Rewiring the State

A Companion Essay...

A few days ago (July 2026) the Cabinet Office published a Statement called Rewiring the State. I think it is an important document, not because of the policies it proposes, but because it represents Mr Burnham’s hopeful attempt to rethink the relationship between central government, local places and the people who live there.

Photo by Nick Kane on Unsplash

I find its main argument convincing. Decisions have been drawn up into Whitehall, leaving local authorities and communities with painful responsibility for problems but too little authority or resource to address them. The paper argues that if Britain is to prosper, power must move closer to the places where people actually live their lives. Regions should have greater freedom to shape transport, housing, education, skills, health and economic development around their own circumstances. Public services should become less fragmented, more integrated and much more responsive to place. Central government should become less controlling and more enabling. Few people who have spent time working in public service can read these aspirations without finding much to like.

Over the past forty years I have worked with organisations across the public, private and voluntary sectors. Much of that time has been spent alongside people wrestling with exactly the kinds of problems this Rewiring the State seeks to address: organisations constrained by structures designed for a bygone age, professionals trapped in institutional boundaries that make little sense to the people they are meant to serve, and communities whose knowledge rarely finds its way into the decisions that most affect their future. If the Government is serious about trusting places more deeply and relinquishing some of the habits of central control that have accumulated over generations, then I believe that deserves our encouragement rather than cynicism.

But, having read the document several times, I found myself thinking less about its proposals than about its title.

Rewiring the State.

It is an elegant phrase that we understand immediately because it draws upon an experience familiar to many of us. A house grows old and its wiring no longer meets modern standards. Electricians remove ageing cables, install new ones, reconnect the circuits and certify the work. When they leave, the lights work more reliably, the risks are reduced, the WiFi is reliable and the house is ready for another generation. The structure remains much as it was. The change lies in the infrastructure hidden behind the walls.

It is a reassuring image that suggests competence, clarity and purposeful action. It reassures us that complex problems can be addressed through thoughtful redesign. We identify the architecture that no longer serves us, replace it with something better and expect the whole to function more effectively as a result.

There is much truth in that.

Indeed, if we remain within the metaphor, we might even extend it. Perhaps the challenge is not simply to replace old wiring but to redesign the architecture itself. Instead of relying upon a single central motherboard, we might imagine a more distributed arrangement of daughterboards, each capable of making decisions locally while remaining connected to the wider whole. Processing becomes less concentrated, intelligence is distributed and the system becomes more resilient because it no longer depends upon a single centre.

It is an attractive vision to an engineer. Or a politician. But it worries me, because however sophisticated the architecture, it remains an architecture. However distributed the processing, it remains computation. The daughterboards do not develop their own judgement. They do not build trust with one another, imagine new possibilities or wrestle with competing values. They simply perform the functions for which they have been designed.

Another sentence, written many years ago in a very different context, came to my mind. Audre Lorde observed that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Whether or not one agrees with every aspect of Lorde’s argument, her question reaches far beyond the circumstances in which she first posed it. It invites us to wonder whether the ways we imagine the world also shape the kinds of change we are capable of imagining.

That question has surfaced in conversations about healthcare, education, leadership and economic development. I have found myself wondering whether many of our deepest disagreements are not really about policy at all. They begin in the unnoticed assumptions we make about the nature of the things we are trying to change. Before we ask how something should change, perhaps we should first ask how we are seeing it.

Seeing Is Never Neutral

That question may sound almost absurd, surely we see the State as it is. Yet the more I have worked alongside organisations, communities and public institutions, the less convinced I have become that it is true. We don’t encounter the world directly, but through habits of attention, through inherited metaphors and through stories that have become so familiar to us that we no longer recognise them as stories.

Barry Lopez once wrote that “we create wolves.” He did not mean, of course, that wolves are imaginary creatures. He meant something subtler and much more unsettling. The wolves we fear, protect or persecute are always encountered through the stories we have learned to tell about them. We meet the animal, but we also meet our own imagination. The same, I suspect, is true of almost everything that matters.

We do not simply encounter “the economy”, “the NHS”, “the education system” or “the State”. We encounter ways of imagining these realities that have been handed to us over generations. Those ways of seeing are often useful. They allow us to simplify complexity, coordinate action and develop institutions capable of serving millions of people. Without them, public life would be impossible. But every metaphor carries a cost.

