When this government came to office, it more or less had the diagnosis for our national ills right. It understood that the British state had been hollowed out, that delivery had decayed, and that the centre needed rebuilding. It set out five missions to focus the whole of government on outcomes that cut across departments.
Whatever happens to it from here, we argue that diagnosis was largely right. The trouble has been everything that came after the diagnosis. The next government, will inherit the same state and meet the same obstacles unless it learns them.
The first lesson is that a mission needs machinery. The five missions were intellectually sound but are now barely mentioned. They did not fail because the analysis was wrong. They failed because the operating model of the centre of government wasn’t redesigned to enable mission delivery.
A goal that cuts across departments needs an institutional owner with the authority to act across boundaries, and the capacity to keep acting once ministerial attention moves on. None was created. The missions were a statement of intent with no machine behind them, and intent without machinery does not survive contact with the daily grind (and the grid), of governing.
The second lesson is that rebuilding the centre is not the same as restoring its capacity to act with one mind. Architecture can be redesigned, with delivery teams and a revived strategy function, and much of that work is welcome but architecture is not capacity or capability.
When the centre could not settle a dispute between the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence over the most basic question a state faces, what it spends to defend itself, the result was the resignation of the secretary of state for defence. New structures are not sufficient when culture and behaviours do not support open, robust debate and agreeable disagreement. Whilst the principal of collective responsibility is inviolate, we would argue that the centre has become less effective at tolerating disagreement and building consensus.
The third lesson is that announcing is not delivering. This government has too often treated the announcement as the achievement. But the announcement is the easy part. The hard part is implementation: the enforcement regime, the regulator asked to invent a workable answer at speed, the slow and unglamorous work that turns a commitment into a change in someone’s life.
That second half has been consistently under-resourced and under-attended and it is where impact is actually created. A government measured by what it announces will always look busier than it is, even if the reality is that nothing has changed.
The fourth lesson is that you have to be honest about trade-offs. A government that will not level with the public about what things cost, and what must be given up to afford them, cannot sustain difficult delivery. Delivery will always be hard and if the political support is not there, because the challenge of the change was not surfaced and discussed, delivery will fail.
Whether on welfare, defence or the constraints of its own manifesto, this government has repeatedly chosen the comfort of leaving the trade-offs unspoken and has then found itself unable to carry the country through the consequences.
Underpinning these lessons is the same thing: capability. The government inherited a state that had lost much of its ability to deliver and has tried to deliver through it without first rebuilding that ability. This error is what underpins the others.
Missions without machinery, structures without the capacity to effect change, announcements without implementation and ambitions without the honesty to fund them are all versions of the same error, which is to treat delivery as something you conjure into being rather than something you build incrementally and carefully.
This is not a counsel of despair and it is not really about one administration, either. The state these lessons describe was hollowed out over decades, by governments of both parties, and no single administration created the problem but it is cumulative. However, a government that diagnosed the problem correctly was better placed than most to begin fixing it, and has instead demonstrated how hard the fixing is. That is the lesson worth learning.
Delivery is a capability, built patiently over years, not an intention announced in a manifesto. Whoever holds power next will face the same wall this government has run into, and the same choice: to keep announcing intentions, or to do the slower work of building the machine that enables them to be realised.
Patrick Diamond is professor of public policy at Queen Mary University of London and a former head of policy planning in No.10. Vijay K. Luthra is a public service transformation specialist and former civil servant, local government councillor, school governor and NHS NED