A new prime minister is due to take the stage with fresh ideas and a reforming zeal, looking to radically transform the state and public services. To realise the scale of his ambition, he’ll need to tackle a rigid Whitehall.
He brings his two trademarks, a black T-shirt and a passion for devolution, and arrives in office with the most ambitious public service reform agenda in a generation – promising a radically decentralised state, with greater responsibility resting in regions rather than Whitehall. Realising this ambition will require more than a transfer of powers. If local leaders inherit services that remain shaped by the same central accountability architecture, their ability to deliver differently will remain constrained.
The challenge isn't generating ideas, it's harnessing the right ones in the right places
Many voices are competing to shape the details of this public service reform agenda: productivity reformers argue that government has been slow to modernise, and that digital and AI-enabled delivery is the route to faster, more responsive services; relational reformers want more citizen centric services, moving away from remote transactionalism to more holistic and preventative approaches.
Each reforming school of thought accurately identifies limitations with the status quo; the mistake is to treat these approaches as mutually exclusive or competing. Processing a passport application and supporting a family through the care system are not variations of the same task – no singular model of delivery can be expected to be effective in both cases.
Our public services need to be more efficient, more digital, more place-based, and more relational. For Burnham to be successful in his mission to “take power out of the centre”, he needs a multimodal state that can shift between modes of public services delivery according to what a given service requires and what citizens demand, and the multipolar government machinery that facilitates this push from the centre.
We need a state that can 'mode shift'
Mode Shifting, published by Demos on Friday, demonstrates how, in order to revitalise public services and arrest the decline in faith in democratic institutions, we need a government that can harness each of these reforming agendas, and lays out the practical steps for building the multipolar system that enables them to flourish.
Transactional services, where the citizen needs fast and reliable outcomes, should be delivered as efficiently as good digital systems now allow. Relational services that deal with complex or overlapping needs depend on relationships, professional discretion, local knowledge, coordination between agencies – and cannot be standardised without diluting the frontline agency that makes them work.
The multimodal state meets citizens where they are, rather than directing different services through the same administrative model. To achieve multimodality, the state must develop the capacity and skills within the system to recognise when and how different approaches should be applied, and allow public servants to deliver accordingly.
Reforming accountability holds the key to transformation
Accountability mechanisms, appraisal frameworks such as the Green Book, and the scrutiny of bodies such as the National Audit Office still assume a single dominant model of administration, and assess every service against it. This is why relational and preventative work often struggles to leave the pilot stage: an official can be equipped to identify the need for a relational approach and still find that every subsequent stage of the system pulls back towards a transactional one.
When the centre asks the same questions to every model, choosing an alternative approach is a risk. A relational or preventative programme – judged on the short-term, attributable outputs it was never designed to produce – will appear to underperform. Within the current unipolar accountability architecture, it is the rational response for officials to default to a transactional service model.
Multimodality expands the options for what mode the front line can deliver in; a multipolar system of accountability recognises that a relational programme and a transactional one do not succeed on the same terms, and evaluates each on the logic by which it was designed to work. This is what turns permission to deliver differently into the ability to do so.
A more devolved state will only achieve its potential if local leaders have the institutional freedom to adopt the delivery models that best serve their communities, and if the centre develops the capacity to support and evaluate those different approaches on their own terms. A Downing Street in Manchester is not transformative if it brings Whitehall’s way of doing things with it.
Aidan Garner is a researcher at Demos and a co-author of Mode-Shifting: Whitehall reform that liberates public services to shift between transactional and relational delivery modes