Neil Barnett is Y-PERN Policy Fellow for Yorkshire & Humber Councils, helping local policy-makers negotiate an increasingly complex set of governing arrangements around the devolution agenda.
As the Y-PERN Policy Fellow for the Yorkshire & Humber Councils, Neil is responsible for…
Research into governance arrangements in the region and issues around the devolution agenda. Neil is liaising between the local governments, Combined Authorities and other public agencies in the region and the Y-PERN network to identify on-going research needs, particularly as new governance structures come into being and develop.
Neil’s most looking forward to…
Helping local policy-makers as they negotiate an increasingly complex set of governing arrangements and an ever more acute set of demands for public service delivery. This will be a process of mutual learning in an evolving landscape, so he’s also looking forward to seeing how the relationship develops between academics and policy makers, and how Y-PERN can help to establish a model for ‘feeding in’ research to the policy cycle.
Key areas of focus for Neil are…
The devolution agenda, with the established and newly created Combined Authorities developing patterns of working and collaboration with the local governments and other stakeholders in a environment of multi-level governance. Initially, this has involved him collating international evidence re devolution and decentralisation, and a key area of focus will be on how these trends play out in our particular places – the region, sub-regions, cities, towns and neighbourhoods. In addition, councils continue to grapple with the consequences of austerity and budget-tightening, necessitating that this be conducted against the background of ensuring that organisational arrangements are focussed on effective delivery of public services.
Neil joins us with a background in…
Politics and public management. Neil was a local government officer before moving to (the then named) Leeds Metropolitan University as a Senior Lecturer in Public Policy. He has developed and led management development programmes, delivered in-house to councils in the region, including Leeds, Kirklees, Rotherham and North East Lincolnshire, and taught and delivered on a range of undergraduate and post graduate programmes. He’s authored and co-authored articles in a range of Journals, including Local Government Studies, Political Studies, and Environment and Planning (C) and a series of research reports for the Association of Public Service Excellence (APSE).
