When a crisis hits, the default way of doing government quickly unravels. Carefully constructed media grids, centrally-coordinated plans and timetabled announcements are hastily ripped up, and ministers and officials shift to a very different way of working.
In the last few months alone, ministers have had to grapple with the conflict in the Middle East, making decisions in a matter of hours to protect national security and systems – and this was just the latest crisis in a long, and varied, list. The Institute for Government has long warned about the risks of rapid policy making – and we still stand by this. But we also recognise that working fast is sometimes necessary.
Urgency can be demanded by ministers with Darren Jones recently setting out his vision for government to ‘Move Fast and Fix Things’. But it can also be triggered by exogenous shocks – whether far reaching like the Covid pandemic or recurring such as flooding. In these moments, the question is not whether speed is right or wrong, but how civil servants can make rapid, yet robust policy under pressure. This has been the focus of a recent Institute for Government project.
We surveyed 135 officials, spoke to 30 current and former civil servants, ran six focus groups with working-level officials and drew on insights from the Institute’s Ministers Reflect archive and case studies of policy successes – as well as our own personal experiences of working at the coalface of an urgent priority or crisis: from responding to the demands of a new government following the 2024 general election or shaping managed isolation and quarantine policy in New Zealand during the pandemic.
Our research – and our experiences - pointed to a clear message: the ‘burning platform’ of a crisis (whether for government or the country) can jolt the system into action. Time and again, crises can create the conditions for civil servants to cut through inertia – moving faster, streamlining bureaucracy and innovating to deliver results that too rarely exist in ‘peacetime’. Just think of the rapid roll out of vaccinations during the Covid pandemic.
But the opposite is also true. The same conditions that get the best out of the civil service also lay bare long-standing weaknesses as officials bypass or short-cut the fundamentals of ‘good’ policymaking. The result is ‘quick and dirty’ policies that can deliver immediate benefits but have long-term costs for the taxpayer and the public.
How the civil service responds to a crisis and strikes the right balance between speed and rigour is the focus of our recently published report. We explore what works – and what doesn’t – and set out the lessons that apply in other scenarios when the pressure is on. Some of our insights are well established. Others are perhaps surprising.
Crises can create the opportunity for greater clarity around goals – or at the very least encourage conversations about policy objectives, red lines and trade-offs. As one official who worked on financial recovery measures during the pandemic told us, an increased understanding of what the then chancellor’s priorities were allowed civil servants to produce advice more quickly than “business as usual times which is more a guess exercise on what is wanted and why because these are not communicated through the layers of officialdom”.
But as we dug deeper into what doesn’t work, we found that the same conditions that enable fast, decisive action also create room for error and poor outcomes in the long term. For example, a laser sharp focus on resolving the immediate issues is necessary but can leave longer-term problems unresolved – only for them to re-surface, often more acutely, in the next emergency.
For instance, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the government cushioned households against the energy price shock, but at a significant cost, as gaps in data limited the ability to target support effectively (an issue that continues to this day as government struggles to design a more targeted response to the energy crisis triggered by the Iran war).
This duality is present at every stage of the policy making process – from how data and evidence is used to governance and decision-making. Crisis structures can enable ministers and civil servants to ‘grip’ an issue and unblock problems more rapidly than usual processes, but it can also crowd out challenge and entrench group think.
Intense periods of high activity can create a sense of camaraderie, but prolonged periods of working in this way can lead to low morale, high turnover and a loss of institutional expertise when it is needed the most. In Policy making in a crisis: a civil servant’s guide, we provide practical prompts for civil servants to help them navigate these extremes to develop robust policy advice when time is short and the stakes are high.
Individual civil servants cannot do this alone. Ministers have a crucial role to play. And the system in which they operate needs to change to enable fast-paced policy making when it is required. In our previous report, we made the case for three key shifts in government. First, normalise a culture that empowers people to take proportionate risks and adopt a genuine test‑and‑learn mindset. Second, scale existing tools, systems and processes that can facilitate fast, informed action. Third, invest in people to create a workforce that is both stable and agile.
Working at rapid pace is a feature of modern governance, and ministers and officials must work together to balance speed with the fundamentals of ‘good’ policy making: clear objectives and structured handovers to ‘business as usual’ policy teams, streamlined decision making with appropriate safeguards, early and consistent engagement with those responsible for delivery (not just the usual suspects), disciplined use of evidence and deliberate structures that allow civil servants to reflect, learn, and feel supported.
Nehal Davison is the programme director for the IfG's work on policymaking. Vimbai Dzimwasha is a senior researcher in the policymaking team at the institute. They are the co-authors of Policy making in a crisis: A civil servant’s guide alongside Rosa Hodgkin, another policymaking-focused senior researcher at the IfG