Professor Mariana Mazzucato

So the lessons should go from local to national.

The money should flow in the reverse.

Right.

And so, for example, back to this capability index, what we're trying to do is better understand which cities were able or less able, whether it's during COVID with the lockdown to deal with that problem, whether it's a flood in New Orleans or in Delhi, what

what was revealed in terms of the capacity and capability of the mayor and their team to work with citizens to solve their problems.

So you can call it devolution, but it's also about working with people at the local level.

And we should be learning from cities and local places because that's where the leaders, the political leaders have a closer relationship with the people that in theory they're trying to serve.

Those lessons currently are not going national because we don't

look at cities or local places as places where innovation, where knowledge, where kind of 21st century capitalism is happening in a way that we should learn how to do better.

We always go back to the national policies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's

Absolutely important.

But for example, coming back to the Camden example where it was the learning across 10 housing estates in Camden that the city, the council leader, sorry, learned how to create better adult social care.

That, to be honest, is not local, right?

That's about working with your local people, which in Newcastle will be different, say, from Camden, of course.

But the lesson of don't work at people, but work with them and figure out the structure, hence my focus on this conversation.

to create that structure, to do that, and then have learnings between, for example, cities.

We don't do that.

I mean, what's really striking, and this is why I set up the Institute at UCL, is because we value the private sector, the learning of what works, what doesn't in companies, you know, Harvard Business School's case study methodology,