Advancing commission scholarship by inferring leadership legacy motivations from commission reports: The case of Sir Michael Lyons

Abstract

This article contributes to commission scholarship by exploring how and why chairs use their reports to shape their leadership legacies. It distinguishes two types of legacy – fiduciary and expressive – that chairs shape through their reports. The expressive legacy of the chair can be shaped through judgements about the scope of stakeholder engagement and agenda adjustment that generate four types of leadership identity: conservator, consolidator, advocate and catalyst. We explore the particular ways in which the chair of the Lyons Inquiry into Local Government in the UK used his three reports to shape his legacy. Through his distinctive integration of historical and contemporary perspectives into a leading vision for local government, he expressed a consolidator identity with his short-term recommendations and a catalytic identity with his far-reaching envisioning of the institutional space within which a greater place-shaping role for local government could be established.

Keywords

Commissions interpretive authorities leadership legacies local government Lyons Inquiry

Introduction

If a legacy is ‘something transmitted by or received from a predecessor’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary), a commission of inquiry report¹ can be seen as a legacy bequeathed to other policy actors. This article explores the ways a commission chair may seek to shape this legacy through judgements made about the conduct of the inquiry during its planning, investigative and persuasive phases. We apply this analysis to a single person inquiry where such judgements can unambiguously be attributed to its chair and argue that its report can function as a ‘sense-making narrative’ (Brown, 2000) to shape the fiduciary and expressive aspects of the chair’s leadership legacy as it relates to this episode of leadership authority (ELA). In particular, their judgements can shape the type of legacy they want to leave – conservator; consolidator; advocate; and catalyst. In the case we are considering, both consolidator and catalytic identities were expressed through different aspects of the chair’s conduct.

In exploring these issues, this article will seek to make a contribution to two strands in the policy literature: policy leadership and commission scholarship.

Policy leadership

The first draws on the work of a number of policy scholars (Goldfinch and Hart, 2003; Goldfinch and Wallis, 2010; Wallis et al., 2007) who have drawn on the interdisciplinary literature on leadership (see surveys by Bass and Bass, 2009; Van Wart, 2013) to explore the role individual actors play as leaders in the policy process. In doing so, they have grappled with the contested nature of leadership concepts. These are reflected in two major paradigmatic divisions: (i) ‘essentialists’, who view leadership as residing in the ‘traits’ of leaders (Kirkpatrick and Locke, 1991), the behaviors they enact in a particular situations (Fiedler, 1978; Hersey et al., 1979) and/or the functions (including transformational as opposed to transactional leadership) they perform (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978) and (ii) ‘relationalists’ and ‘social constructionists’, who find leadership in relationships of ‘emergent co-ordination and change’ (Uhl-Bien, 2006) in which shared meanings are socially constructed (Fairhurst and Grant, 2010; Ospina and Sorenson, 2006). One way these actor-centric policy scholars have sought to resolve this definitional conflict is to treat policy leadership, like other forms of leadership, as a relational process in which social constructions of shared meaning take place, while highlighting the temporary opportunities such processes give individual actors to demonstrate the ‘essential’ qualities they have to take the lead, by making judgements that influence the direction of policy leadership processes (Wallis et al., 2007: 87).

The ELA that commission chairs are given when leading the conduct of an inquiry exemplifies this type of agency in a way that, to our knowledge, has not been explored in this literature. The typical parameters within which chairs can act as policy leaders appears to have remained stable over time and similar across different institutional contexts (Inwood and Johns, 2014; Prasser, 2006; Rowe and McAllister, 2006; Zegart, 2004). Chairs are typically appointed from outside government circles to lead ad hoc bodies that have an official status and are charged with a discrete task, the scope of which is defined in advance, and a limited time to complete it, usually through the submission of a report with factual analysis and recommendations, after which they are disbanded with no subsequent role in implementing policy.

This leadership perspective raises the types of questions considered by leadership scholars who are interested in the degree to which such actors seek to shape the legacy of their ELAs (Gardner and Laskin, 2011; Kouzes and Posner, 2008; Shamir and Eilam, 2005). Their motive may be stronger when they see the potential for the legacy to be subject to misattribution and misrepresentation. Misattribution arises when outcomes are attributed to the leader’s agency that could arguably be caused by other factors (Meindl, 1995; Popper, 2011). However, this bias can work in the opposite direction, with opponents or critics downplaying the agency of the leader in producing positive outcomes. Misrepresentation relates to the intentions of leaders. It may arise when actors are unclear about the leader’s actual intentions and engage in projection, treating the leader’s intentions as approximating what their own would have been in similar situations (Popper, 2011).

The leadership legacy of commission chairs may be subject to misattribution in a number of ways. Firstly, inquiry reports are often publicly attributed to the chairs, even when they reflect the deliberations of multiple members, due to the role commission chairs play in steering the inquiry process to the production of a text in the form of a ‘sense-making narrative’, that ‘is a monologue, a univocal representation that omits, marginalizes, and selectively highlights in its suppression of interpretive plurality’ (Brown, 2000: 30). Secondly, governments may claim to be influenced by them, even where they learn little new from commission reports, because the reports recommend policies the governments intended to implement anyway. Thirdly, in cases where their recommendations are largely rejected by the appointing governments, successor governments, opposition parties and opposing advocacy coalitions may cite their reports as an influence on policy changes that may already have been on their policy agendas.

