Does inter-municipal collaboration improve public service resilience? Evidence from local authorities in England

Resilient organizations maintain functioning during times of unexpected adversity. Collaboration may enhance resilience by enabling scarce information, resources and capabilities to be leveraged across organizations, although it also impede rapid flexible decision-making. We explore this dilemma using the case ‘inter-municipal’ collaboration in England, analysing how first COVID-19 lockdown 2020 affected provision Housing Benefit – a locally administered social-security entitlement. Using OLS, probit, random-effects GLS Hausman-Taylor estimations on time-series data from 187 lower-tier councils, we find that partly limited decline service accuracy but gave no protection speed.