New Orders – Andy Burnham and Lord Heseltine join UK OGN for discussion on power post pandemic.
In November 2020, as governments worldwide grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK Open Government Network convened “New Orders” – a landmark discussion on the balance of power in post-pandemic Britain.
The event, organised and chaired by Kevin Keith from the UK Open Government Network as part of the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation’s global “Government After Shock” initiative, brought together Lord Michael Heseltine, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Professor Arpana Verma of the University of Manchester, and Jacqui McKinlay of the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny.
Addressing 126 participants from central and local government, universities and civil society, the panel explored three fundamental questions: What do we need to leave behind? What do we want to keep? What should we do differently?
The answers were striking in their consensus. The panellists identified over-centralisation as the defining challenge, with Lord Heseltine declaring Whitehall “too powerful, too remote, and too disjointed” and Mayor Burnham observing that “you cannot level up top down.”
Professor Verma made a compelling case for “small and medium data” to complement big data approaches, arguing that aggregated national datasets had masked the inequalities most critical to pandemic planning. McKinlay highlighted the need to move beyond the “competitive language of them and us” between regional and central government.
Drawing parallels with the 1942 Beveridge Report, the event synopsis identified by Kevin Keith five new “giants” for rebalancing power in the UK: Data, Ignorance, Place, Pragmatism, and Democracy.
The findings were submitted to the OECD as part of its global Call to Action on government innovation.
The full event remains available to watch on YouTube here and the complete synopsis can be viewed below: