Working Together SCS Example Statement (750 Words)

SI was the senior responsible owner for a £26 million programme modernising licensing for small food businesses, which had to operate across England, Scotland and Wales. Each administration ran its own licensing rules, IT systems and inspection arrangements. A year into the programme, relations between the three teams were strained: each believed the others were slow, the Scottish team suspected the design favoured English processes, and a joint milestone had been missed publicly. Without a genuine partnership the programme would either fragment into three incompatible systems or collapse into recrimination, and 48,000 businesses would keep dealing with three conflicting services. Each team had also built its own business case, so we were effectively funding three overlapping programmes.

TMy task was to rebuild trust between the three administrations and establish a partnership capable of delivering one coherent service while respecting three legal frameworks and three sets of ministers. I judged that the programme's real risk was not technical but relational, so I treated the partnership itself as the deliverable in my first six months and measured it as carefully as the technical build.

AI started with relationships, not governance. I visited the Scottish and Welsh leads in their own offices, spent time with their teams and listened to their grievances without defending my programme's position. I wrote up what I heard and sent it to both leads for comment before sharing it with my own board, which signalled that the partnership would be honest in both directions. I acknowledged openly that early design decisions had been taken in London with too little involvement, and I shared our own problems honestly, including deadlines my team had missed. I proposed a joint programme board with equal membership, a chair rotating between the three administrations, and a rule that design decisions required agreement from all three, with an escalation route designed to avoid ministerial confrontation. I offered to host the secretariat for the first year and to put my own programme's budget lines on the shared table first, demonstrating that transparency applied to us too. To reset the technical conversation, I organised a two-day working session in Cardiff where mixed teams mapped each administration's licensing process end to end and discovered far more common ground than anyone had assumed: around 80 per cent of the process was shared. From that we agreed a shared outcomes framework, one service standard for applicants with three locally owned delivery routes, and I negotiated it with each senior team separately before it reached the board, so nobody was bounced into a position in public. When a dispute over the funding split stalled the board for two months, I commissioned a joint analysis of costs, brought the three finance directors together and brokered a formula based on transaction volumes that all three could defend to their own ministers. I built mixed delivery teams, deliberately pairing staff from different administrations on each workstream, and a shared risk register owned jointly rather than by my programme office. When a senior figure in one administration briefed against the programme, I resisted escalating and instead asked my counterpart what sat behind it, which surfaced a legitimate concern about inspection workloads that we then designed around. I brought the three communications teams together so public messaging was coordinated rather than competitive, and I created a joint induction for new joiners across the three teams. I maintained the personal infrastructure too: monthly one-to-ones with both counterparts, early private warnings about problems before they reached the board, and public credit to the other administrations at every opportunity. When my own minister proposed announcing progress unilaterally, I set out the risks to the partnership and persuaded them to make the announcement jointly from Edinburgh instead. I also instituted a quarterly lessons exchange so each administration could borrow the others' improvements without any sense of being graded against them.

RThe three administrations signed a joint delivery agreement covering all three nations, the first of its kind for this policy area. The unified service launched two months ahead of the revised schedule and served 48,000 businesses in its first year, with applicant satisfaction at 87 per cent. Delivery confidence has stayed green for four consecutive quarters. The funding formula survived a spending review unchanged, the board still meets under rotating chairs, and the partnership model has been written up as a template for other UK-wide programmes. Both counterpart directors now call me before problems reach paper, which I count as the real result.