What makes the role of commission chair distinctive, however, is that the requirement to submit a report gives them an ex ante opportunity to shape their legacy in a way that is resistant to misrepresentation. Unlike political or administrative leaders, who are often motivated to write memoirs to ‘set the record straight’ about what they intended while in office, the report of a commission chair is itself the work product the inquiry was intended to produce, and so its explanations and justifications of judgements made during the course of the inquiry cannot be dismissed as misattribution or misrepresentation.

Commission scholarship

In exploring how a report gives chairs the opportunity to shape the legacy of their ELA, this article will seek to extend the scholarly literature on commissions that has tended to study their policy role and impact from the point of view of the governments that appoint them. Within this literature can be found both in-depth case studies (see, for example, Brown, 2000; Clark and Trick, 2006; Inwood, 2005; Owens, 2012; Resodihardjo, 2006; Söderblom, 2001) and comparative studies that are often undertaken in the context of particular countries. For example, the classic works of Gosnell (1934), Clokie and Robinson (1937), Sulzner (1971) and Chapman (1973) have more recently been updated by Rowe and McAllister (2006) and Sulitzeanu-Kenan (2010) in the UK; Gilligan (2002) and Prasser (2006) in Australia; Berger (2003) and Inwood and Johns (2014) in Canada; and Campbell (2002), Zegart (2004) and Kitts (2006) in the United States. Moreover, in the last decade, the deployment of investigatory commissions in the aftermath of crises has received some attention from policy scholars (see Boin et al., 2008; Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 2011; Sulitzeanu-Keenan, 2010).

A recurrent theme of this literature is that beyond the official rationalization of their appointment, governments have other reasons for appointing them. For example, if they are seen as a ‘venue-alteration mechanism’ that replaces ‘one volatile critical audience (the media, the opposition and the public) with a much slower-moving and predictable audience – the inquiry commission’ (Sulitzeanu-Kenan, 2010: 623), governments may not be primarily interested in what a commission finds or recommends. There is thus the possibility that they may not take up a commission’s recommendations, particularly where they deviate significantly from their own policy agenda. The implications such possibilities might have for the legacy-shaping behavior of individual commission chairs is a subject that, to our knowledge, has not been explored in the commission literature.

Method and structure

In considering these implications, we will build on the work of a number of scholars who have emphasized the significance of commission reports as sense-making narratives (Brown, 2000, 2004; Gephart et al., 1990; Weick, 1995). It is a feature of this work that a general theoretical framework is formulated before being applied to an analysis of the reports produced by individual commissions. To some extent, this reflects what Zickar (2015: 4) characterizes as a tendency in historiography to shift toward a kind of micro-history that focuses ‘less on wide swaths of time and broad topics’ and instead concentrates ‘on “small mysteries” telling the stories of specific events and locales’. For example, in addressing the issue of what can be learned ‘about sense-making from analyses of the texts of public inquiries’, Brown (2004: 96) proposed that ‘such texts are authored in an effort to elicit verisimilitude attributions from their target audiences’ so as ‘to depoliticize disaster events, legitimate social institutions, and extend the hegemonic influence of dominant groups’; he then sought to demonstrate ‘crystallized sense-making’ in the Report of the Allitt Inquiry into attacks on children on Ward Four at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in the UK (Brown, 2000) and the Cullen Report into the Piper Alpha disaster (Brown, 2004).

In this article, we will move from the general to the specific in similar fashion. We will begin by discussing two types of legacy that can be shaped by a commission report, and then analyze the expressive aspect of a chair’s legacy in terms of four types of leadership identity formed through the judgements they typically make during the course of the inquiry: conservator, consolidator, advocate and catalyst. We will then apply these types of legacy and leadership identity to the Lyons Commission of Inquiry into Local Government (Lyons, 2005, 2006, 2007) in the United Kingdom between 2004 and 2007.

The Lyons Inquiry is interesting from the perspective taken in this article for a number of reasons. Although it was immediately and enthusiastically praised for its insight and engagement with a tradition of inquiry into the ‘wicked issue’ of central–local government relations in the UK, its recommendations were largely rejected by the Brown-led Labour Government. It nevertheless remains a point of reference for subsequent policy developments almost 10 years after its final delivery and so cannot be unambiguously dismissed as a ‘failure’. The question remains whether Sir Michael allowed for this eventuality by making judgements that shaped a legacy that would, to some degree, be independent of the government’s response to its recommendations. His opportunity to do so was enhanced by the fact that the terms of reference of his appointment and the deadline for completing the report were more flexible than a typical commission of inquiry. Moreover, as the chair of a one-person inquiry, he could take full responsibility for these judgements. It could be argued that this renders the Lyons Commission a less interesting example of chair leadership than would be the case with more typical multi-member commissions, where chairs have to exercise influence as leaders during the deliberations over other commissioners to produce to kind of ‘univocal representation’ described by Brown (2000). For our purposes, however, this one person inquiry allows us to focus on the legacy-shaping intent of the judgements made by Sir Michael, since these can be read unproblematically from the report and attributed exclusively to this policy actor. The article concludes by suggesting a new direction for commission scholarship that takes into account the intentions of commission chairs as reflected in the reports generated by the inquiries they lead. Future research in this vein could go beyond the limitations of this study by applying its framework to comparative studies that include multi-member commissions, in which questions relating to the relative degree of influence of the chair over collective judgements would need to be addressed.

