Nick Davies

Week in Public Services: 5th December 2025 This week: jury trial restrictions, place-based budgeting pilots, and warnings from Ofsted on the children’s social care market.

The @instituteforgovernment.org.uk’s Week in Public Services blog is back! This week I looked at the Budget’s place-based budget pilots, jury trial restrictions, and Ofsted’s concerns on children’s social care. Some thoughts below.

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Central government’s takeover of SEND deficits raises the stakes for SEND reform | Institute for Government At the budget the chancellor announced a significant change to SEND funding arrangements

Last week the Chancellor announced a central government takeover of special educational needs deficits.

I write about the potential impacts of this move on SEND reform, including on governance of the system, local innovation and trust

When I was a young parliamentary researcher, a hereditary peer called the office to ask if the MP I worked for would support his red squirrel campaign. He said “I was going to call it the grey squirrel annihilation league but thought that might get marginally less support”

Today's ITT Census data is positive, showing a sizeable increase in trainee numbers vs last year, alongside lower targets due to other supply improvements like retention. But there's still more to do as secondary recruitment is still below target at 88 per cent

Just caught up with this and it's fantastic. Essential reading (particularly for government strategists and the media!)

Patients clogging up A&E with hiccups, sore throats and niggles NHS bosses warn the public to use hospitals wisely amid concern this could be a tough winter.

The 'clogging up' of A+Es is not due to the 2% of people coming to ED with this quite arbitrary list of conditions. The main reason they're clogged is poor flow through hospitals!
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I was a little sceptical about the OVfM’s unusual setup but it has worked very well. The key question, as Ben argues, is whether politicians and officials can now put its proposals into practice and take up the mantle of driving further system reform

This is such a good piece of work by @nuffieldtrust.org.uk & @instituteforgovernment.org.uk.

The structure is not the fundamental problem, it's the multiplicity of dysfunctional behaviours which surround it. Until those are fixed, every structure is likely to fail.

I'm really delighted to announce that- in a restructure of the @instituteforgovernment.org.uk’s senior team - I've appointed @gemmatetlow.bsky.social to the new role of Executive Director of Research & Innovation & @alexgathomas.bsky.social to the new role of Executive Director of Impact & Influence

The report is a joint effort between @instituteforgovernment.org.uk and @nuffieldtrust.org.uk

It's been a real pleasure working with @markgdayan.bsky.social @sjanereed.bsky.social ed.bsky.social @stuarthoddinott.bsky.social @nigel-edwards.bsky.social @becksfisher.bsky.social on it

We identify 5 factors in whether it will be a success:
➡️Gov develops a coherent vision for reform
➡️That vision is sensitively and openly communicated
➡️Speed of reform is balanced against opportunities for transformation
➡️Costs + uncertainty of transition are contained
➡️Establishing a unified culture

Abolished to perfection? Building a better centre for the NHS | Institute for Government The abolition of NHS England creates both risks and opportunities.

NEW REPORT: abolishing NHS England could help simplify accountability, improve prioritisation and create savings. But the change could also lead to increases in policy incoherence and blame culture, as well as the loss of skills, capacity and focus on areas outside the day-to-day NHS.

David Lammy’s proposals for judge-only trials would make England and Wales an outlier | Institute for Government Most countries don’t use jury trials, but few rely on a single judge to pass both verdict and sentence

My latest on the gov's proposal to all-but abolish jury trials: a radical move that would leave us out-of-step with most democracies and increase the risk of miscarriages of justice. 🧵
www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/david-lammy-...

Agree with every word of this

We've gone from 9% of social care staff coming from outside the UK and EEA in 2021/22 to almost 25% in 2024/25

The govt has no near-term replacement

It means either:
1) staffing shortages or
2) councils spending far more to attract staff, with no extra funding

The role of procurement in delivering mission-led government | Institute for Government How can the government remove the barriers to its missions?

Those are from this @instituteforgovernment.org.uk report on the role of procurement in delivering mission-led govt.

While the mission terminology is effectively dead, this is ultimately just about govt having a clear set of priorities and using the tools at its disposal to deliver these

The government will leverage its procurement budgets to drive innovation. Each department will appoint a senior Procurement Innovation Champion, responsible for defining and delivering its innovation priorities through procurement. To accelerate access for strategically important innovative firms, the government will launch an Innovation Marketplace and establish a task-and-finish group to remove internal barriers to innovative procurement. Demonstrating a new approach, the government has launched an advance market commitment (AMC) to spur investment in clean concrete technologies, backed by Scottish Water, Ramboll, Derwent London, Atkins Realis UK, and Heathrow. Subject to due diligence, the government will launch another AMC, worth up to £100 million, for novel AI inference chips.

