Building the Workforce for England’s New Strategic Authorities: Why Strategic Capability Is Now the Most Important Skill in Local Government

Devolution has become a defining feature of this Government’s approach to public service reform. The direction of travel is clear: decisions about place, economic growth, housing, transport, skills, and public service integration should sit closer to the people and communities they affect.

As a result, England is entering a new phase of local governance in which strategic authorities—combined authorities, mayoral authorities, and newly proposed regional bodies—are expected to act as the system leaders of place. They will shape long-term economic priorities, steward major investments, steward complex partnerships, and deliver the kind of whole-place strategies that local government has struggled to realise under more fragmented arrangements.

The ambition is significant. But achieving it will depend on something often overlooked in policy announcements: whether these new strategic authorities are staffed with people who have the skills, mindset, and behaviours needed for twenty-first century system leadership.

This blog explores why staffing strategic authorities is emerging as one of the most complex workforce challenges in English local government—and why developing strategic capability across the workforce is now central to the success of devolution.

Strategic Authorities Require a Different Type of Local Government Workforce

Most local authorities have workforce models built around statutory service delivery: planning, housing management, environmental services, social care commissioning, community engagement, and corporate support. These roles are vital to local communities and require deep technical skill.

But strategic authorities are fundamentally different. They do not exist primarily to deliver services. Their purpose is to shape, influence, convene, and coordinate—to create the enabling conditions for social and economic prosperity across a much wider geography.

This requires a different kind of workforce. People who can:

• operate across multiple systems and institutional boundaries

• interpret complex economic, demographic, and social data

• build coalitions between public, private, voluntary, and community sectors

• challenge assumptions and reframe entrenched problems

• design long-term strategies grounded in evidence and place-based insight

• facilitate political consensus while navigating competing priorities

• communicate with clarity, influence, and purpose

• innovate, experiment, and adapt

These are not simply “senior management” skills. They represent a distinct capability set—one that many local government structures have not historically cultivated at scale.

And herein lies the challenge: many of the people now needed to build and staff strategic authorities do not naturally sit within traditional local authority career pathways.

The IMD Strategic Leadership Framework: What Strategic Capability Really Means

To understand the workforce implications of devolution, it is helpful to revisit the renowned IMD strategic leadership framework, which sets out the cognitive and behavioural capabilities required for effective strategic leadership.

The framework identifies five core capabilities:

1. Anticipating – scanning the horizon for emerging trends, risks, and opportunities.

2. Challenging – questioning assumptions, reframing issues, and provoking new ways of thinking.

3. Interpreting – synthesising complex information to generate meaningful insight.

4. Deciding – making clear, timely, evidence-based strategic choices.

5. Aligning and Learning – building alignment across teams and partners, and fostering continuous learning.

These capabilities are not role-specific—they apply across all levels of a strategic authority, from senior officers and programme leads to policy analysts, partnership managers, and economic development specialists.

Crucially, they are developable skills, not innate traits. People with strong analytical capability, curiosity, resilience, and collaborative instincts can grow into excellent strategic leaders—even if they have not previously operated at that level.

This has profound implications for recruitment and workforce planning in strategic authorities.

Why Local Government’s Traditional Talent Pipeline Won’t Be Enough

Local government houses exceptional talent, but its workforce has historically been organised around service delivery and statutory compliance. Many officers progress because they excel operationally: running safe services, managing budgets, dealing with crises, and meeting statutory duties.

Strategic authorities, however, require people who can do something fundamentally different:

• see across whole systems

• balance political, economic, and social objectives

• design multi-agency strategies

• integrate skills, transport, housing, and economic development

• engage business, universities, community groups, and national agencies

• work with ambiguity, uncertainty, and incomplete information

These capabilities do not always correlate with seniority, tenure, or operational success. Some strong strategic thinkers are early in their careers. Others may come from outside traditional local authority settings—industry, academia, consultancies, think tanks, or the voluntary sector.

The risk is that strategic authorities may default to filling roles with people who have succeeded in legacy organisational contexts, rather than those who possess or can develop the core strategic skills needed for the future.

This is why the Leadership Centre’s programme for strategic authorities is so important: it recognises that these new roles require not just knowledge, but a shift in mindset, practice, and leadership behaviour.

The Workforce Planning Challenge for Strategic Authorities

Building a capable and confident strategic authority is not simply a recruitment exercise. It requires intentional workforce planning aligned with the authority’s vision, functions, and operating model.

(1) Start with a clear organisational vision

Before staffing begins, the authority must define:

• What kind of strategic authority do we want to be?