Two types of leadership legacy that can be shaped by commission chairs

Commission reports can provide insights into how commission chairs may shape two aspects of the legacy of their ELA: a fiduciary legacy and an expressive legacy. A fiduciary legacy can be discerned in the way the chair is remembered to have run the commission: the degree to which the chair complied with the terms of reference set by the appointing authority and with the norms and conventions that distinguish commissions from other advisory institutions, including autonomy, integrity and proficiency. An expressive legacy can be discerned in the way the chair is remembered to have expressed individual values and priorities within the structure of the inquiry, through key judgements made during the course of the inquiry. These judgements provide criteria for evaluating the success of the commission in its own terms. It may take considerable time after the publication of the commission’s report to make this evaluation because, even if the government largely rejects its recommendations, future governments may reference the report in changing policy; societal actors may attribute their actions to its influence, and future commissions may use it as a point of departure for their own work and judgements. While the individuals appointed as commission chairs can choose to champion the recommendations made in the report after it is submitted, they will no longer be doing so in their role as commission chair. The fiduciary legacies and expressive legacies they shape within this role are thus not contingent in this way on future responses; rather, the narrative accounts of the inquiry process in commission reports can provide a sufficient basis for inferring how chairs qua chairs sought to shape these types of legacy.

Commission reports will be sufficient for readers to assess the fiduciary legacy, a chair intended to leave through compliance with the terms of reference set by appointing authorities and with the relatively stable set of norms and conventions that have come to differentiate commissions from other advisory institutions. Commissions of inquiry are distinguished by their emphasis on independence, impartiality and propriety, and it is the fiduciary responsibility of the commission chair to ensure that commission members follow these norms and maintain the probity and integrity of the commission process (Ashforth, 1990; Brown, 2000). The chair seeking a positive fiduciary legacy would therefore ensure that the commission members have sufficient autonomy to exercise their responsibilities on behalf of society, to ensure the impartiality of the inquiry process, and to maintain a certain decorum with respect to the asking and answering of questions (Ashforth, 1990: 10).

Commission reports will also provide a sufficient narrative for readers to assess the commission chair’s expressive legacy. This has two aspects. First, there is the impression the report leaves of chairs striving to differentiate themselves from other actors in the policy process. Bourgault and Van Dorpe (2013) characterize this as a policy actor’s role identity. It is the identity they express as the holder of a particular role as distinct from the personal identity they derive from seeing themselves as separate from others and the social identity derived from being a member of a particular demographic grouping.

From a social constructionist perspective, a role identity of chairs striving to be relatively autonomous ‘interpretive authorities’ (Ashforth, 1990; Brown, 2000; Sheriff, 1983) would be expressed by going beyond their fiduciary responsibilities and the expectations of the political actors who appointed them, and seeking to serve the ‘State’ by discovering how the public interest can be advanced from the situation that gave rise to the inquiry. From this perspective, the State is an abstract entity that must be socially constructed: it represents a ‘common good’ that exists outside the political realm. Chairs thus have an opportunity to present themselves as leading their commission teams in a process of discovery through interrogating Society on behalf of the State (Ashforth, 1990: 9). The strength of this motivation may, however, vary from chair to chair.

This second aspect of a chair’s expressive legacy can be inferred from the narrative account of key judgements that leave a distinct impression of their role identity, or the type of commission chair they seek to be or present themselves as being.

In the next section, we formulate a typology of leadership identities, with each type emerging from the judgements commission chairs make about their scope of stakeholder engagement, and the extent of agenda adjustment they are going to propose.

The relationship between expressive legacy motivation and the judgements made by commission chairs

As interpretive authorities, commission chairs have an opportunity to create narratives and make judgements that shape their expressive legacy. This opportunity will remain until inquiries have run their course, typically passing through three distinct phases (Prasser, 2006: 133–134):

a planning phase, where the scope and parameters of the inquiry are determined;

an investigatory phase, where submissions are solicited; and

a persuasive phase, where recommendations are formulated and the final report is presented.

Through these phases, the commission chair will take responsibility for two types of judgment: the scope of stakeholder engagement and the extent of agenda adjustments. In their reports, they can provide a narrative account of how they came to make these judgements.

