Posted on: 13/05/2026

Thought Leadership

Reflecting on the PPMA Conference 2026, Rebecca Davis explores how local government is moving beyond familiar ideas of complexity into a more uncertain, people-led future. From reform and AI to workforce capacity and leadership confidence, the article considers why the sector’s ability to adapt will depend not only on structures or funding, but on how seriously organisations invest in people, culture and change.

Rebecca Davis, Chief Executive at West Midlands Employers

There is always a moment, usually somewhere between the polite applause and the third coffee of a conference, when the realisation lands that what you are hearing is not simply a collection of interesting perspectives, but something closer to a collective admission that the ground has shifted beneath us and we are still, for the most part, unsure of what that really means.

That was my experience at the recent PPMA Conference, where across two days the conversation never quite tipped into alarmism, but equally never retreated into comfort, instead sitting in that slightly uneasy space where experienced CEOs and sector leaders recognise that the old rules no longer apply but have not yet fully articulated what replaces them.

For me, I came away from those two days not drained by the scale of the challenge, but reinvigorated by it, returning with a notebook full of ideas [as my team found out!], a head full of possibilities [lots of things we can do!], and a renewed sense that if we choose to lean into this moment rather than manage around it, there is something genuinely exciting about what could come next [hopefully, I’m not the only one feeling that way?].

We have become very good in Local Government at describing our context as “challenging” or “complex,” words that once carried weight but now feel almost reassuring in their familiarity, yet I didn’t hear the words VUCA mentioned at all at this Conference.

I think we’ve moved past that, into a fundamentally different operating environment altogether, one where legal challenge is no longer the exception but an increasingly routine feature of decision-making [and AI’s influence], where political expectations are not just changing but fragmenting in ways that are harder to predict, and where the sheer scale of sector reform activity is quietly absorbing leadership capacity at a level that would have seemed unthinkable even a few years ago.

I heard one example of a Chief Executive spending 70% of their time on Local Government Reorganisation alone, and it felt like a glimpse into a pattern we are only just beginning to acknowledge.

What this creates, and what we perhaps talk about least openly, is a cultural shift that is happening in plain sight, a drift towards a more fault-finding environment in which the instinct to attribute blame begins to crowd out the confidence to act, and where even the most well-intentioned organisations can find themselves moving more slowly, more cautiously, than the situation demands.

It is not that accountability is unwelcome, far from it, but that in a system already under strain the cumulative effect of scrutiny can become paralysing. The most compelling counter to this that I heard was not a new framework or model, but something deceptively simple: a commitment to absolute transparency, not as a slogan but as a discipline, one that makes visible how decisions are taken, how risk is understood, and how accountability is shared, thereby removing some of the ambiguity in which blame tends to flourish.

Alongside this sat a more provocative line of thought that has stayed with me, which is that many of the issues we continue to categorise as financial or structural are, in reality, workforce issues in disguise, a point that sounds almost obvious until you begin to follow it through to its logical conclusion, because if Local Government is indeed a people-intensive system, then the quality, capability, confidence and capacity of that workforce is not one consideration among many but the central determinant of whether the system succeeds or fails.

And yet, despite this, we still too often see investment in people as something that can be squeezed, deferred or treated as secondary, even as expectations of delivery continue to rise, creating a quiet contradiction at the heart of the system where we ask more of our workforce while simultaneously resourcing them less.

It is perhaps in this context that the evolving expectations of HR leadership become particularly interesting, because what I heard, very clearly, was a rejection of the idea that HR should be a purely advisory function operating at the edges of decision-making, and instead a call for something altogether more assertive, more integrated and, at times, more uncomfortable, where HR leaders are expected not simply to provide guidance but to actively shape outcomes, to call out when pace is insufficient, to challenge when decisions are not landing, and to bring together the people, legal and financial dimensions of an issue into something that resembles practical judgement rather than theoretical compliance.

There was even the suggestion, that HR leadership should be elevated to a statutory role, which may or may not materialise, but speaks volumes about how central the workforce agenda has become and an agenda WME wholeheartedly supports.

What makes all of this more acute is the way in which reform, particularly Local Government Reorganisation, is being approached, because while it is entirely understandable that the instinct is to prioritise safety, legality and risk mitigation, there is a growing sense that in focusing on this, we may be missing the very opportunity that makes such reform worthwhile, which is the chance to fundamentally redesign how services operate and how organisations function, rather than simply reassembling existing parts into a new configuration.

There is a real concern that if the ambition is limited to being “safe and legal,” then the opportunity has already been lost and perhaps more importantly, that change of this magnitude is not experienced as a structural exercise by those living through it, but as something deeply human, shaped by trust, identity.

What stood out more broadly in the AI discussion was not the technology itself, but the insistence that technology is not a shortcut around the harder work of organisational change, and that attempts to “buy in” solutions without addressing underlying processes, data quality and workforce capability are likely to disappoint; you cannot procure your way out of complexity.

Perhaps the most provocative thought of all, though, was the suggestion that “we are the last generation of leaders who will manage entirely human teams”, an idea that, once considered, becomes difficult to unsee and blew my mind, because it is true and that’s how we need to view the future of work.and relationships, all of which require as much attention as governance structures or operating models, and yet are so often treated as secondary considerations until they become problems that are harder to resolve, which we often see in the work we do at WME.

There was one image that has stayed with me, but an observation by one speaker about the presence of handwritten signs in organisations, those small, often overlooked indicators of workarounds and adaptations that frontline staff create when systems do not quite function as intended, like the ones we see on boards in the London Underground. These signs, we were reminded, tell a story that formal reporting rarely captures, one about where processes break down, where technology falls short, and where people quietly fills the gap. Because organisations that rely on workarounds are not operating at their full potential, and the longer those workarounds persist, the more they become embedded as a substitute for improvement.

When I step back from the detail of those two days, what I am left with is not a single conclusion but a thread that runs through all of it, which is that the future of Local Government will not be determined solely by structures, strategies or even funding settlements, but by the extent to which we are willing to confront, invest in and lead the people dimension of change with the same seriousness that we apply to everything else.

Running alongside these themes was, of course, the growing presence of artificial intelligence, although what I found most telling was not just what was said about it, but what was deliberately not said, particularly in the CEO panel where there was a noticeable and, I think, entirely rational reluctance to frame AI as a neatly defined “challenge” to be solved, because the truth is that it is simply too vast, too fast-moving and too unknowable for anyone to credibly claim expertise or a solution at this point.

There was a more honest acknowledgement that we are all, in different ways, learners in this space, trying to understand not just the tools but the implications, and that perhaps the more important leadership task is not to have the answers, but to create organisations that can adapt, experiment and make sense of change in real time.

For us at West Midlands Employers, this is not an abstract debate or a set of distant trends, but something that is already shaping the conversations we are having with councils and partners across the region, from the pressures on recruitment and retention to the realities of reform, from the evolving expectations of leadership to the opportunities and tensions created by new technology. Our role is to help create the conditions in which the region can respond with confidence and innovation, to do things differently.

If there is one thing the conference made clear, it is that continuing to manage the system as it is will not equip us to lead the system as it is becoming.

Find out how West Midlands Employers supports councils with leadership, workforce transformation, organisational development and change.

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