The government must disrupt the status quo, drive change with impatience and vigour, and get better at telling a clear story about reform , Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons has said.
Setting out his vision for public service reform at Tuesday’s Britain Renewed 2025 conference, run by the Future Governance Forum and UCL Policy Lab think tanks, Simons said the biggest dividing line in parliament right now is between those who think “many institutions and dogmas in this country are broken and need to be ripped up, and those who think they're merely off track, not working as they should, and in need of patching up”.
“The first group thinks that what this country needs is disruption, radical reform, going back to first principles, to build anew,” Simons said. “But the second group think we need incrementalism – tweaks and careful changes to patch things up.”
Simons, who was first elected as MP for Makerfield in July 2024 and appointed as parliamentary secretary in the Cabinet Office in September as maternity cover for fellow MP Satvir Kaur, said he is “firmly in the first camp”, because “trust is broken in this country” and because “ceaseless insecurity is the defining experience of our age”.
“Our goal, in my view, should be simple – to make our country, our communities, our families stronger and more resilient,” Simons said.
“To build that strength, we must disrupt the status quo, slaughter sacred cows, be impatient and rigorous and vigorous in driving the change the country needs for the vigour that this moment demands.”
Simons said this disruption should begin with “place being our orienting principle”. He said he is “proud” of the government’s progress with its £5bn pride and place initiative – which gives communities funding to spend on projects that matter most to them – “but we must do more”.
“Place must be how we design every major policy programme that we think about, breaking up the culture where Whitehall departments defend their own programmes first, before handing power to, and adapting around, the places that they serve,” he said.
Secondly, he said public services should be organised “around relationships”.
“It's people on the front line who know what an area needs best, not us in Whitehall,” Simons said. “The people who have relationships directly with those they serve need the agency and the freedom to experiment with new ways of doing things, and when they work, they need our support to scale their approach to new places.”
He said this is why the government is “reviving the Total Place principles with new pooling budgets, giving flexibility to places to redesign services around users”.
Simons said technology can also help – AI by “liberating public servants to actually serve people”, and the government's planned Digital ID “to understand what services people actually use in particular places”.
He said the third solution is to become a “more powerful and responsive state”.
“The state has to shift from being a barrier that people must fight and become again a force for making people's lives easier, giving back people time and bandwidth and energy.”
Simon said “this starts by moving power down and out – not in a piecemeal, sporadic, random way, but in a systematic principled way”.
To do this, “we must be clear about the principles that guide where power should sit and why, and not assume the centre is right by default,” he added.
Simons said centralised, top-down approaches work for solving some types of problems, such as sanitising water, building railways and hospitals, but fail in solving many others,such as caring for the young and the old, mental health and long-term worklessness.
"These are things rooted in a local context, so we must be too," he said. "These things are based on relationships, so we must be too. These things require a more powerful and responsive state, so we must build it.”
On the action the government is taking to deliver this “disruption”, Simons pointed to the Test, Learn and Grow programme's pilots in ten communities in England, where civil servants are working alongside local authorities and service users with an “explicit mandate to try new things and be creative".
He said the programme “can show the power of working in this relational, iterative and person-centred way”. To go further, Simons announced at the conference the launch of a new Test, Learn and Grow Network to “provide a space for peer learning, sharing best practice and sustaining momentum around the reforms that this programme promises for years to come”. Simons also pointed to the new community mission challenge launched in June in Leeds.
He added that the new Office for Impact Economy, announced earlier this month, “will bring together place-based programmes, providing a single front door to impact investors, philanthropy and purpose-driven businesses to partner with the government, to grow social impact across the UK, and deliver in the places we're working”.
‘To miss the opportunity for radical reform is unforgivable.’
Concluding his speech, Simons said that "in this age, state reform must be at the heart of any governing project" and that the government needs to do a better job of telling the story of its reform agenda.
“When trust in government and in democracy is so low, people will only believe we can build a stronger country if we show it,” he said. “Our reforms to the state and public service, the policies we design, must be visible, obvious, blatant, in your face, brash. It's our job, the policy and political establishment, to show that we are grappling as hard as we can to drive the changes in the places that people live.
"We cannot be afraid of failing, because, after all, failure, in my view, is where we are right now, so we have nothing to fear. In a moment like this, to miss the opportunity for radical reform is unforgivable. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said of a similar moment in American history – the risk is not of doing too much, but of doing nothing at all.”