The judgements chairs make regarding the scope of stakeholder engagement will be made primarily in the planning phase, although these plans could be changed during the investigatory phase should it become clear that the scope needs to be increased. The appointing authority, the sponsoring department authorized to assist in the inquiry, and relevant interest groups, which would be expected to make formal submissions, constitute the ‘insider policy community’ (Marsh and Rhodes, 1992) that the commission would, at the minimum, be expected to consult. A decision to engage stakeholders outside this insider network has both rewards and risks.

The reward of more extensive engagement is that it may confer greater legitimacy on the commission’s recommendations. For example, Resodihardjo (2006) describes how, in 1990, the Woolf inquiry into UK prison riots sought to do this through the public seminar, a new procedure for judicial inquiries, at which interested parties, including prisoners, could voice their opinion (Resodihardjo, 2006: 202).

An inquiry may also have greater scope to develop its own views when it consults stakeholders beyond the insider policy community, because this broader group of stakeholders may introduce ideas that were not contemplated in the commission’s remit and would not have been raised by the insider policy community. For example, the chair of an Australian Inquiry into Local Government Finance in 1984 noted that while public hearings imposed a burden on commission members, they also ‘allowed the inquiry room to move’ and ensured that ‘local government associations and states grants commissions could not monopolize local government voice’ (Howard, 1987: 6).

In general, consideration and integration of outsider views, ideas and interests may generate fresh perspectives that could help to develop or support the eventual recommendations of the commission, including recommendations that may be controversial or that may disrupt the status quo.

The risks associated with seeking wider participation in the inquiry include the following: the potential difficulty of keeping the inquiry within budget and proleptic concerns about criticism on this ground; diminishing returns related to the uncertain quality and quantity of information gathered through wider public engagement; the possibility of becoming overwhelmed by the volume of information gathered; and the difficulty of representing all views impartially. Moreover, the inquiry can become a ‘garbage can’ (Cohen et al., 1972) so that the inquiry loses focus and fails to draw a coherent set of conclusions.

After determining the scope of stakeholder engagement, the commission must determine the extent to which it is willing to adjust the agenda by considering policy proposals beyond those contemplated in its initial remit. At one end of the spectrum are those commissions that voluntarily limit their ‘labors to those proposals that are likely to succeed’ (Ashforth, 1990). At the other end are inquiries that recommend what Hall (1993) has termed a third-order change in the policy agenda through (a) floating innovative policy options and/or (b) reframing policy priorities. In the first case, commission chairs may ‘break the ice’ by recommending changes that may not have been raised previously, so that they become ‘discussable’. In the second case, the commission may be seeking a shift in a policy paradigm by reframing the way problems are interpreted rather than advocating a particular policy option.

While the chair’s final judgment on agenda adjustment needs to be made in the persuasive phase, other judgements made during earlier phases can nevertheless have an influence. For example, decisions relating to the focus of the inquiry must be made in the planning phase. A decision to focus on a narrowly defined issue or problem may bias the commission toward mere incremental adjustments, whereas a decision to explore the root causes of a problem or to discover and amplify best practices in the area of inquiry (Cooperrider, 1990) may generate ambitious adjustments to the received agenda.

Ambitious adjustments to the agenda may, of course, increase the risk that the appointing authority will ignore the recommendations, but a refusal by the government to fully implement commission recommendations does not necessarily represent poor judgment by its chair (e.g. Sheriff, 1983). Even if their recommendations are rejected, commission reports can provide ammunition for advocacy coalitions seeking policy change (Sabatier, 1988), and can become points of reference for ongoing discussion.

Prasser (2006: 141) has observed that many chairs ‘admit that in writing the report and recommendations there is often discussion as to whether they should be drafted in a way to ensure government acceptance, even if it means watering down some of the findings’. Rowe and McAllister (2006) suggest that in some cases, such as the Richards Commission into devolution in Wales, a middle ground may be taken, with commission chairs considering that ‘a simple count of recommendations accepted would not accurately reflect’ the success of their inquiry with ‘there being some so integral to the overall intent of a report that, to reject them, undermines the whole’. As we will see, a similar pragmatism is apparent in the reports of the Lyons Inquiry.

Judgements about stakeholder engagement and agenda adjustment at different stages of the inquiry process can be read from reports as expressing a distinctive leader identity for commission chairs. Table 1 proposes a typology of four possible leader identities.

Table 1.

Typology of commissioner identities

	Low-risk persuasive	High-risk persuasive
Low-risk investigative	Conservator	Advocate
High-risk investigative	Consolidator	Catalyst

A conservator identity is expressed in judgements that take a low-risk approach to both stakeholder engagement and agenda adjustment. Brown (2000) describes how such an identity would be expressed by a chair who offers ‘acceptable interpretations’ that ‘ameliorate anxieties’ and rule out significant reform of social institutions (see also Gephart et al., 1990). Such a commission chair would leave a conservator legacy if its report is used to legitimize institutions in their present form.

