Every incoming administration promises to govern in a new and better way. Whitehall is told to raise its game and deliver better, faster results. Yet, all too often, governments fall back on the same old habits: operating through departmental silos, stop-start reform programmes, along with short-lived frameworks for measuring performance leading to accusations that Whitehall is too ‘command and control’.
The question this predicament raises is simple: does the UK need a cross-government theory of change? In other words, a shared understanding across ministers and officials of what outcomes matter most, how government intends to achieve them and how progress will be judged.
Why the theory of change matters
The stakes could not be higher. As we have argued before, democratic government must be able to deliver tangible improvements to people’s lives if it is to hold back the tide of populism and polarisation. But the way government operates in Britain today ensures outcome frameworks remain piecemeal. Each department writes its own outcome delivery plan. The Treasury negotiates bilaterally with spending departments. Parliament receives departmental reports in silos.
The result is a patchwork approach. Departments optimise their own outputs, ministers chase media-friendly wins, but the system as a whole lacks coherence. Strategic capacity is eroded and wicked problems that demand collaboration – social care, skills, homelessness, regional inequality – fall between the cracks. Too often, the focus is on inputs and efficiencies, rather than connecting pounds and people to purpose.
Lessons from abroad
This situation is not inevitable. Other governments have developed cross-cutting outcome frameworks that act as a de facto theory of change.
New Zealand’s Results Programmes made chief executives jointly accountable for outcomes like reducing crime or increasing skills and later the Wellbeing Budget embedded a broad set of national wellbeing outcomes. The message was clear: success was about cross-government results, not activity in single departments.
Scotland has its National Performance Framework, with 11 National Outcomes aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The framework has created a common language across devolved government, even if embedding it fully in budgeting and decision-making has been somewhat uneven.
Canada’s Policy on Results requires every federal department to align its programmes to national outcomes, with logic models and performance stories made public through the GC InfoBase. This creates transparency and comparability across government.
Australia ties budget appropriations directly to outcome statements, making it a legal requirement for agencies to demonstrate how spending links to intended results. Performance audits by the auditor-general provide external scrutiny.
The European Commission mandates that every major policy proposal sets out an “intervention logic”, essentially a theory of change, to explain how activities will lead to outputs, results and impacts.
Each of these models are in their own way imperfect, but they demonstrate that it is possible to align a whole government machinery around a shared approach to outcomes rooted in a common understanding of the causal drivers of policy problems.
The UK’s blind spot
UK central government remains an outlier. Departments may use theory of change tools for specific programmes and the Treasury sets out guidance in the Green Book and Magenta Book. But there is no overarching framework binding Whitehall together. Each new government tears up the previous performance regime: Public Service Agreements, Departmental Business Plans, Single Departmental Plans, Outcome Delivery Plans - and starts again.
The National Audit Office has repeatedly warned that there is still no coherent, enduring framework for strategic planning across government. Liaison Committee reports have described Whitehall as trapped in short-term, siloed thinking. Spending reviews remain dominated by departmental bids to the Treasury, rather than mission-based envelopes that encourage collaboration.
This matters. Without a unifying theory of change, departments define success differently, ministers fail to achieve meetings of minds and civil servants struggle to coordinate across administrative boundaries.
Contradictory reform initiatives
One symptom of the absence of a shared philosophy is the proliferation of contradictory reforms. Successive governments have pursued programmes that pull in opposite directions.
Take healthcare reform over the last decade: on the one hand, the NHS was asked to pursue integration through Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships; on the other hand competition remained embedded through market-style procurement and fragmentation of commissioning.
Or skills policy: governments have alternately centralised powers in Whitehall (e.g. creating national skills accounts) while devolving responsibility to Local Enterprise Partnerships or combined authorities, with little consistency in how success is defined.
In local government, devolution deals have promised greater autonomy for city-regions, followed by parallel initiatives such as centrally directed levelling-up funds that re-impose top-down bidding and ministerial discretion.
These contradictions are not accidents: they flow from the absence of a single, agreed theory of change about what government is trying to achieve and how. One reform emphasises market discipline, another stresses collaboration, a third trumpets local autonomy. But no overarching framework ties them together.
What a cross-government theory of change could look like
We do not argue for a straitjacket. UK government should not attempt a single, rigid blueprint imposed from the centre. But it does need an adaptive framework, rooted in a common philosophy. At its core should be:
- A set of national outcomes: economic, social, environmental; that command broad political and public legitimacy
- A shared causal logic: prevention, integration, collaboration; that guides how interventions are designed and evaluated
- Cross-departmental missions owned collectively by ministers and senior officials, with resources pooled where necessary
- Transparency and accountability through regular reporting on progress, not just by department but for government as a whole.
Departments and localities would still develop their own theories of change for specific programmes but these would sit within the wider national framework. Ministers would have clear accountability for cross-cutting missions. Civil servants would gain clarity of purpose and incentives to collaborate.
Towards a more strategic state
Of course, a shared theory of change will not solve all of Whitehall’s problems. Institutional inertia is endemic while Treasury’s dominance of budgeting remains a significant barrier; but without such a framework, Britain will remain trapped in cycles of short-term managerialism.
The international evidence is clear: governments that align their priorities around shared outcomes and a common understanding of causal drivers are better able to tackle complex challenges, particularly relevant given the disruption wrought by the 5th Industrial Revolution. In a time of economic strain and political distrust, the UK cannot afford merely to muddle through.
The case for a cross-government theory of change is, at heart, the case for a more strategic state: one that thinks long term, acts collaboratively and delivers results that citizens can visualise and experience in their everyday lives.