This autumn will see the publication of a raft of strategies and roadmaps, as the government shifts into what prime minister Keir Starmer has characterised as “phase two” of its administration, “where we focus on delivery, delivery, delivery and start to show what a difference a Labour government really makes”.
Among these publications will be documents that provide more clarity about the opportunity mission and how it will link into other policy spheres, including youth policy. A schools white paper is the key document expected to give more information on how government aims to deliver on its commitment to “give every child – from early years to leaving school – the best start in life”, while a child poverty strategy will support the mission’s wider aim to break the link between young people’s background and their future success.
Finally, a youth strategy, including perspectives from 20,000 young people who took part in a nationwide listening exercise, will set out how government intends to better coordinate youth services and policy at a local, regional and national level to support this effort.
While this breadth of work is to be applauded, it also throws up questions around how these interventions might be channelled into a coherent programme of support. Among those urging the government to be ambitious in joining up its policies for young people is former civil servant Moira Wallace, a veteran of the last Labour government’s wide-ranging programme of social policy innovation.
The Social Exclusion Unit
In 1997, Wallace, with more than a decade of experience in the Treasury and No.10 behind her, was appointed head of the newly established Social Exclusion Unit (SEU). Set up by the prime minister, the unit was launched with 12 full-time and four part-time staff. The numbers would grow over the next few years, but it remained a small team, based in the Cabinet Office. “Social exclusion” was not a household term, but the government described it as “a shorthand label for what can happen when individuals or areas suffer from a combination of linked problems such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime environments, bad health and family breakdown”.
Approaching policy in a joined-up and cross-departmental way was the key instruction for Wallace and her team. The prime minister and the No.10 Policy Unit had identified the fact that government often struggled to prevent and respond to problems because it did not recognise the complexity of their causes. The SEU was freed from other day-to-day responsibilities and given tightly focused issues to look at. In its first three years, it tackled, in turn: school absence and exclusion; rough sleeping; teenage pregnancy; young people not in education, employment or training (NEET); as well as beginning a long-term project to develop a national strategy for neighbourhood renewal. Its remit was to get to grips with the issues behind individual social problems, identify good and bad practice, then propose solutions and implementation plans.
The unit was set up to be multi-disciplinary, staffed by secondees from different government departments alongside local government officials and experts from charities and frontline organisations. Wallace remembers this as a hugely productive mix, and one that helped the unit form wide connections across government and outside. Ministers encouraged the SEU to work in an outward-looking way – what Wallace called the “go and look” method – and the unit’s reports were built on what they learned from visits up and down the country, as well as discussions with academic experts, frontline practitioners and, crucially, people with lived experience of the issues being investigated.
The cross-government wiring
For the first few years of its existence, the SEU reported directly to the prime minister – a decision that aimed to emphasise the importance of the initiative. But collaboration with other departments was vital to ensure that its reports were accepted and implemented: they had to be agreed by cabinet, just like any policy announcement. Wallace says that departments were “much more supportive than the sceptics predicted”.
It helped that for each topic, the unit was linked with “champion ministers” in key departments: Hilary Armstrong was ministerial champion for rough sleeping and neighbourhood renewal, for example, while Tessa Jowell was ministerial champion for the work on teenage pregnancy. These connections helped align the efforts of the unit with the big departments.
Senior officials were, in the main, also very supportive. Wallace says she thinks most recognised that “if they were a willing partner to others when asked for help, they were more likely to get cooperation when the roles were reversed”. Nonetheless, Wallace recalls that the unit’s findings were sometimes challenging for departments: “The unit was given the time and space to look at how policy and services were working for the most vulnerable. Sadly, sometimes the only honest answer was: ‘Really badly’. It was our job to push for policies that would actually work.”
Designing for delivery
SEU reports were always a mix of strong, evidence-based analysis and detailed implementation plans. Some people felt the implementation plans were too detailed – or “fussy” – Wallace recalls, but as she looks back now, she says this level of detail was key to implementation. “Many of the issues we were asked to look into had arisen because no one was in charge of making the system work properly, or because people with complex problems were being ignored or shunted from one agency to another. If you didn’t redesign the system to work better, this would keep happening.”