A consolidator identity is akin to the reform consolidator discussed in the literature on policy reform (see Haggard and Kaufman, 1992). Commission chairs can express a consolidator identity when they seek to justify government decisions by forging a consensus among the interests represented on the commission (Zegart, 2004) and by building support among the societal actors they consult (D’Ombrain, 1997). Thus, a consolidator chair could make the judgement to take a low-risk approach in the persuasive phase but the high-risk approach of opening the investigative phase up to more societal actors. By referencing the sources of support discovered by commission chairs, reforming governments will help construct a consolidator leadership legacy for such actors.

An advocate identity is expressed through judgements that take the high-risk approach of promoting non-incremental reform proposals, while limiting the scope of the inquiry phase to insiders. The public inquiry process thus provides a venue to ‘audition’ and tests insider reaction to a narrowly defined set of issues or proposals (Heifetz and Linsky, 2002). Because the proposals are unlikely to be modified significantly in the inquiry, the leader legacy of advocate chairs will primarily be determined by whether they are endorsed or otherwise by current or future governments.

A catalytic identity is expressed through judgements that make a more far-reaching and risky agenda adjustments in the persuasive phase on the basis of what chairs have learnt during an investigatory phase that included a wide range of stakeholders beyond the insider policy network (Resodihardjo, 2006). This identity is thus underpinned by narratives of reforms emerging from an ‘open-minded’ process of ‘sense-making’ from information gathered. Like consolidators, catalytic chairs can be construed as using investigation to build societal support; however, societal support confers on catalytic chairs a greater autonomy because it sustains the hope that their recommendations may be adopted by a future government, even if the ‘take-up’ by the incumbent government is limited.

The appointment of the Lyons inquiry and the significance of its reports

The immediate problems addressed by the Lyons inquiry related to the council tax system of local government finance that had been introduced in 1993. In the 10 years since the system had been introduced, the burden on households of providing council financing had risen from 20% to 25%, while the contribution from business had fallen from 29% to 22%. The burden on some households stood to be further affected by a planned revaluation of properties for council tax. The (then) Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, thus responded to the Balance of Funding report in July 2004, which drew attention to these emerging inequities, by delaying any further action until he had received the report of the Lyons Inquiry.

The appointment of Sir Michael ‘to consider the place for changes to the present system of local government funding in England and to make recommendations, including the reform of council tax’, in order to reform financial relations between local and central government (Lyons, 2005: 12), could be attributed to his experience and expertise in the UK local government policy community, as reflected in his knighthood for services to this community in January 2000. The three reports Sir Michael wrote as chair of the commission of inquiry into local government share a common theme and show how he sought to shape his legacy in this role. Thus, while the first interim report (Lyons, 2005) addressed his initial terms of reference, it also introduced the basic principles of ‘place-shaping’. His remit was then extended to allow him to explore the implications of these principles for the roles and functions of local government in a second interim report (Lyons, 2006). The final report, which was only produced after his remit was further extended to consider ‘the implications for local government of the Barker Review of Land Use Planning, the Eddington Transport Study and the Leitch Review of Skills’ (Lyons, 2007: 42), allowed him to develop his place-shaping ideas into a vision for ‘local government in the twenty first century’.

Inferring through his inquiry reports how Sir Michael sought to shape his fiduciary legacy

In the introductory chapters of his final report, Sir Michael showed how a chair’s fiduciary legacy could be shaped not just by conformity to the norms and conventions associated with this role identity, but by establishing his autonomy and proficiency, demonstrating a scholarly detachment from the immediate policy concerns and political agendas, and placing his report within a broad and historical explanatory context.

Lawrence (1984) has proposed that ‘historical perspective refers to understanding a subject in light of its earliest phases and subsequent evolution’ and that ‘this perspective differs from history because its object is to sharpen one's vision of the present, not the past’. This perspective is reflected in the way Sir Michael grounds his vision in a diachronic study of local government:

Local government was a collaborative venture … Royal appointments were often chosen from the important men of the area, and a Crown-appointed official who was unacceptable to the political community of an area might well have difficulty in successfully carrying out his responsibilities. (Lyons, 2007: 45)

According to Grant and Dollery (2007), Sir Michael then draws from ‘English republicanism’ in building upon this historical perspective, citing Thomas Paine: ‘Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man’.

He elaborates on this view by arguing that:

There is much truth in that statement – our ability to create and sustain social bonds, and to form communities of common interest does not depend on the formal institution of government … But I would argue that there is value in government, as a device which allows us to frame and enforce rules and laws for behaviour, manage the provision of public services, redistribute resources, and manage frameworks for long-term economic, social and environmental sustainability. (Lyons, 2007: 51)

Sir Michael then finds the comparative institutional advantage for local as compared to central government in familiar propositions that can be traced back to John Stuart Mill: (i) ‘by being close to local circumstances’, local government can be more allocatively efficient; (ii) there are public participation advantages of local government; and (iii) local government can act as a constraint on the power of central government.