To see something as a machine is to illuminate certain possibilities while allowing others to fade into the background. Machines can be engineered, repaired, optimised and redesigned. Components can be replaced without asking whether they consent or breaking long standing relationships Performance can be measured against specifications and if the output is disappointing, we look for faults in the design or the execution.

That is sometimes the right way to think. Nobody wants an engineer to approach a collapsing bridge as though it were a poem. The difficulty begins when a way of seeing that is powerful in one domain expands into all domains.

• Public organisations become delivery mechanisms.

• Communities become service users.

• Learning becomes the transfer of information.

• Health becomes the management of disease.

• Leadership becomes the exercise of influence.

• Politics becomes the allocation of resources.

Each of these descriptions captures something important, but also leaves something vital behind.

Over the past half century we have become increasingly good at thinking in this way. We have developed remarkable tools for analysing organisations, modelling behaviour, measuring performance and understanding complexity. Systems thinking, in particular, represented a profound advance over the older mechanical imagination. It taught us to pay attention to relationships rather than isolated parts, to feedback rather than linear causality, to emergence rather than simple prediction. Those of us working in public service owe an enormous debt to thinkers such as Peter Senge, Donella Meadows and many others who helped us recognise that organisations behave less like machines than living networks of interaction. I have learned a great deal from that tradition, and I continue to do so.

Yet I find myself wondering whether even the language of systems carries assumptions that deserve our attention. For when we speak of a system, where are we standing? Most systems diagrams invite us to imagine ourselves looking from above. We map relationships, identify leverage points, analyse feedback loops and consider interventions. It is an extraordinarily valuable discipline. Yet there remains a subtle separation between the observer and the observed. The system is something we study, redesign and improve. What if we are never quite outside it? What if our observations are themselves part of the relationships we are attempting to understand? What if our questions, our language and even our preferred metaphors participate in shaping the very realities we hope to change?

That possibility does not invalidate systems thinking. If anything, it completes it. It reminds us that the observer is not an external analyst standing safely beyond the edge of the map, but we are participants within the landscape itself, our seeing is already a form of participation.

Before we ask how something should change, perhaps we should first ask how we are seeing it. Not because there is one correct answer waiting to be discovered, but because every answer invites a different way of acting. If we see the State as a machine, we will naturally reach for engineers. If we see it primarily as a system, we will look for leverage points, better feedback and improved coordination. If we see it differently again, perhaps as something living, historical and relational, even poetic, then another set of possibilities begins to emerge.

The remainder of this essay is an exploration of those possibilities, not in order to replace one metaphor of ‘Rewiring’ with another, but to develop awareness of the metaphors that already inhabit us, and of the futures they quietly make possible.

Seeing Like...

The question, then, is not simply whether the State should change. It is how we have learned to see it in the first place. This is not a new question. James C. Scott’s influential book Seeing Like a State explored the power that governments acquire when they render societies “legible”. Forests become timber inventories, rivers become navigable waterways, citizens become populations, farms become units of production, and complex local knowledge gives way to categories that can be mapped, measured and administered. None of this is malign, much of it is essential if a modern state is to collect taxes, educate children or build railways. Yet Scott’s central insight was that every act of simplification reveals certain possibilities while concealing others. The map is never the territory.

More recently, Dr Mike Love has invited us to think instead about seeing like a city. His work suggests that cities cannot be understood simply as administrative units or economic engines. They are places of encounter, memory and relationship. They possess identities that emerge through the lives of the people who inhabit them rather than through the plans of those who govern them. A city is not merely managed; it is lived. It is a place where people choose to live alongside one another.

Neither Scott nor Love are describing different objects. They are describing different acts of attention. Each way of seeing discloses a different world. That made me wonder what other ways of seeing might be possible.

Suppose we continue to see the State as a machine. We will naturally concern ourselves with architecture, efficiency and reliability. We will ask whether power is flowing through the right circuits and whether decisions are being taken at the most appropriate level. Rewiring the State makes a persuasive case that they are not, and proposes a thoughtful redistribution of authority in response. Within the metaphor, it is an entirely coherent argument.