“It felt different from any job I’d done before, and changed the way I did every job afterwards”
After analysing the cost and causes of a problem, the SEU would identify what change was needed to fix it, often at a very local level, and then trace this back to national government to develop policies and systems to effect change. This led to the creation of local, regional and national mechanisms that aimed to deliver policy outcomes. “Very often,” Wallace recalls, “the issues that we were asked to look at were explicable in terms of: difficult problems meet inadequate services.”
Her team’s work sought to create the conditions in which services would be better able to prevent and address those problems. Implementation of the unit’s reports was always passed back to the main line departments. In some cases, the work would be taken on by an existing team; in others, the unit recommended that a new dedicated team should be created to take policy forward. For example, the Teenage Pregnancy Unit was created following the SEU’s 1999 report; and the Rough Sleepers Unit – Louise Casey’s first role in government – was also established in 1999 to follow through the SEU’s recommendations on street homelessness.
Joining up Whitehall
There was always the risk, of course, that departments would quietly shelve the unit’s reports when they got the chance. But close work with the Treasury had ensured that the reports’ targets were embedded in spending reviews and the Public Service Agreement framework: delivering on social exclusion metrics thus became part of the accountability framework for government departments. And the Treasury itself was a major contributor to tackling social exclusion, through Gordon Brown’s championing of action to reduce child poverty.
Looking back, Wallace recalls how the Social Exclusion Unit’s work blended with that of many other departments to form a concerted approach to preventing child and youth disadvantage. Cross-cutting prevention programmes such as Sure Start, Connexions and the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy were trailblazers for joined-up local delivery, for example.
Youth offending teams and drug action teams were also making a real impact on some of the key drivers of youth offending. A cross-cutting review of “youth at risk” in the 2000 Comprehensive Spending Review even made extra funding conditional on more coordination in Whitehall. Machinery of government changes brought more youth policy issues into DfE, and the 2003 Every Child Matters green paper established key outcomes that should guide government policy.
Even though Wallace left the social exclusion unit in 2002, her interest in social policy and joining up continued. After a director general role leading work on joining up the criminal justice departments, she became DG of crime and policing at the Home Office. Then, in 2008, she was appointed as a permanent secretary and given the task of bringing together staff from the business department and Defra to create the first Department of Energy and Climate Change.
After stepping down as perm sec in 2012, Wallace spent five years as provost of Oriel College, Oxford. There, too, she put her interest in social policy to good use, chairing the university’s admissions committee and spearheading the effort to attract applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Returning to social policy
But out of all the jobs she’s ever done, it’s clear that Wallace regards running the SEU as the most special. “It felt completely different from any job I’d done before, and what I learned there changed the way I did every job afterwards,” she says. So it’s no surprise that she has now returned to the field of social policy as a researcher and writer.
In 2018, Wallace joined the London School of Economics’ Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion as a visiting professor of practice. She set herself the task of looking at what happened to the generation of young people in whom the last Labour government invested so much attention and resource, as well as looking at how policy and outcomes had changed under the coalition and Conservative governments. She relished the opportunity to see how different initiatives had developed and performed, and as a self-confessed “data person”, dug deep into the official statistics.
“Working together closely makes even more sense when money is tight”
The results she uncovered were noteworthy. In a 2023 paper, Trends in Adolescent Disadvantage, Wallace found some striking improvements in youth outcomes had occurred. Across a range of youth issues that were both “very expensive and very damaging for the individuals”, with a concerted effort by central and local government, there had been significant improvements. Many different youth outcomes improved in parallel over the same time period, starting early in the last Labour government, and continuing into the early years of the coalition. For example, across a range of secondary school attainment indicators, the decade up to 2012 saw improvement and narrowing disadvantage gaps.
Wallace’s report describes how secondary school absence levels fell by 40%, permanent exclusion rates halved, and an extra fifth of the teenage population remained in full-time education after 16. These improvements went much wider than education. Data on adolescent drinking in England over this period shows a significant fall in alcohol use from around 2003 to 2014. The proportion of 15-year-olds who had ever taken drugs halved between 2003 and 2014. And as is well known, between 1998 and 2019, the teenage conception rate for under-18s fell by 66%, with a sharp acceleration in the rate of reduction after 2007.
