The local effects of policy piloting

Piloting has become an established mechanism of introducing health and social care policy change, and of stimulating local engagement with national policy ideas. Previous work by PIRU had focused on the motivations of national policy-makers to initiate pilot programmes and examined the multiple – and sometimes contradictory – purposes of piloting. This project turned attention to the consequences of pilots for local policy-makers and implementers.

This project examined the effects of national pilot schemes initiated by the Department of Health on local implementation sites. It focused on pilots related to adult social care, which is organised by local authorities to explore why local authorities decided to participate in national schemes, what they expected to get out of them, and whether their expectations had been fulfilled.

Understanding the perspective and experience of local implementers will help develop evaluation designs that can support local sites in their efforts to facilitate sustainable change to policy and practice. This knowledge should also help national policy-makers to understand better the aspirations of local implementers, and their need for both direction and flexibility. It can also help explain why some pilot programmes struggle to maintain local support.

The project began with an extensive internet search to find out which national social care policy pilot programmes local authorities and other local organisations had participated in since 2010. 

Local Authority Directors of Adult Social Services were interviewed to elicit their reasons for participating in national pilot schemes, their experience of implementing pilots and their views of the effects of these schemes on local implementation and service provision.

Interviews were conducted between October 2016 and March 2017 and comprised 26 interviews with current and past Directors. The majority of were in post at the time of the interview, while some reflected on piloting from their past experience. 

This work showed that local sites involved in piloting often had to live up to the dual expectations of helping to establish whether a national policy 'works', and of achieving practice change in their areas that was sustainable and effective beyond the life span of the pilot scheme. Participating in national pilots provided local authorities with access to ideas and resources, and with a mandate for change, which motivated them to voluntarily subjugate themselves to being “steered at a distance” since they had to align themselves closely with central government's policy objectives, at least for the duration of the pilots.