Are Compacts about to matter again?

A local compact is an agreement that sets out how voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations and public sector bodies will work together. At their best, compacts are practical tools for building trust, improving behaviour, and handling inevitable tensions in a constructive way.

Compacts have a long history. They emerged from the Commission on the Future of the Voluntary Sector in England (1996), chaired by Nicholas Deakin, which called for a clearer and more balanced relationship between government and civil society. That thinking led to the first national Compact and, in the early 2000s, to a rapid spread of local compacts across England. For a time, they were a familiar part of local partnership working.

Over the years, their prominence declined. In some places, Compacts became symbolic rather than operational. In others, they were overtaken by new commissioning models, increasing system complexity, and a more transactional approach to relationships. The language of partnership often remained, but the structures that supported it weakened or disappeared.

That context makes recent developments feel particularly timely.

The government’s publication of a refreshed Civil Society Covenant signals renewed attention to how the state and civil society relate to one another. Allied to this is the call-out for members of a new Civil Society Council — formal roles designed to provide challenge, insight, and accountability from outside government.

What’s striking is how closely this mirrors effective practice at local level.

For Compacts to work well, they must be supported by a clear implementation mechanism, such as a Compact Implementation Group. This would be a small group of leaders from both VCSE (usually the local civil society infrastructure organisation) and public sector with the authority to oversee how the Compact is being used, surface recurring issues, and support learning across the system.

Compacts are not primarily about resolving individual disputes. Their purpose is to improve working relationships over time and to address problems before they become entrenched. Clear arrangements for implementation, escalation, and learning need to be written into Compacts deliberately, rather than left to custom and practice.

Seen together, national and local developments are pointing in the same direction. Both recognise that good relationships do not build themselves or sustain themselves! They need agreed ways to raise concerns safely, test behaviours, and reset expectations — particularly where power, funding, and accountability are uneven.

This feels like an important moment for local compacts. If central government is formalising civil society’s role in dialogue and scrutiny, local compacts should explicitly reflect that too.

Compacts will not resolve all structural challenges. But used well, they can support better day-to-day working relationships between civil society and public bodies at a time when trust, transparency, and collaboration matter more than ever. With renewed momentum coming from the centre, this may be the right moment for a resurgence of compact working locally.

Written by Lev Pedro