Delivery. Innovation. Pride. Antonia Romeo’s reforming energy is infecting and enthusing Whitehall and meeting a political moment that will promise change, driven by the public restlessness with the status quo. From workforce reforms to the adoption of productivity boosting AI tools, the ambition is palpable. Expectations are mounting.
To reset and rebuild the British public’s faith in democratic systems, we need to show that our institutions can deliver for them. Optimising Whitehall without a commensurate improvement in the day-to-day services that citizens experience will do little to restore faith in the British state. And improving public services is impossible without changing how the centre works – from directing to enabling.
It's right to improve the institutions and culture at the centre of our state, but these reforms must be shaped and delivered with improvements to frontline services – and the citizens who use them – as the central guiding philosophy. The centre needs to change its assumptions, culture and ways of working to do this.
This is urgent and time-limited work. The loss of faith in public services and the organisations behind them are fuelling a democratic doom loop. People are losing faith that our public services can deliver even part of what they promise to.
Recent reforms have gone unrealised. For example, the government promised public services that are more preventative, more integrated and shaped closer to communities, but progress has not yet met expectations. Demos, in partnership with Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, The Health Foundation and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, has set out a suite of policy measures that could shift funding towards prevention.
The Treasury needs to work differently to liberate the frontline to reform. Reimagining the way our state operates is possible. To do so, we must be clear eyed about where the issues lie. Rebuilding citizens’ experiences of the state is not just a matter of funding – though, let’s be clear, that always helps. It requires a reimagined Whitehall that plays a different role in the design and delivery of public services. A Whitehall that, with appropriate parameters, gives agency back to those with the greatest understanding of what serves the citizen. A Whitehall that is comfortable and open minded about different approaches to delivery. We need a new enabling relationship between the centre and the frontline that powers the delivery everyone is striving for.
A New Deal for public services
Delivering a New Deal for public services as we set out in our new report today, demands that the centre meets four conditions:
First, Whitehall and public services need a political vision to animate and inform the nature of the reforms taking place. Citizens value efficiency, and it should remain a central objective of any public institution, but public servants – from secretaries of state, to policy makers in Whitehall, to frontline practitioners – all need a north star that they can use to shape the nature of the services they are responsible for. And this animating vision needs to convey more than the pursuit of productive efficiency.
Second, Whitehall must become both multimodal in developing services which prioritise citizen outcomes over institutional convenience (or tradition), and multipolar, in that the systems of administration, from funding rules to accountability mechanisms, do not prioritise a single governing logic at the expense of others. This is how true innovation can be achieved.
Third, the state needs to regain the capability to reform at scale and at pace. Pilots are a sensible means of testing alternative approaches in controlled environments, but pilotitis signals a pathological aversion to risk and a tendency to micromanage. After the second world war, the British state underwent a thorough and comprehensive transformation. If the Beveridge report was written today, it would be disregarded out of hand by today’s HM Treasury.
Fourth, the distance, both geographic and institutional, between policy and delivery must be reduced to create a more responsive and agile state. We must move beyond a model where policy is set in Whitehall and delivery happens elsewhere. Services must be more responsive to citizens' experience and designed to drive outcomes, rather than easily measured – and easily gamed – outputs. The Test, Learn and Grow programme is proving the way on this and could go even further.
Bureaucratic bravery is needed to meet the moment
There is a moment of hope with Whitehall thrumming with ambition and a civil service that is driving its own reform agenda.
To capitalise on the moment, Whitehall must seek to do more than optimise itself according to its current blueprint. It must consider the role it plays in enabling public services and reflect on whether it is supercharging or suffocating the change at the front line that citizens are demanding. That’s how the hope loop starts.
Joe Martin is associate director of policy at Demos