The Cabinet Office’s announcement this week of £100 million investment in ‘test and learn’ pilots is a welcome realisation of mission-based policy making and shows a balanced approach to the need for urgent action in the face of limited evidence of what works sustainably.
As a practitioner, I have seen first-hand the opportunity to deliver preventative, place-based, and proactive public services. Public service reform requires shared tools and frameworks to shift complex systems; including their governance, culture, and core infrastructure. At a strategic level, a new approach to public policy making is one such tool of a missions approach as outlined in Mission Critical 01 by the Future Governance Forum. A test and learn culture is another.
Whether using randomised control trials or other approaches, test and learn provides space to innovate and be disruptive. It gives opportunities for the usual actors in a system to collaborate with those who may usually contribute less, or for completely new actors to bring novel approaches that can be tested, evaluated and scaled. It also opens up new opportunities for work to happen with – and not just for – people whose lived experience holds valuable knowledge of what works.
My experiences of using test and learn approaches in tackling homelessness are overwhelmingly positive (which is not to say without challenge). To make the most of the Cabinet Office’s programme, we must:
- Be bold in what we design
- Balance agile learning with robust evaluation
- Scale up and scale deep
Tackling homelessness, in common with the other social policy areas targeted by the Cabinet Office’s fund, is a complex and politically turbulent issue. The problems are often clear, but evidence-based solutions are less well understood. Implementing new approaches requires multiple parties to contribute, each with only some of the relevant knowledge or potential solutions, and often with differing values and interests. By some metrics, this puts ending homelessness in the ‘wicked problem’ category.
We know that in order to end homelessness we need more robust evidence of what works. The Centre for Homelessness Impact exists to address this, and is leading the UK’s first of a kind Test and Learn programme of trials and other evaluations to help develop understanding of the types of actions and interventions that need to be made more widespread. It is commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
We need to ask ‘what works’ when designing evidence-based interventions and also when addressing the implementation challenge of transitioning out of crisis management and into a prevention space. The Cabinet Office’s investment is a chance to change the wider landscape. With the right permission and resource, test and learn pilots experiment with governance, data and technology, system wide resource allocation, and more. We should be bold in designing pilots to do things differently at all levels of system leadership, policymaking, and service management.
Proud of its pioneering and progressive cultural history, Greater Manchester has ‘doing things differently’ in its blood. This spirit of innovation enabled us to deliver a range of bold test and learn programmes to ending homelessness that have yielded positive results. Programmes and pilots included A Bed Every Night, Housing First and the Young Persons’ Prevention Pathfinder. Designed to test support interventions within new models of system coordination, they have evidenced both effective and ineffective practice and, as such, helped policymakers to identify what to do and what to stop or change.
With over 20 years of test and learn experience, the Greater Manchester Model for Integrated Public Service Reform demonstrates the impact of this as a tool in re-designing public services fit for the 21st century.
A key lesson that I take from this model is that scaling what works means more than replication or increasing operational reach horizontally across systems. As well as going big or wide, it also means ‘scaling deep’ and ‘scaling up’ through systems. ‘Scaling deep’ impacts on culture to change relationships, cultural values and beliefs. ‘Scaling up’ impacts on policy locally, regionally and nationally and across institutions. The public service reform model in Greater Manchester codifies and builds capacity for these vertical approaches to scale.
I am extremely proud of the role that the Centre for Homelessness Impact has played in launching the London Ending Homelessness Programme, in partnership with London Councils and the Greater London Authority. The programme will use test and learn approaches to find new solutions to accelerate efforts to end homelessness in the capital. The city also has a proud history of innovation and will draw on this to transform the conditions that have led to 1 in 50 people in the capital experiencing homelessness.
The Cabinet Office’s commitment to test and learn unlocks significant potential to impact on today’s most wicked problems.
Molly Bishop is Head of Implementation at the Centre for Homelessness Impact, the What Works Centre for homelessness in the UK. Molly previously worked as a public servant, including as Strategic Lead for Homelessness at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. Molly is a Civic Futures Fellow with the Young Foundation and KOREO, sponsored by the Greater London Authority.
