Secondment can move capacity but It can't move capability

On 21 August, government confirmed that Whitehall officials will be seconded into eighteen mayoral strategic authorities from this autumn. Each authority will receive five to ten civil servants for six to nine months, and mayors will be able to request the specific skills they need rather than take whatever resource is offered. Alongside the secondments, the Future Leaders Scheme, previously a Civil Service development programme, will open up to people working in mayoral and local authorities, and a new Digital Devolution programme will build data and AI skills and a shared data model between Whitehall and the authorities. Government has already committed £99.6m of Mayoral Capacity Funding over the Spending Review period for staffing and corporate functions, and the 31 July Rewiring the State statement set out a commitment to "strong, capable strategic and local authorities" as a condition of devolution working.

Mayors are taking on more of transport, housing, skills and growth, often in areas where the authority itself has little experience making strategic decisions. An organisation cannot be handed a function without the people who know how to run it, so government is sending some of those people in.

A secondment lasts six to nine months. At the end of it, the person who arrived with that knowledge goes home. What the authority is left with depends on what happened during those months, a different question from the one the funding and the placement answer on their own.

It's tempting to think about organisational capacity the way an engineer thinks about a spare part: a system is short of something, so a component with that something gets moved into it. Whitehall has people who understand how government works; mayoral authorities need people who understand how central government works; move some of the former into the latter and the gap closes.

But alas, people aren't components. What an experienced official brings to a placement isn't a fixed quantity that transfers whole. It's built from years of relationships, judgement calls and lessons learned from mistakes made along the way, alongside a support system those individuals rely on to deliver. Move that person into a new authority for nine months and the authority has access to it while they're there. Move them home again, and the specific experience goes with them, unless someone made a deliberate effort to leave some of it behind.

That's the difference between a secondment that plugs a hole and one that leaves something behind: whether the people sent in are asked to build capability, not just deliver work. A secondee asked only to deliver tasks will do exactly that, and take the ability to do them again when they leave. Closing the gap properly needs a brief that asks for more: a plan for building that capability alongside the work, and the tools to do it, both in how the secondee operates and in how they hand over what they've done.

None of this is specific to devolution. The same gap opens up whenever an organisation takes on a new responsibility faster than its people develop the judgement to carry it: local government reorganisation, a merger, a department absorbing a function it didn't have before. An organisational chart can change in an afternoon; the capability to match it takes longer to build.

The measure of these secondments won't be how much the seconded officials get done in nine months. It will be what the mayoral authorities can do on their own once they've gone home, and that depends on whether building that capability was written into the brief from the start.

This is our approach for how to train people to build capability in others: click here.