• What functions will we own directly?

• Where do we convene rather than deliver?

• What is our operating model?

• What will success look like over 5–10 years?

Without this clarity, job roles become muddled and the workforce becomes misaligned.

(2) Identify future capabilities, not just traditional job titles

Strategic authorities must identify the capabilities required—often new to local government:

• system leadership

• analytical and data intelligence

• economic development strategy

• housing and spatial planning integration

• innovation and place-shaping

• partnership and stakeholder management

• behavioural insights and policy design

• digital and AI readiness

• evaluation and performance insight

These are strategic functions, not simply extended versions of existing local government roles.

(3) Design a balanced, flexible workforce model

Strategic authorities benefit from a mix of:

• permanent strategic staff for continuity

• fixed-term experts for time-limited programmes

• interim or specialist resource to plug capability gaps

• secondments from local universities, anchor institutions, or partner councils

• temporary or flexible roles for innovation and exploratory work

Rigid workforce models—often inherited from predecessor councils—can stifle the agility strategic authorities need.

(4) Build strategic capability at all levels

Capability must be developed deliberately. This includes:

• leadership programmes (e.g., Leadership Centre)

• mentoring and coaching

• system leadership training

• joint learning across councils and combined authorities

• secondments into BEIS, DfE, Homes England, or local growth partnerships

• “learning by doing” through collaborative, cross-sector projects

Without structured development, staff will revert to operational behaviour because that is what the system historically rewarded.

(5) Manage transition and restructure with care

Establishing a strategic authority often coincides with:

• TUPE transfers

• the creation of new roles

• changes to terms and conditions

• portfolio realignment

• duplication of existing functions

Strategic workforce planning must therefore include:

• accurate mapping of existing skills

• clarity on what roles disappear, evolve, or are created

• early engagement with staff and unions

• a focus on supporting staff emotionally through change

• transparent processes to avoid organisational insecurity

Authority-building is as much a people activity as it is a structural one.

Key Challenges Strategic Authorities Are Already Facing

Even with the right intent, strategic authorities face four major workforce barriers.

1. Budgetary pressures

Many authorities enter devolution with reduced HR and transformation capacity. Workforce planning becomes reactive rather than developmental.

2. Short-term “firefighting” culture

Economic uncertainty and local demand pressures make it difficult to focus on long-term capability building.

3. Capacity and capability gaps

In some places, HR functions themselves need upskilling to operate as strategic partners.

4. Lack of a shared vision

When local partners disagree on the authority’s role—whether it is a deliverer, convener, or commissioner—workforce planning becomes fragmented.

These challenges are not insurmountable, but they require deliberate and coordinated responses.

The Opportunity: Creating a New Profession for Strategic Public Leadership

Devolution gives England an unprecedented opportunity to build a new type of public service profession—one that is forward-looking, strategic, evidence-informed, and capable of navigating the complexity of modern place leadership.

A future “strategic public leadership profession” might include:

• structured career pathways

• shared modules across combined authorities

• competency frameworks built around strategic capability

• talent pipelines drawing from universities, private sector innovators, and community leaders

• long-term secondment routes between local government and national bodies

• a commitment to continuous learning and reflective practice

Done well, this could be the most important workforce development innovation in local government for decades.

Strategic Capability Is Now the Foundation of Successful Devolution

Bringing all of this together, the key message is clear:

Devolution will succeed or fail based on whether strategic authorities build the right workforce—not on structural reforms alone.

This means:

• recruiting for capability, not just experience

• developing people intentionally, not incidentally

• designing roles around a clear vision, not inherited structures

• embracing flexibility in workforce models

• investing in workforce intelligence to guide long-term decisions

Strategic authorities must resist the temptation to “fill vacancies” with people who look like their organisational past. Instead, they should build a workforce capable of delivering their future.

Conclusion: The Human Architecture of Devolution

Devolution is often described in terms of powers, functions, and governance. But its success will ultimately rest on something far more human: the skills, judgement, creativity, and strategic capability of the people leading and working within strategic authorities.

England is on the cusp of a new era of place-based governance. To realise its potential, strategic authorities must think carefully—and courageously—about the workforce they build. That means identifying and developing people with the core capabilities to become the next generation of strategic leaders, even if their backgrounds look different from traditional local government trajectories.

If England gets this right, devolution could genuinely reshape the way public services are planned, delivered, and experienced. If it gets it wrong, new structures will simply replicate old behaviours.

The choice lies not in the legislation, but in the workforce.