Despite having a background in economics, Sir Michael’s perspective on the role of local government does not appear to be bounded by mainstream economic thought. There are, for example, both historical and contemporary aspects to his vision of a place-shaping role for local government. With regard to its historical aspects, Grant and Dollery (2007) point out that ‘Lyons’ idea of place-shaping is, to a certain extent, defined against the modern concept of community.’ At the same time, a post-modern perspective can be detected in Sir Michael’s emphasis on local government leaders playing a catalytic role in the social reconstruction of place in the face of modernity, through which ‘locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them’ (Giddens, 1991: 18).

Sir Michael’s emphasis on the importance of local leadership was in harmony with the ‘leaderism’ that had come strongly into vogue under the Blair-Brown Labour Government (1997–2010). O’Reilly and Reed (2010) explain the distinction between leaderism and managerialism. Leaderism shifts the locus of credit for public management reforms that improve government effectiveness from the reformers, who design ways to increase managerial discretion and make public managers accountable for the management of their resources, to the ‘change agents’, who are responsible for leading cultural change in their organizations and initiating collaborative and co-productive innovations that create public value (see Moore, 1995).

There are a number of important ways in which leaderism provides a background to the Lyons reports:

Lyons never questions his role as the ‘leader’ of a single person inquiry and takes full authorial responsibility for the content of his three reports;

The need for effective leaders to catalyze place-shaping initiatives at a local level is a recurrent refrain of the reports, which appeared to resonate so well with the then Labour government’s policy approach that the second interim report was followed by a White Paper (Department of Communities and Local Government (UK) (DCLG), 2006) that proposed, inter alia, that:

In future, there will be three choices for councils: a directly elected mayor, a directly elected executive of councillors, or a leader elected by their fellow-councillors with a clear four year mandate. All the executive powers of local authorities will be vested in the leader of the council;

Sir Michael’s vision of a place-shaping role for local authorities was very much in line with the type of leading vision that characterized the integrative priorities of leaderism.

Through his adroit employment of historical perspective and distinctive integration of historical and contemporary perspectives into a leading vision for local government, Sir Michael gave his report an air of competence and expertise that contributed to his fiduciary legacy by suggesting his autonomy and impartiality, his scholarly detachment and informed authority, with respect to local government policy.

Inferring through his inquiry reports how Sir Michael sought to shape his expressive legacy

As chair and sole commissioner of this inquiry into local government, Lyons had an opportunity to engage in an ongoing policy debate that had come to divide the policy community into centralist and localist ‘advocacy coalitions’. This debate had been shaped by Whitehall’s long-term centralizing tendencies. Under the Thatcher and Major governments, a ‘hollowing out’ of the local state took place. While the Blair-led Labour government elected in 1997 seemed more willing to invest in local government, that willingness was contingent upon local cooperation with a performance monitoring regime. Resistance to this performance monitoring gradually gained momentum, with critics highlighting the costs and inhibitory effects compliance had on local democracy and innovation (Mclean et al., 2007).

By 2004, a localist advocacy coalition had formed across the major political parties, whose core beliefs have been described as being ‘based on local government’s role as community leadership, expressing its concern for the well-being of its area and its communities and citizens that extends beyond the provision of services’ (Jones and Stewart, 2012: 348–349). The extent to which Lyons planned to allow them a venue to express this perspective, and the judgements he made to shape his own expressive legacy, must now be considered.

Planning phase

From the early planning stages, the Lyons Inquiry tried to accommodate responses from ‘as many people as possible who use, pay for, and work in or with local government’ (Lyons, 2007: Annex F: 2). Lyons invited written responses from interested members of the public, as well as other key stakeholders, and he facilitated 37 information-gathering events attended by 1405 people (Lyons, 2007: Annex F: 3). An innovative aspect of the inquiry was its engagement of council leaders and chief executives in the administration of an interactive questionnaire, to stimulate debate among citizens and to solicit their views. Lyons thus appears to have accepted the risk of extensive public engagement as worth taking, although he did try to mitigate the risks that the inquiry would become a ‘garbage can’ (Cohen et al., 1972) by focusing on ‘strengthening leadership and expanding the opportunities for local people to influence local decision making’ (Lyons, 2007: 2). In this way, he sought a common focus for the concerns of local councils, businesses, and third sector organizations; moreover, his approach provided the foundation for relatively ambitious adjustments to the received agenda in the persuasive phase of the inquiry.

The local government policy community was relatively open to this framing of key issues at the time the inquiry was launched. Thus, although councils generally favoured and businesses opposed the re-localization of business rates, the latter expressed support for council concerns about how over-centralization had impacted their role through, for example, ‘the removal or diminution of local powers; the limiting of local discretion, the subordination of local to national priorities; and the increasing central prescription of how local services should be delivered’. Businesses also acknowledged local ‘frustration at the different and often contradictory goals pursued by individual government departments’ and a sense of disempowerment as new layers were added to regional government (Lyons, 2007).