Suppose, instead, that we see the State as a system. Our attention shifts. We become interested in relationships rather than components, in feedback rather than command, in adaptation rather than control. We ask different questions. Where are the reinforcing loops? What unintended consequences are emerging? Where might a small intervention produce disproportionate effects? These are good questions. They have transformed the practice of organisational development and public policy over the past half century.

Yet there is another possibility.

What if neither machine nor system adequately captures the reality before us? After all, systems remain things that can be described. They can be mapped and their boundaries drawn. We still imagine ourselves standing just beyond the edge of the diagram, studying its dynamics and deciding where to intervene.

But perhaps the State is less like a system than a continuing conversation. Conversations have no fixed architecture and cannot be engineered into existence. They are shaped by history, trust, misunderstanding, generosity, memory and imagination and they evolve through participation rather than design. Every contribution alters the possibilities available to those who follow, and every silence does the same.

Or perhaps the State is better understood as a commons. Not simply a collection of institutions, but a living inheritance continually recreated through relationships between citizens, communities, public servants, businesses, voluntary organisations, landscapes and the more-than-human world that sustains them all. Such a commons cannot be reduced to organisational charts or constitutional settlements, important though these may be. It exists only insofar as people continue to participate in its renewal. The point is not that one metaphor is true and the others false.

Each reveals something and each conceals something.

• Seeing the State as a machine draws our attention towards infrastructure, coordination and design.

• Seeing it as a system reveals patterns of relationship and emergence.

• Seeing it as a conversation reminds us that meaning is continually negotiated rather than imposed.

• Seeing it as a commons invites us to ask not simply how it functions, but how we belong.

This, I think, is where the Cabinet Office paper becomes especially interesting.

Its practical proposals concern devolution, fiscal reform, integrated public services and local accountability. Yet beneath those proposals lies a more important invitation. It asks central government to trust local places more deeply and it asks local institutions to exercise greater judgement. It asks for relationships to carry responsibilities that have previously been held by rules.

That is a constitutional adjustment that demands a profound cultural transition.

Whether it succeeds will depend not only upon the powers that are devolved, but upon the ways in which people learn to inhabit those powers together.

Beyond Rewiring

If this way of seeing has any merit, then it changes how we read the Cabinet Statement.

Its proposals remain important. Boundaries, institutions and funding arrangements all matter. Few would deny the importance of aligning responsibilities with resources, or of allowing decisions to be taken closer to the places where their consequences will be felt. The practical reforms set out in the Statement deserve to be debated on their own terms, and many of them will, I hope, improve the capacity of places to shape their own futures.

But they cannot, by themselves, create the future to which the Statement aspires which depends upon something much harder to legislate.

Throughout the document there are recurring references to partnership, collaboration, participation, capability, accountability and leadership. These are vital words because they do not describe structures. They describe qualities of relationship. They belong not to the architecture of government but to its culture. You can talk about devolving power. But can you do it?

Trust, for example, cannot be devolved, nor can judgement, imagination or courage. Nor the confidence that allows people to exercise authority wisely without reaching instinctively for permission from the centre. These are not assets that Whitehall possesses and local government lacks. They are capacities that emerge through practice and grow through repeated encounters between people discovering that they can rely upon one another. They deepen through shared responsibility, through honest disagreement, through the experience of getting things wrong together and learning from it.

This is why I wonder whether the most important word in the Cabinet Statement is not rewiring but good. The document speaks repeatedly of “good growth”. It assumes, quite reasonably, that growth should be sustainable, inclusive and rooted in place. Yet I found myself wondering whether the adjective might point us towards an even deeper question. What makes growth good? Not what does good growth look like once it has arrived. How does it come into being? There is an observation by Myron Rogers that has accompanied me for many years: the process you use to get to the future is the future you get.

At first sight it seems almost obvious but the more I have reflected upon it the more radical it appears. If we seek trust through processes that generate suspicion, we should not be surprised when trust remains elusive. If we seek collaboration through competition, participation through compliance or local confidence through central prescription, then our methods quietly undermine our ambitions. We may achieve our immediate objectives, but we also cultivate habits that make the larger aspiration harder to realise.

Perhaps this is why so many organisational reforms feel so incomplete. We redesign structures but reproduce the same relationships. We create new institutions but carry old assumptions into them. We draw new lines on old maps.

The process becomes the destination. The destination has already begun to emerge within the process itself.

