability and public service resilience in the places that were doing the delivery,” she explains.
Twenty years on, her assessment is that the biggest determinant of delivery success is usually the skills of precisely those people. If something is awry, the answer is rarely to parachute in a ‘hero-leader’ to sort things out; instead, it is duller and harder – “to understand capability and accept that sometimes the thing that makes the biggest difference does not fit neatly into the logic model.”
All that said, the Delivery Unit toolkit came north with her. “Sheffield has done – and will continue to do – loads of work around performance culture and how we use data,” she says. Here, the ideal is to pair a performance culture with space for innovation and creativity.
In practice, Kate’s constraint is not doctrine but capacity. Sheffield’s budget is roughly half what it was in 2010, and the corporate core has been cut hardest as elected members have understandably opted to protect front-line services wherever possible. The facts are stark: “you can now count on one hand the number of people on policy and strategy we have for a council of over 8,000 staff, covering 800 services and a £1.5 billion budget.”
Redrawing the chart
If serious devolution is coming, that hollowed-out core is where it may be felt first. There is a graph Kate carries to every argument about the future of the state: civil service headcount rising over the past decade; local government workforce falling. Redressing this “has to be part of the answer to the devolution question.”
The diverging paths are not the product of a single, strategic choice about what is right for the system as a whole; instead, they are the consequence of events – Brexit and Covid being just two – and of a fiscal squeeze in which governments have had to make difficult choices. If anything, those same events “almost forced national government to double down on its centralising tendencies; to demonstrate grip and control.”
Her prescription is unapologetically radical: “these roles either need not be done any more, or they need to move to regional or local government.” Kate has seen projects reviewed by more officials in central government than were delivering them on the ground – for example, a Sheffield business case for a complex road junction, reviewed and re-reviewed, until several years later the answer comes back ‘yes’ (by which point it may no longer be the priority). ‘Letting go’ would mean more than just allowing local government to deliver; it would mean building the capability and capacity for it to decide robustly.
She is equally insistent on a distinction that is sometimes confused: relocation is not redistribution. Moving civil servants out of London is genuinely good – for the breadth of talent and, above all, for social mobility. With more of the state visible to the country it serves, “policy-making would get better,” she thinks. But this is no substitute for reflecting on the workforce balance between different levels of government. As a former Treasury official, she acknowledges that the fiscal arithmetic means a real transfer of people and resource from one tier to the other, not an addition.
Sheffield from above
Devolve, don’t delegate
Unsurprisingly, the Sheffield experience has made Kate a conviction devolutionist. By her own admission, she has gone from thinking about devolution as a good economic policy to believing that “there are simply too many things in our system that are too centralised.” Her logic is that it has become all but impossible to design person-centred services and policy once, for the whole country, from Westminster.
To start, Kate is clear on what devolution is not: “here’s a pot of money; here are the parameters within which you can spend it.” Going back to the road junction, this would be a form of “here’s the scheme you can do – well done, you get to be the one that cuts the ribbon.” But real devolution means giving away power and choice, not just responsibility for delivery.
Everyone reaches for Greater Manchester as the example. Kate agrees it is “the proof that devolution can work”, though that success was the product of a thirty-year project, based on both “science and art”: good policy, long-term vision and effective partnership between different levels of government. So while Manchester demonstrates the prize, it is not a universal proof; we may need different and better conditions for effective further devolution.
Kate offers three reflections on how to go further, across the whole of England. The first is a more equitable balance of workforce and resource between the tiers. Referring back to the graph, “you cannot deliver the level of promise that is being talked about and not properly fund mayoral combined authorities.”
The second is to come to terms with the “fabled postcode lottery”. Kate’s answer is that we already have one: “it’s called where you’re born.” The fact is that a child born in certain parts of Sheffield has less access to opportunity than a child with similar economic disadvantage born in London. This disparity is not a risk of devolution; it is the patchwork quilt that devolution seeks to mend.
The third is the hardest, because it is personal. Kate looks at her own CV – performance management, analysis, the aforementioned ‘grip’ – and asks whether the skills that got her here are the skills a devolving state now needs. Her answer is that they are necessary but no longer sufficient; what counts is people, capability and taking risks in the right places. The leaders who achieve the most, she expects, will be those who convene rather than do everything themselves.
Reasons for optimism
Kate’s leadership philosophy was formed down the road in Doncaster, while watching her social worker parents make a difference to people’s lives, sometimes in spite of the leadership above them. They did things because they wanted to do them and cared about them. Leaders, she concluded, can rarely claim the credit. This humility shapes her ethos that leadership is, more than anything, about creating the right conditions for others.
She also learnt a key lesson while working for the Obama administration. “It was a very positive, can-do culture, which I found really freeing,” she remembers. It confirmed for her that optimism and hope must be part of a leader’s job description. This does not mean being naive in the face of difficulty; it means having an underlying sense of belief that “things can be better and you can be part of making them better.”
The contrast she reaches for is one many in central government will recognise: presenting an idea while steeling yourself for several clever people picking it apart in real time, usually with excellent analysis. She learnt the game and does not disown it; challenge matters. But challenge only builds something when it is paired with something else. “You need to bring a sense of belief that things are possible to your critique,” she says.
Which is, in the end, her message to the centre and a final element of the prescription that has run through the conversation: that national government needs to hold less tightly in the places where it can afford to. “There needs to be a bit of cultural ‘letting go’ and recognising that some of the job is about setting a direction and being braver,” she summarises. “It’s possible, but it’s countercultural.”
And with that she will walk back out – past the town hall, past the fly-tipping, past an empty site that is going to be something, and is going to take a while to build, so bear with us. Would she go back to the centre? Not for a good while yet – “the job’s not done in Sheffield.” In the meantime, her challenge for national government is to put more of its people in the places where they too can walk to work past the consequences of their own decisions.
Peter McDonald is the Director of Strategy in Welsh Government and a member of the Editorial Board of the Heywood Quarterly.
Kate Josephs is Chief Executive at Sheffield City Council.
