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Open Innovations is winding down and will no longer be commencing new work from May 2026.

Insights from the power of local

Collecting evidence

In early 2025 we launched a new project called the "The power of local" in partnership with the Local Government Association. The project has been an experiment to collect stories of how our great Local Government institutions have delivered better outcomes than centralised approaches.

We created a very simple form that took less than 5 minutes to fill in and shared it widely. We asked people to share their stories and tell us what worked and what didn't.

Amazing response

The response was incredible. We didn't expect to get so many people filling out our form and getting in touch directly. In total, we had around 50 responses, covering every region of England, spanning a plethora of topics. Thirteen people expressed their interest to tell us even more about their locally delivered projects.

We also had a large response from people who said that they would respond but didn’t quite manage to find time to respond to the form. There was a definite parallel theme of “no one has ever asked us for feedback like this before, and we’d love to share and learn more”.

Our initial analysis of the responses is summarised by the following figures.

The image is a horizontal bar chart. It shows the location of responses to a feedback form. The categories are English ITL1 regions. The North East has the most with 19, followed by Yorkshire and The Humber with 10, then London with 5. Every region has at least 1 response.
67% of responses came from the North of England (Yorkshire and The Humber, the North East and the North West). Note that some responses had multiple or no fixed location.
Credit: Open Innovations
The image is a horizontal bar chart. The categories are the themes in responses to a survey. Community was the most common theme with 18 responses, followed by Social care with 12, and Health with 10.
Community, Social care and Health were the most common themes among the responses to our form. Note that each response was assigned up to three themes.
Credit: Open Innovations

Our initial findings show that Community, Social care and Health were the three most common themes in the responses. There is also a strong Northern presence among the examples shared with us; 67% of responses came from Yorkshire and The Humber, the North West and the North East. However, we had at least one example from every region of England, demonstrating the diversity of the responses.

Next steps

This is a great start and a massive win for local government. The next step for us is to dive deeper into the responses to understand the themes in more detail. For example, was budget a limiting factor in the success of the project? Does central government make it easier or harder to carry out the work? 

We’ll pick out the best examples and share them in another blog post. We will also look at what was not included in the responses - themes, locations, and project's scale and scope.

We are very proud of what we have collectively achieved so far. That wouldn't have been possible without all the fantastic responses, for which we are extremely grateful. We plan to be at the LGA's Annual Conference and Exhibition 1-3 July 2025 and look forward to meeting people and discussing all things local.

Thank you for all the support and help so far, and stay tuned for what’s next!

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