Last week’s speech to the FDA conference by the chief secretary to the prime minister, Darren Jones, was a substantive effort to outline a coherent view of government delivery. More practically, Jones proposed delivery teams led by senior officials in each department, recruitment of external delivery advisers, and a shared-intelligence platform linking No.10 with Whitehall departments, alongside delivery taskforces modelled on the Vaccine Taskforce. Jones’ reforms are a genuine attempt to get to grips with the implementation deficit in government which many blame for the Starmer administration’s current malaise.
The chief secretary’s thinking reflects an emerging consensus among the commentariat about how to strengthen delivery in UK government. The author Sam Freedman has set out a detailed blueprint for an expanded Office of the Prime Minister, a rebuilt strategy unit, and an Office of Budget Management. The UK Growth Group of Labour MPs and the Future Governance Forum think tank have elaborated the case for a Department of the Prime Minister, while the Institute for Government’s Commission on the Centre of Government argued in parallel for a single prime ministerial department.
Meanwhile, Michelle Clement’s contemporary history of Tony Blair’s Delivery Unit, based on its former head, Michael Barber’s own diaries, has reminded observers of the advantages of a highly structured and centrally managed approach to policy implementation.
There is no doubt that the centre has lacked effective strategic coordinating capacity outside national security for two decades. No prime minister since Blair has adopted a coherent approach to delivery of key programmes and policies from the centre. The Treasury controls the flow of public money without countervailing strategic capacity at the centre, which means there is insufficient focus on outcomes and quality of results. The Treasury acts as a risk manager, not a strategic investor. This fault line has been identified by every serious review of government delivery, and yet still remains unresolved.
While the Barber delivery unit produced measurable gains in the 2000s, there are doubts as to how far it will provide a model for the next decade. ‘Deliverology’ reflects a particular theory of change in public services: the centre selects a few prime ministerial priorities, identifies targets, monitors the trajectory of improvement, and removes obstacles and blockages where necessary, driving performance throughout the system. The approach is prone to the gaming and distortion that inevitably accompanies targets, to privileging what is measurable over what matters, and to being heavily reliant on the personal input of the prime minister.
The model is, by definition, heavily centralising. It regards delivery as the transmission of control from the centre to the front line, rather than building capacity in the institutions, localities and services that have to sustain improvement once the attention of the centre has moved on. It is also relies on the assumption that central government in Whitehall should continue to oversee the delivery of policy, when it is clear that among the major weaknesses of implementation is that the centre seeks to do too much.
Deliverology compounds these problems: it is largely divorced from policymaking, while it focuses on refining technical structures, negating the importance of culture and relationships. In many instances, the problem is not simply implementation, but the fact the policy at the outset was flawed. Delivery units reflect the flaws of information uncertainty in Soviet-era central planning, and the gap between the prescriptions of the centre and the lived reality on the ground.
The burgeoning project of English devolution underway for more than a decade in fact creates the opportunity for major decentralisation of service delivery to the sub-national level with greater scope for testing and trialling new methods and programmes. In this scenario, the role for central government is to collect performance data and enable comparison between areas to prevent producer capture, rather than instructing organisations in the minutiae of how best to deliver their priorities.
That instead requires the patient construction of distributed capacity: institutions, regional authorities and public services equipped to sustain improvement without continuing central interference. This includes building capability in frontier technology and AI, as Jones proposed in his FDA speech.
For all that, government delivery will never be a technocratic exercise that can be unlocked by clever technocrats and management consultants. It is an inherently political process. Above all else, it requires us to unleash the passion and commitment of staff at the frontline of public service. As it stands, rehashing the ideas of the Blair era will be insufficient given the radically changed world of the late 2020s.
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