Ask any neighbourhood partnership how they are doing and you will hear about good work. Committed teams, genuine collaboration, real progress on the ground. All true, and none of it is quite the point. NHS England has been open about a different concern: whether the management and governance behind neighbourhood working is rigorous enough to trust with bigger, shared contracts. Good intentions and a shared WhatsApp group are not the same thing as governance.
This is a different problem to the ones we have already covered. It is not whether an individual leader feels confident making decisions. It is not whether a practice can produce CQC evidence. It is not even whether you can write a persuasive bid. It is whether a group of separate organisations, often with a long history of quietly competing with each other, can show a commissioner that they know who is accountable for what, how decisions actually get made, and what happens when something goes wrong.
Without that, two things tend to happen. Partnerships built on goodwill hold together nicely until the first genuinely difficult decision, at which point nobody quite knows whose call it is. And multi-partner bids stall on exactly the section that asks how governance and risk are shared, because it turns out nobody had written it down.
At Scale helps neighbourhood partnerships build this before a commissioner ever asks for it. That means identifying who genuinely needs to be involved, agreeing shared priorities and roles, and establishing clear ways to make decisions rather than assuming everyone will simply get along. It means helping manage the harder conversations around accountability, risk and resources so the partnership survives contact with a real problem. We have done this for organisations that had never worked this closely together before, and in some cases had previously competed for the same work, helping them build a shared operating model, align their governance and find one voice.
If you are heading to Agilio Live on 25 September, Alice Benton and Rachel Edwards will be covering exactly this territory. If not, our Neighbourhood Leadership support covers the same ground year-round, or email info@atscale.co.uk to talk through where your partnership’s governance actually stands.