Investigative phase

Sir Michael’s early endorsement and subsequent elaboration of a place-shaping role and responsibility for local authorities had ‘resonance with many respondents, including local authorities themselves’ (Lyons, 2007: Annex F: 112) and was found by councils to be ‘a useful way of articulating their key, but not always acknowledged, strategic role’ (Lyons, 2007: Annex F: 112). Business organizations ‘welcomed the opportunity’ to work with local councils in developing their capacity, while third sector organizations saw it as legitimizing their concern about the ‘unequal partnership’ and lack of engagement they experienced with councils that had not yet fully developed their place-shaping potential.

By auditioning his interpretation of the place-shaping role of local authorities early in the inquiry, Sir Michael was able to find a common theme in the multiplicity of submissions, and to refine this theme to the point where it emerged as the most catalytic aspect of the persuasive phase of the inquiry. Moreover, he was able to evaluate complex funding reform options according to whether they supported the emerging place-shaping role for local authorities.

In this regard, the investigative phase of the inquiry was strikingly focused and able to discover exceptional examples of effective ‘place-shaping’ which ‘involve little, if any, institutional reform (and leave “bottom-line” financial accountability well alone)’ (Dollery et al., 2008: 485). Sir Michael found such place-shaping to have occurred (a) in Southampton’s ‘repositioning’ itself as a culture and leisure hub for knowledge-based industries on the South Coast and (b) in Nottingham’s developing of a £13 million Centre for Contemporary Arts in cooperation with the city’s two universities.

By exploring what made these and other examples exemplary, Sir Michael was able to delineate a system-wide vision of place shaping as ‘the creative use of powers and influence to promote the general well-being of a community and its citizens’ (Lyons, 2007: 51).

By articulating such a framework, which was ambitious beyond the intentions of the appointing government, and which resulted from extensive stakeholder consultation, Sir Michael expressed a catalytic leadership identity. His proposed framework could serve to inspire and empower spontaneous, voluntary initiatives and social movement activities that could serve a place-shaping role for local communities. Thus, even if he failed to receive explicit central government authorization or recognition, his inquiry could still have a long term impact on policy, if it mobilized bottom-up initiatives from local government actors to advance place-shaping.

Diagnosis of accountability problems

While the Lyons Inquiry broke new ground through its application of place-shaping as an innovative interpretive frame, it also sought to revive significant aspects of the 1976 Layfield Committee, by applying the diagnostic frame used by this predecessor. Like Layfield, the Lyons report attributes most of the problems in central–local relations to a lack of clear public accountability in supporting the role of local government. Sir Michael finds symptoms of the accountability problem in the lack of public appreciation of local government, the complexity of its funding and the poorly understood link between business and local services. From this perspective, the cumulative effect of detailed controls, capping and specific grants under recent Conservative and Labour administrations only exacerbated the confusion. His report thus sought to effect change not only in local government but also in the way central government related to it.

Through his deployment of both place-shaping and accountability frames during the investigative phase, Sir Michael expressed a catalytic identity. Did he continue to do this during the persuasive phase so that his recommendations reflected a similar leadership identity?

How catalytic were the recommendations of the final Lyons report?

Sir Michael’s recommendations on the function, form and financing of local government were published alongside the 2007 Budget and encompassed relatively modest and incremental changes to the system that was then in place. In this respect, Sir Michael’s expressive legacy came closer to that of the consolidator type of commission chair, since he seemed unwilling to assume the risks of rejection we would associate with a catalytic commissioner, considering instead that ‘a phased change to the system would also stand a better chance of political support: ministers would be wary of any reforms that could alienate affluent voters’ (Public Finance, 2007).

In other respects, however, Sir Michael demonstrated the ambitious approach to agenda-shaping expressive of a catalytic commissioner. In particular, he argued that the most appropriate response of the government to the problem of local government accountability was to institute a constitutional settlement expressed in a contract or ‘concordat’ between the central government and local authorities. The operation of this contract would be subject to scrutiny by Parliament and supported by independent advice on grants and on the costs of any obligation imposed on local authorities by central government. It would provide the institutional space within which Sir Michael’s place-shaping vision for local government could be pursued.

Preserving the legacy of a rejected report

This article is concerned with aspects of a leader’s legacy associated with a particular ELA and its enduring influence. Commission chairs, like Sir Michael, will have a number of ELAs outside the context of leading the conduct of an inquiry. What differentiates inquiry-related ELAs from others is that they leave a report as a crystallized legacy that may contain an account of the thinking and factual analysis that gave rise to its recommendations, so that there is less need for the chair to defend his or her intentions against ex post misrepresentation, and less motivation to engage in their own ex post manipulation. They can then decide the extent to which they continue to engage in the policy process that follows the submission of their report, or whether they will leave the evaluation and attribution of its impact to others.

Why then does Sir Michael appear not to have strongly aligned himself with the negative reaction to the government’s disappointing response to his report? The leadership legacy perspective may allow us to make sense of his restraint. The legacy of his ELA may have been burnished, despite the government’s failure to act upon the recommendations in the report, because the major competing interests in local government policy had, for differing reasons, an interest in supporting the legacy he sought to express through his reports. Thus, on the one hand, the incumbent government, despite rejecting his recommendations, sought to limit the consequent political damage by commending his conduct of the inquiry and subsequently appointing him to Chair the BBC trust.