The improvements were seen not just in national averages but also reductions in inequalities – pupils eligible for free school meals and those with special educational needs narrowed the attainment gap with other pupils; while Black Caribbean pupils, previously over-represented in both school exclusions and among those not achieving Level 2 by age 16, saw some of the biggest improvements. White pupils were the group most likely to have consumed alcohol in the last week in 2003, but this group saw the biggest reduction by 2014.
Between 2012 and 2014, however, the picture began to change. Many of the indicators began to stall and in some cases, reverse. And some inequalities began to widen again. The reasons for the stalling of progress are complicated to unpick. Wallace thinks it likely that austerity played a part, but thinks some of these subjects suffered from a lack of attention as well as a lack of money.
“The resources and attention given to youth disadvantage increased very sharply under the Labour government,” she says. “Then they decreased again very sharply after 2010. Labour’s approach was characterised by national initiatives intended to deliver specified outcome targets. After 2010, national government set no targets and left local areas and institutions to decide their priorities and manage the consequences.”
School absence
Wallace explored one aspect of this broad story in more detail in an Institute for Government report on school absence earlier this year. The paper details the policy and implementation work that saw school absence fall for more than a decade from 2000-01. The report draws out several key lessons from that work. Government should ensure it fully understands the costs associated with and the root causes of the problem it is tackling. It should ensure that the most vulnerable children and young people are thought about in the design of universal policies and services. That would mean putting absence at the heart of school policy and supporting the front line by sharing good practice.
As absence is a joined-up problem, Wallace says government should focus on ensuring connections and collaboration with key partners across the public sector and beyond, and then on developing strong local partnerships to drive change. To “jump-start” this change, the report suggests funding whole-system pilots in local areas.
Finally, the paper advocates an outcomes-focused strategy with clear targets, supported by close monitoring of progress so that officials “watch the data like a hawk, evolve and adapt”.
Lessons for today
Wallace reiterates the importance of targets for the government’s wider ambitions and its mission-based approach. She thinks missions will fail without clear targets. Some of the problems the government is facing today show “what happens when the focus on outcomes drifts away”: progress can stagnate or deteriorate because no one has a target to sustain it. Wallace is aware, of course, of the controversy that can accompany targets in government, and acknowledges the problems that can be caused by badly designed objectives or too many trivial targets.
She adds that one way to ensure targets are clear and well-designed is to adopt a more holistic approach to data about how public services are performing, and look behind the average to probe variations between areas and groups. “I don’t think government makes remotely enough use of the data it’s got,” she says. “You’ll be much more likely to design a good target, and spot if it’s being gamed, if you are looking at a range of indicators of how your policy is going. And, of course, understanding the data is key to delivery, whether or not you have targets.”
Wallace’s IfG paper also sets out other reflections for mission-based government. She thinks the government needs to “remember that its move back to an outcome-based approach to public services is an enormous change” and ministers should “ensure that the system is developing and rewarding the delivery skills they require”. And the government should remember the importance of strategy.
“Delivery can never thrive without great strategy behind it,” Wallace says, adding that “coherence is a core principle in effective strategy design. For ministers, this means that delivery of any government priority is much more likely if other government policies point in the same direction. Conflicting policies, on the other hand, are a recipe for failure.”
“You’ll be much more likely to design a good target if you are looking at a range of indicators of how your policy is going”
But she writes that this sort of coherence should not be assumed as automatic, even if the need for it is evident. As she puts it: “The lesson of history is that departments tend not to self-organise.” It took a few years before the last Labour government developed coherent structures and objectives for their childhood and youth policies, but rebuilding those mechanisms should be addressed “without delay” since it would improve delivery and reduce cost.
Alongside this call for urgent action, Wallace acknowledges that the public spending environment is a key difference between the turn of the century and now. But she doesn’t think that weakens the case for joining up: “Working closely together makes even more sense when money is tight.”
Her overarching message is one of encouragement. The trajectory of change in the early 2000s, she says, shows that with a clear focus and coordinated effort, “government can do remarkable things”.
For more, read Wallace’s IfG paper, Reducing school absence: Innovation lessons from the last Labour government