How to turn local pilots into national practice: lessons from Future Ready

Delivery models tend to overestimate the likelihood of sector-wide scaling. That assumption is often what justified the programme’s business case in the first place.

The pattern is well documented across sectors. In 2021 the National Audit Office found that unclear roles and piecemeal funding were preventing councils from building lasting capacity on net zero. The 2025 evaluation of MHCLG’s Local Digital Fund found agile methods taking hold within funded teams but not spreading across councils.

Future Ready, the community and knowledge-sharing service within Innovate UK’s £60m Net Zero Living Programme, was designed to address this directly.

Urban Foresight led the service for two and a half years, working with 52 local authorities across the nations and regions of the UK. We convened the cohort, overseeing mentoring, peer learning, and insights capture from across the programme so that it could be used beyond it.

The results were strong. 85% of participants applied the learning in their day-to-day work, and 96% formed new collaborative links with other authorities.

Five lessons from that experience stand out.

1. Segment by readiness, not geography or sector

Councils start from very different places, and support designed for the average starting point serves nobody well. Future Ready worked with three distinct cohorts, each receiving different funding, timeframes and depths of technical support according to where they were starting from.

The gaps were substantial. Authorities newer to net zero delivery typically had no strategy or delivery plan in place, and rated their own confidence to deliver as no better than neutral. A council in that position needs fundamentally different support from one already running live pilots. And readiness is rarely uniform even within a single authority: a council can be strong in one area and inexperienced in another.

Programmes that design for this spectrum of starting positions, rather than a single model, get further.

2. Peer learning has to be designed, not assumed

Connecting people does not, by itself, produce knowledge transfer. Future Ready’s community of practice ran on a deliberate structure: a consistent quarterly event format, clear expectations of what members gave and got, and success measures that shifted from participation early on to evidence of collaboration later.

The most striking early finding was how much councils had in common. Participants repeatedly told us their most significant learning was that authorities across the country face substantially the same challenges, regardless of size or context. That recognition, surfaced mostly at the in-person gatherings participants rated as the programme’s most effective element, underpinned much of the collaboration that followed.

The best evidence the design worked was what the community did without us. One council ran a carbon literacy workshop for the rest of the cohort on its own initiative. A group of London authorities formed a working group that met outside programme events entirely. Good structure makes that more likely; it does not need to direct it.

3. Synthesis is a discipline, not an afterthought

Creating Better Places, which we produced for Innovate UK, is a practical handbook and ten resource packs distilling what 52 local authorities learned into approaches other councils can use. Although it was published at the programme’s close, it was the product of insights capture that ran throughout delivery, which meant we could act on what we were learning rather than simply describe it afterwards.

The handbook’s diagnostic canvas illustrates the kind of output this produces: a short, structured tool that a council team can use in fifteen minutes to identify where its own progress is stuck, rather than a further report to file.

4. Someone has to own the translation from local to national

Local learning does not become national practice by itself. Someone has to be responsible for converting what one authority has discovered into something a whole sector can use.

In Future Ready, this was written into our brief. In practice it meant reading across 52 projects, spotting the patterns that no single authority could see from inside its own work, and turning them into guidance others could apply. It is a distinct role, separate from both delivery and dissemination, and easily overlooked because it produces little that is visible until the synthesis is complete.

The National Audit Office has shown the cost of leaving this role unfilled. In 2022 it found that years of local growth programmes had left government unable to say what had worked, because no consistent evaluation or learning function existed to capture it. Opportunities to inform future interventions were lost.

Systematic evaluation helps learning to spread and scale. One authority told the programme’s evaluation that collaboration through Future Ready had enabled it to pilot its approach in another county entirely – a local solution crossing a boundary it would not otherwise have crossed.

5. Measure capability, not just outputs

A capability-building programme can hit every milestone and still fail. Whether the events happened and the deliverables landed matters, but it is not evidence that anyone is better equipped to act differently afterwards.

The more useful measures concern changed behaviour. In Future Ready’s endline evaluation:

• 87% of participants reported increased confidence to lead or influence action in their own organisation
• a similar proportion reported increased individual capability, particularly in stakeholder engagement, systems thinking and project scoping
• almost a third reported that their project or partnership would not have happened without the programme

These are self-reported findings, but the consistency across survey and workshop evidence gives reasonable confidence that learning translated into practice rather than remaining theoretical.

The wider lesson

None of this is specific to net zero. Any programme attempting to move from isolated local pilots to shared national practice faces the same design problem: different starting points need different support; connection has to be built deliberately; insight has to be captured during delivery rather than assembled at the end; and someone has to hold responsibility for turning local learning into sector-wide practice.

That combination of convening, synthesis and translation at national scale is what Urban Foresight brought to Future Ready, and what we bring to programmes across sectors, from net zero to digital transformation.

Much of what we learned is published in the Creating Better Places handbook and its ten resource packs, which are free to use. If you are designing a programme that needs to scale local learning, we would be glad to compare notes and share our experience: hello@urbanforesight.com.