This seems particularly important if the Government’s ambition is genuine devolution, because what is being asked of local places is not simply that they administer more services. They are being invited to exercise greater judgement, to discern what matters in their own communities, to bring together organisations that have often worked in parallel rather than in partnership and to develop forms of leadership that cannot depend upon command because authority itself has become more widely shared.

None of this resembles rewiring. It resembles learning, maturing and the cultivation of relationships capable of carrying greater responsibility together. Interestingly these were exactly the kind of foundations laid in Manchester over many years by Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese over a decade and which Mr Burnham inherited when he became Mayor. Foundations which are still to e laid own many places.

Gardening has become a more helpful image for me than engineering. A gardener cannot command a plant to grow. Nor can they design growth in the way an engineer designs a bridge. They prepares the conditions. They pay attention to the character of the soil, the weather, the relationships between species and the rhythm of the seasons. They remove obstacles where they can, but they know that growth itself remains a living achievement rather than a manufactured product.

Good government may be more like that than we have been prepared to admit. Its task is not simply to distribute authority more efficiently. It is to cultivate the conditions within which places become increasingly capable of governing themselves wisely. That is a slower ambition and, I believe, a more hopeful one. For if this is true, then the future of the State will depend less upon whether we have finally found the perfect constitutional arrangement than upon whether we have learned to become better participants in the living relationships from which any constitution ultimately draws its life.

A Different Kind of Companion

If you have read this far, you may wonder whether this is still an essay about government. In one sense, it is not.

The Cabinet Office Statement provided a point of departure, a thoughtful and ambitious attempt to address some of the deepest structural challenges facing the United Kingdom. I hope many of its proposals succeed. We need stronger local institutions and greater trust in places. We need public services that are capable of working with one another rather than alongside one another and a more confident relationship between central government and the communities it exists to serve.

None of that seems controversial. But structural reform, however necessary, is only part of the work. For each reform carries with it an image of the world. Each proposal rests upon assumptions about the nature of the reality it seeks to change. We don’t notice these assumptions because they have become woven into our language. We speak of systems, interventions, delivery mechanisms, organisational architecture, redesign and optimisation with such familiarity that they no longer appear to be metaphors at all. They simply become common sense. Yet metaphors matter because they invite participation in different kinds of worlds.

If I encounter a forest as a timber resource, I shall learn to count trees.

If I encounter it as an ecosystem, I shall become interested in relationships.

If I encounter it as sacred, I shall walk through it differently again.

The forest has not changed, but I have.

Perhaps the same is true of the State. Perhaps the same is true of leadership, education, healthcare, economics and community.

The practical questions remain important. How should services be organised? Which powers should be devolved? What forms of accountability encourage responsibility rather than compliance? These questions deserve serious attention. But they are no longer the first questions. The first question becomes:

How are we seeing this?

Because the answer we give shapes every answer that follows. This is not an invitation to abandon engineering, systems thinking or organisational design. The point is not that these ways of seeing are wrong. It is that they become dangerous when they become complete. Every metaphor, however powerful, eventually reaches the edge of its own usefulness.

The challenge, then, is not to replace one dominant metaphor with another. It is to cultivate the freedom to see differently. Sometimes like an engineer. Sometimes like a gardener. Sometimes like a city. Sometimes like a neighbour. Sometimes, perhaps, like a wolf.

And occasionally, if we are fortunate, to recognise that the world has been seeing us all along. That, I suspect, is the beginning of wisdom.

For many years I believed that the central challenge of public life was to discover better answers, but I am no longer sure. I find myself believing that the deeper challenge is learning to ask better questions. Questions that make us pause before reaching for familiar tools. Questions that invite us to notice the assumptions already present in our language. Questions that help us recognise that we are never detached observers of the world we hope to improve, but participants in its continual becoming.

That is why this essay is offered as a companion to Rewiring the State rather than as a critique of it. The Cabinet Office has invited us to think seriously about how the State might change.

What if, before deciding how to change the State, we learned to see it differently?

And what if, in learning to see it differently, we discovered that we ourselves had begun to change?

For if there is one conviction that has slowly emerged through everything I have written over recent years, it is this. We do not stand outside the world attempting to improve it. We belong to it.

And perhaps the task before us is not to build a better machine, or a better system, but to learn once again how to participate, with humility and care, in the living, more-than-human commons of which we have always been a part.