Screenshot from IFG report: However, there are several barriers to effectively using public procurement to support the government’s missions and new ‘mission-led’ ways of working, including: • insufficient clarity about the government’s missions, which limits the public sector’s market shaping ability • pervasive aversion to risk and uncertainty • a lack of forward planning, which means there is often not enough time to explore how the market could provide new solutions • commercial professionals being brought into the policy process too late • procurements starting with over-specified solutions rather than outcomes • innovation often being initially available at a small scale • low quality of procurement data • insufficient senior commercial capacity and contract management capability • limited cross-government working between commercial professionals

Pleased to see the govt commitment to using procurement to drive innovation. Procurement accounts for roughly 1 in 3 pounds spent by govt but it's utterly unstrategic about how it uses this

@drbenpaxton.bsky.social and I previously identified the barriers that the task-and-finish needs to remove

Key chart for public services

Govt is back to pencilling in undeliverable plans to hit its fiscal rules

After taking out likely funding for protected areas, other departments will have to absorb 3.3% annual real terms cuts. That includes prisons, courts, and local govt, among others

Place-based budget pilots and changes to spending controls in the budget both reflect a growing recognition by this govt that trying to deliver efficiencies by tightly controlling spending and reducing frontline autonomy tends to have the exact opposite effect. That's a really positive shift

This is great news. Place-based budgeting could help to substantially reduce duplicative spending by different public bodies, allowing a greater focus on prevention and delivering much better outcomes

These (and other) pilots are really positive. Govt must use SR27 to make this way of working BAU

Really pleased to see a new commitment to place-based budgets today. Further progress towards the implementation of 'Total Place' principles as urged with @jesstud.bsky.social a couple of years ago. www.newlocal.org.uk/publications....

Pleased to support these changes to the controls framework alongside @nickmacpherson.bsky.social @danrcorry.bsky.social @jo3hill.bsky.social Oliver Letwin and Lord Willetts

The full review can be found here: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6925f3...

More governance can muddy accountability and reduce competition New policies and controls are typically introduced with good intentions – it is right that procurement decisions are properly scrutinised and reflect the changing priorities of the government. However, old policies and controls are often not scrapped when new ones are introduced, leading to layer upon layer of red tape – or, as one roundtable attendee put it, “terms and conditions on top of terms and conditions”. Governance alone, however, does not equal accountability. The cumulative complexity of controls and guidance can make lines of responsibility harder to trace, muddying the waters of accountability, as it can become less, not more, clear who is ultimately responsible for a decision (for example, the departmental commercial team leading a procurement or the central teams that have signed it off and set the guidance it complies with). Suppliers experience the proliferation of policies and controls through additional requirements in contracts. This can risk making the public sector a less attractive customer, putting off providers considering entering public sector markets and reducing market competition. Additional requirements at both tendering and contract management stages tend to impact SMEs, including charities and social enterprises, the greatest, since they usually have less capacity to meet them.

Proposed changes to spending controls are incredibly positive. As @instituteforgovernment.org.uk has previously noted, the cumulative complexity of controls muddies accountability, makes govt a worse customer, and wastes time and money. We asked govt to review and that's exactly what they've done

Definitely not an easy or quick job to fix. But they should have done much more preparation in opposition and they’re in desperate need of a PM with vision

They've also got a big backlog of new homes to add.
bsky.app/profile/resi...

I’m excited ministers get to find out what a hot mess the Valuation Office is. It’s currently taking more than a year (based on personal experience!) to undertake assessments that are meant to take less than 4 months

Summary in this thread. Full details in the report it links to bsky.app/profile/njda...

You're right. I think @stuarthoddinott.bsky.social is the author of this particular elegy

The Public Services Performance Tracker is regularly described as ‘sobering’ but this is definitely the first time we’ve had ‘almost lyrical’

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An IfG live blog post from Jill Rutter, titled "Keep the chancellor away from the Treasury" What will Rachel Reeves and her officials be doing in the last few hours before the budget? In earlier eras, chancellors could change their minds down to the wire (though the Red Book would be printed over the weekend) and rewrite their speech. That could mean laborious retypes and recollations. That led to an instruction in the Treasury’s own budget day manual to “Keep the chancellor away from the Treasury” after the budget had been presented to the cabinet in the morning. Chancellors would be dispatched to St James’s Park to be photographed feeding the ducks, while Treasury officials frantically compiled printed copies of the budget speech. No indication yet that this is the plan for this morning! But if you see Rachel Reeves heading into the park, you know that another bit of Treasury orthodoxy still rules.

I would say this, but the IfG's budget live blog is already great, even before we get to the main event - where else do you get this kind of content?