Ctrl + Alt + Govern

Multi-agency governance feels like a tango. It requires coordination, trust, timing and an agreed set of steps. Everyone has to move together, anticipate one another and stay in rhythm. When it works well, it looks effortless. When it doesn’t, it’s awkward and someone ends up with a bruised toe.

In the public sector, we are good at insisting that organisations dance together. For decades, legislation has required agencies to collaborate on shared outcomes: community safety, safeguarding, reducing reoffending, public protection – the list goes on. The idea behind these mandated collaborations is that no single organisation can address complex societal problems alone.

But what if you have no power over the steps that your partner will dance? What if they know the rhythm in advance but you don’t? A tension is created at the heart of these arrangements: the partnership working and collaboration is mandated, but the power rarely is.

On paper, multi-agency boards are excellent at agreement. They agree priorities, action plans, strategies, performance metrics but what they are much less able to do is influence the things that actually determine outcomes: resource allocation, organisational capacity, or how to balance competing organisational priorities within partner agencies. Collaboration is compulsory; impact is not.

This creates an interesting accountability illusion. Everyone around the table is responsible, but no one is empowered to achieve. Decisions are made, but delivery depends on whether each organisation can (or chooses to) actually take actions forward into individual organisations. When progress stalls, the partnership group review and refresh…and meets again. The dance continues, but nobody is quite sure who’s leading it.

Since their inception, Police and Crime Commissioners (and their offices) often acted as a spearhead of multi-agency criminal justice partnerships. While there were certainly challenges around having a politically elected official leading criminal justice, they did provide something that partnerships lack: a visible convenor with a strategic remit and at least some levers – be that commissioning, grant funding, scrutiny or convening authority. In practice, many PCCs became the centre around partnership systems orbited.

This model is now changing. With PCCs being disbanded and their functions being absorbed into mayoral or local authority structures, the question of “who leads” multi-agency governance becomes sharper. There is a genuine opportunity here: broader public service alignment, fewer siloed strategies, and crime being considered alongside housing, health and education rather than in isolation. However, there is a risk that leadership becomes even more diffuse – spread across systems already stretched for capacity and clarity.

The challenge is not whether partnerships should exist. They should – that was settled long ago. The real challenge is whether we are prepared to challenge the status quo and design governance arrangements that match the complexity of the problems we expect them to solve.

Effective multi-agency governance needs more than goodwill and regular meetings. It needs clear choreography and dancers who are empowered to know it. This means being explicit about decisions and influence – what the board can decide, what it can only recommend, and where ultimate accountability sits. It means linking governance to resource (potentially through pooled budgets), aligned commissioning cycles and transparent acknowledgement of constraints. It means clarifying the remits of the governance and resisting the temptation to create new boards every time a new duty appears.

Most importantly – it requires us to be honest about power. Collaboration without influence and power breeds frustration. Governance without levers becomes performance. If everyone is expected to lead a little, the risk is no one leads enough.

A tango only works when partners understand their roles, trust the structure and move with purpose. Multi-agency governance is no difference. We can keep forcing the dance – or we can finally focus on the choreography.