Civil servants and the general public need greater clarity on Keir Starmer’s mission-government objectives – as other pledges are in danger of interfering with the approach, MPs have been told.
Members of parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee took evidence yesterday from government-focused think tanks on Starmer’s five cross-cutting “missions”, which were a key 2024 general election manifesto commitment.
Anna Garrod, director of policy and impact at Demos, told the session that Whitehall lacks a “cohesive understanding” of what missions actually are and suggested that two of the government’s five missions, each with its own mission board, are too vague to qualify.
“Standard understandings often are rooted in what we call technological missions, so the Covid vaccine sprint or landing man on the moon,” she said. “They’re technological missions which require technological innovation. The actors involved are identifiable and the processes that you need to drive towards that goal are much more linear.
“The government’s socio-economic missions are very different in character. They’re dealing with a lot more uncertainty, a lot more complexity across the system.”
Garrod told MPs that there is a question about whether the goals related to crime reduction and health should qualify as over-arching missions. She said that in the months since July 2024’s general election, ministers have begun to add New Labour-style targets into the mix in a bid to demonstrate delivery.
“Within the government’s own articulation of the missions, what you do see is some missions are missions and some aren’t,” she said.
“Some missions started off as missions, but now how we’re talking about them we’ve moved back to a target-driven approach and a focus on outputs not outcomes.”
She cited the government's pledge to increase police-officer numbers by 13,000 by 2029 – set out in December’s “milestone”-filled Plan for Change – as an example.
Garrod said the “safer streets” mission, which covers crime reduction, is “too vague to be a mission in and of itself”. However, she said that ambitions under the safer streets banner, including reducing incidents of knife crime and violence against women and girls by 50% over the course of a decade, qualify as missions.
Garrod said that December’s output-focused announcement of the extra police officers failed to offer an explanation of how they would be deployed and how that fitted in with the objectives of the safer streets mission.
“Part of a mission approach is that you need the ultimate ‘why’,” she said. “You can see within that there’s confusion. And it’s not consistent.”
Garrod added that the mission to deliver “an NHS fit for the future” is also too vague.
“The NHS is a means to an end, it’s not an end in and of itself,” she said. “That mission isn’t appropriately couched in describing the grand goal we get to, it’s describing how we get there.
“Within that, you can already see the ‘new public management’ language of targets coming back in, with 92% of patients treated within 18 weeks. That’s not telling us why we’re doing that.”
Garrod said the government had started off “well-ish” with its missions, but said pressure to be able to point to concrete outcomes is now coming up in its approach.
Joe Hill, policy director at think tank Re:State – previously known as Reform – questioned whether the public needs to be fully on top of the missions agenda. However, he said government has more to do to properly communicate its vision to officials and partner organisations.
“It’s very tempting for lots of those groups to fit mission government into the way they’ve seen previous governments work,” he said. “The civil service will say ‘oh, it feels like cabinet subcommittees. We’ve had cabinet subcommittees before. Let’s do more committees!’ That’s one microcosm of it. There’s more to do on clarity.”
Do civil servants have the skills for mission government?
Both Garrod and Hill stressed the extent to which cross-cutting mission government requires a different skill set among officials.
“For civil servants who have been brought up to be experts in their field, and to kind of report upwards on what they’re doing and kind of funnel into the machinery of government, this is a very radically different way of working,” Garrod said.
“Within a successful mission approach, there’s a higher appetite for risk and failure than we have currently in our system and that’s partly due to the constrained fiscal environment that we’re working in. The civil service needs to be encouraged to be able to innovate. That’s going to involve testing, failing, learning. And so a measure of success is ‘have you learnt from that failure?’ rather than ‘did you succeed?’”
Hill told the session he does not believe the UK has “the state capacity” to deliver the missions “as stated”.
“The current set of missions absolutely are characterised by ambition, are very radical and are challenging,” he said. “They’re feasible, but we haven’t architected the state to be able to deliver them. That in itself is going to be rebuilding these institutions – a defining challenge of the next few years.”
Hill said the kinds of behaviours that allow high-performing, highly capable organisations to deliver radical things are “largely quite absent” in the civil service.
He said the state suffers from low accountability with very hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions that often have “very lop-sided attitudes” to risk.
Hill acknowledged that the state is tolerant of lots of kinds of risk, but he said acceptance of the kind of risk that allows for radical innovation is not part of the civil service ethos.
“What it is intolerant of is the risk of an individual person saying ‘I’m going to stick my mark on this, I’m going to fix it, I’m going to get it done, it’s on my head,’” he said.
“We try to do things in government through big committees and limited personal and individual accountability. We don’t resource individual objectives in the way that we should.”