Walsall Council Review of COVID-19 Response: Capturing the Learning
Dr Joshua Blamire discusses recent ICRD research exploring the response to COVID-19 within the borough of Walsall.
Over the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged every aspect of how we live our lives, accentuated pre-existing inequalities and created new and unprecedented demands on services. While national government restrictions such as social distancing and lockdowns have helped to suppress the spread of the virus and to save lives, local authorities have equally been at the forefront, harnessing innovative strategies to mitigate the impact on residents.
Indeed, emerging academic research emphasises the value of multi-agency, collaborative and co-creative governance strategies for approaching complex, chaotic and unexpected problems such as COVID-19. This is characterised by cooperation between state and non-state actors combined with agility, adaptation, resilience and innovation (Ansell et al., 2021; Scognamiglio et al., 2022).
In Walsall, a multi-agency response involved Walsall Council along with various partners from the public, private and community and voluntary sectors across local, regional and national scales of governance.
Walsall is located in the West Midlands (pop. 286,700, ONS, 2020). The borough is culturally and ethnically diverse and has pockets of relative affluence, yet deprivation is deeply entrenched within the borough, which is ranked amongst the most deprived 10 percent of local authorities in England. Walsall residents are also more likely than average to suffer poor health outcomes. These factors make Walsall particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, and the borough has consistently returned higher case numbers than the England average, and has recorded over 1,000 coronavirus-related deaths.
Capturing the Learning
The Institute for Community Research & Development (ICRD) was commissioned by Walsall Council to assess the actions taken during the response. We interviewed 27 key people involved such as senior council officers and representatives from the local healthcare, transport and educational sectors as well as regional and national bodies. Our task was to explore how place-based collaboration worked, and to identify best practices, gaps, and lessons learned.
Responding to COVID-19 in Walsall
The initial humanitarian response was conducted through the borough’s pre-existing Resilient Communities Model. Four Community Hubs were established with partners in the community and voluntary sector, and operated through referrals from West Midlands Fire Service. They
· supported the delivery of over 6,000 food parcels
· helped over 2,000 people with shopping
· responded to 5,500 befriending requests
Meanwhile, some council services moved online, staff worked from home, sites were made COVID-19-secure and other services were reduced or paused (such as leisure centres and libraries). Some council and partner staff were then creatively redeployed to support areas of the pandemic response.
The response itself was led by the Chief Executive of Walsall Council, Dr Helen Paterson, through an Incident Management Team (IMT) which brought together key partners (see list below). The IMT provided local multi-agency leadership, ensured a co-ordinated approach, and translated the wider national and regional response into a local approach.
Members of the Place-Based IMT in Walsall (September 2020-July 2021):
Walsall Council
Chief Executive
Public Health
Economy, Environment & Communities
Adult Social Care
Children’s Services
Resources & Transformation
Governance
Communications Team
Resilience Unit
Emergency Responders
West Midlands Police
West Midlands Fire Service
West Midlands Ambulance Service
Health
Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust
Walsall Clinical Commissioning Group
Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
Regional Convenor (UK Health Security Agency)
Public Health England
Partners
University of Wolverhampton
Black Country LEP
Walsall College
Walsall Housing Group
One Walsall
Walsall Community Network
Highways England
Transport for West Midlands
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Key Findings
(1) The key factors that facilitated the response were strong and effective leadership from Walsall Council and elected members, combined with a spirit of shared endeavour and a shared sense of purpose amongst partners.
Some additional factors were access to a high-quality complex dataset and data-sharing between organisations, digital transformations that enabled partners to meet virtually on a regular basis, the invoking of emergency decision-making powers by Walsall Council, and time-limited changes in legislation by Central Government which allowed certain services to be relaxed, easing the statutory burden on the Council.
(2) Partnership-working was a dominant feature. The response strengthened some pre-existing partnership arrangements but also produced new relationships and co-learning between partners. For instance, supported by the NHS and Walsall Housing Group (WHG), the Council turned a redundant building into a temporary ward for Manor Hospital. WHG provided staff to paint the building and within a week it was fully functioning as a stroke rehabilitation unit, reducing pressure on the hospital.
(3) The response entailed multiple examples of agile, innovative and resilient local governance. The rapidly-changing situation meant that the response needed to mobilise people and resources quickly. It required local institutions to set aside organisational boundaries, to think inventively, to operate ‘outside the box’, and to develop innovative solutions to novel problems. So, rather than await government guidance, the Council formed a dedicated team to source their own PPE and repurposed a day centre for its storage. The Council’s Comms Team were also able to obtain 65,000 email addresses due to a temporary relaxation of GDPR rules, they then circulated a regular residents’ newsletter to communicate with communities in imaginative ways.
(4) There is potential for the increased capacity of local governance into the future should this learning be consolidated. Many organisations suggested that the response brought different partners together, and there has been joint learning about how collaboration can better work. The Council’s relationship with schools was noted to have greatly improved, while the borough’s Community Associations believed that the response had brought the Council closer to its communities. As a result, there is an appetite to begin to rethink procurement and to better involve the community and voluntary sector in delivering services moving forward.
(5) Given some challenges in involving diverse and socio-economically disadvantaged communities in surge testing, vaccination and community engagement, there is scope for agencies to continuing learning more about residents and working with local communities. Indeed, despite much good work, initial confidence in how the pandemic had been handled by Walsall Council was low amongst residents.
What does all this mean?
Given the after-effects of COVID-19 will remain for some time, there is a need to adopt much more holistic approaches to pandemic recovery that are committed to addressing long-standing inequalities and building a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient society for the future. Our work will help Walsall Council to identify future strategic priorities and to build on these partnership arrangements. We also suggest that these conditions may promote opportunities for the re-combination of resources and the improvement of public services, local democracy and residents’ wider health and wellbeing if harnessed effectively.
However, there are challenges at play:
(1) Many organisations have experienced service backlogs as a result of COVID-19, and such pressures may impact upon partners’ willingness or ability to engage in future partnership-working
(2) Some teams within the Council lack sufficient resource to fully capitalise on this learning
(3) This shared experience may be forgotten when key players leave an organisation. The learning therefore needs to be more fully embedded within institutions themselves rather than simply individual relationships
(4) This momentum may dissipate without the shared sense of purpose amongst partners that was created by the pandemic
(5) There are concerns about the long-term financial future of various partner organisations — such as the NHS and Community Associations — which will shape future capacity, especially once certain COVID-19-specific funds diminish
(6) There is a wider question about what precisely the model of working from home means in the longer-term and what opportunities and challenges this might afford
Moving forward, there are also concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on pre-existing inequalities within the borough. Since the onset of the pandemic, over half of residents state that their mental health has deteriorated, and many report drinking and smoking more and being less active.
There is also a fear that COVID-19 will produce irreversible harm to children’s education, nutrition and overall wellbeing, with places like Walsall being further ‘left behind’. These aims to reduce place-based inequalities and to maximise potential are also set within the broader context of national austerity measures and the recent cost-of-living crisis, as well as the challenges associated with climate change, leaving the European Union (Brexit) and ongoing international geopolitical instability. These lessons, however, must not be forgotten.
If you’d like to learn more, you can access the report here.
Dr Joshua Blamire is a Research Associate at the Institute for Community Research & Development (ICRD) at the University of Wolverhampton.