On the other hand, the official rejection of even his modest funding proposals may have prompted committed localists to withhold the criticism they would have directed against this cautious approach had it been accepted. This is evident in the comments made by Jones and Stewart (2007) in the aftermath of the government’s response. They implicitly criticize the relatively conservative ‘developmental approach’ followed by the Lyons report in advocating a ‘rebalancing’ of local government finance, by comparing it with the radicalism of the Layfield committee, but they go on to suggest that if this developmental approach had generated confidence in local government, it could have provided a starting point for more radical change, including even a new constitutional settlement. Jones and Stewart (2007) suggested that blame should be directed at the Brown government, and not at Sir Michael, because it was the Brown government that prevented this developmental approach from going ‘beyond the starting post’, in what they saw, at the time, as ‘a tragic response to an outstanding report and a tragedy for local government’.

With respect to the place-shaping vision on which Sir Michael may have hoped his legacy as a catalytic commissioner to rest, his passive stance appears to have been vindicated by a number of policy developments that reflect, to varying degrees, its continuing influence:

In April 2009, the government introduced Comprehensive Area Assessments which required the Audit Commission to provide a ‘joined-up’ assessment of key public service outcomes in a locality would take into account local priorities and reduce the burden of inspection on local agencies. These changes provided a framework for supporting the type of place-shaping practices advocated in the Lyons report;

While it was not unusual for parties contesting the 2010 election to pledge to reverse centralization, the newly elected coalition government moved with remarkable speed to pass the Localism Act 2011, which attempted to dismantle top-down targets and performance frameworks (Martin, 2010: 1) and to provide a more formal recognition of local government responsibilities, although localists were critical of the Act (Jones and Stewart, 2012: 364), At the time of the release of the Lyons report, one of the architects of the Act, described the report as constituting “a route map for governments of any colour to decentralise, devolve and deregulate” (Pickles, 2007).

The chair of an independent commission into the future of council finance launched in June 2014 by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy and the Local Government Association, outlined its brief as being to follow in the footsteps of Layfield and Lyons ‘to identify practical solutions that will help enable local and central government’s vision for our communities’ (Johnstone, 2014) by addressing ongoing power imbalances in central–local government relations.

Conclusion

Commission scholarship has tended to evaluate commissions of inquiry from the perspectives of those who appoint them. Particularly in comparative studies, the instrumental focus of research has often obscured the role commission chairs play as autonomous agents, as actors whose appointment gives them the opportunity to make a contribution to processes of policy leadership. From the leadership perspective suggested in this article the requirement that chairs provide a report gives them an opportunity to shape their legacy in two important ways. It is possible to infer from commission reports, such as the three published by the Lyons Inquiry, the fiduciary legacy that commission chairs are trying to create, not just by demonstrating compliance with the conventions of commission work, but by the way they attempt to position themselves as autonomous and authoritative inquirers into the subject matter of the inquiry. In the Lyons Inquiry, Sir Michael’s thoughtful engagement with historical and theoretical background material bolstered his fiduciary legacy by giving his report an aura of scholarly detachment and informed authority. The reports also allow us to infer an expressive legacy motivation from the way commission chairs explain and justify judgments made about the scope of stakeholder engagement and agenda adjustment. In the Lyons Inquiry, Sir Michael’s engagement of a broad range of stakeholders and his focus on an ambitious system-wide vision of place-shaping suggest a catalyst legacy, while his relatively modest set of immediate proposals suggest a consolidator legacy. This mix of an ambitious vision with a cautious step by step approach to pursuing that vision may explain the continuing influence of the report and the esteem in which it is held.

The process of evaluating the legacy of commission chairs only begins once a report has been submitted, and it is dependent on the ongoing response of others. The case of Sir Michael illustrates that even those commissioners with a strong motivation to shape the legacy of their ELAs may do well to focus on writing a strong report, while leaving the process of policy impact attribution in the hands of others. It is the role of commission chairs to provide recommendations that may affect policy; they have no role in implementing policy. These recommendations, as well as the explanations and justifications for judgments made during the course of the inquiry, are provided in the report they write upon completing the inquiry. The report, then, is the best opportunity for commission chairs to present what can become their crystallized legacy, which can have an enduring impact long after the government has decided how to respond to their recommendations, and it is this possibility that can influence how they make judgments over the course of their inquiries.

This article applied a novel theoretical framework to a single one-person commission of inquiry, and the article’s implications are inevitably limited by that narrow approach. Nevertheless, the limitation to one inquiry and the selection of an inquiry that had only one chair was desirable for the initial application of this framework, because it allowed a focus on the legacy-shaping intent of a single policy actor as it can be read from the report that he wrote, free from concerns about his influence over other members of the commission, and the input other members may have had into the final language of the report. It is hoped that future research can build upon this article’s foundations by applying the framework to comparative studies, including multi-member commissions, with all their attendant complications.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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