Last month, in his speech “Move Fast. Fix Things”, the chief secretary to the prime minister, Darren Jones, set out reforms to “…fix the problems of today whilst building the foundations of a new digital state.” These include a digital overhaul of public services, cutting bureaucracy, reforming the senior civil service to focus on delivery, (re)establishing a National School of Government, and creating “taskforces in peacetime”, modelled on the Vaccine Taskforce.
The speech has a strong emphasis on delivering the top-level government priorities, likely driven by political necessity with May’s local elections approaching. The Vaccine Taskforce model is presented as a mechanism for accelerated delivery, explicitly aligned to prime ministerial objectives and supported by a direct line into key decision-makers in No.10, the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury.
However, the speech underplays the extent of the delivery challenge facing the civil service as a whole, beyond a small number of designated high-priority programmes. The challenge is that in this rapidly evolving world, events consistently outpace standard government policy-making timescales. This is not a temporary phenomenon brought on by Brexit, Covid and Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. In my last decade in the civil service, every policy role I led on required some element of ‘rapid’ policy work under pressure, outside of actual crisis situations.
The Institute for Government recognises this shift in its December report “Rapid policy-making – How civil servants can make effective policies under pressure.”. The report considers examples of where civil servants are delivering rapid yet robust policies in compressed timeframes in response to pressing priorities that are not formal crises or emergencies. It recognises that speed is an expected, unavoidable feature of modern governance. The report’s findings, combined with my own experiences and insights from current civil servants, makes clear that rapid policy-making is fast becoming the norm, rather than the exception for many teams.
Rapid policy-making is not just about speed of delivery. It often requires operating amid uncertainty: navigating ambiguity, responding to shifting objectives and innovating when established processes fall short. This demands a distinct enhanced skillset that should be part of foundational training for all policy-makers.
Producing robust policy that does not unravel at the final hurdle requires engaging stakeholders from the outset, potentially co-designing solutions, working intelligently with incomplete or emerging evidence, adapting project processes to decouple, combine or fast track work packages, and socialising proposals early to secure cross-government alignment.
Adaptive decision-making, creativity, flexible project management, problem-solving, and high-impact interpersonal skills are all central to effective delivery.
In rapid policy-making situations, teams may be assembled at speed, from across departments or government. Levels of policy expertise and confidence may be extremely mixed. Under intense pressure, with major problems to solve, a skeletal team and little time to spare, there is rarely the luxury of working patiently through the Treasury’s Green Book policy development cycle. Team members will simultaneously be building new working relationships internally and externally, locking down the scope of the ask, absorbing complex subject matter and generating viable solutions. Clearly, those who have already been trained to deliver results in such circumstances are far more likely to succeed.
The behaviour and engagement of senior leaders is even more critical under these conditions. This should be recognised as a distinct leadership attribute around which capability is built. The convergence of pace, uncertainty and high stakes demands a level of direct personal involvement that goes beyond traditional expectations of senior civil servants. It requires leaders to engage with policy teams, not simply to oversee progress, but to take responsibility for actively shaping the conditions to drive success.
For the team to thrive, senior leaders must provide both assurance and vision that what may at first appear an impossible ask is, in fact, achievable. They must demonstrate sustained belief in the team’s ability to deliver, while actively cultivating a learning culture in which individuals feel empowered to develop ideas and propose solutions at pace, testing and learning as they go. Crucially, this must be a safe intellectual space - one that encourages experimentation and challenge without fear of judgement or blame.
As the IFG’s report also highlights, rapid policy-making can “be a breeding ground for ambiguity and tensionbetween officials and ministers” especially in cases where objectives, roles and responsibilities are not clearly understood. The result is often a slowdown in delivery, as teams expend unnecessary effort clarifying objectives and structures rather than advancing policy. Under pressure, teams may also default to established decision-making processes that do not match the fast-moving context in which they are operating. Senior leaders therefore have a critical role to play in enabling efficient delivery: brokering clarity (or simply taking decisions) on objectives, structures and responsibilities, and providing cover for streamlined, proportionate decision-making.
This model of senior leaders working closely with and ‘in service’ of the team - using their authority and influence to create the conditions for success represents a departure from traditional civil service norms. But it is increasingly essential if government is to respond effectively to the realities of modern policy-making.
Rapid policy-making is no longer exceptional; it is becoming routine. Meeting that reality demands a shift in capability, culture and leadership. If we can equip policy-makers with the skills and toolkits, confidence and authority to operate in this way, and support senior leaders to adapt to their approaches accordingly, we will be better placed not only to “move fast and fix things”, but to do so in a way that strengthens the quality and durability of government policy making.
Clare Dobson is an independent policy consultant. She is a former senior civil servant with over 20 years’ experience of policymaking.