Keir Starmer frequently talks about his missions, which are at the core of Labour’s manifesto for a ‘mission-driven government’:
Mission-driven government means raising our sights as a nation and focusing on ambitious, measurable, long-term objectives that provide a driving sense of purpose for the country.
The promise is for more ‘joined-up’ government - a phrase I first heard from Labour Shadow Cabinet members in 1995, so it’s not as though that part of the promise hasn’t been heard before.
The ‘mission’ commitment is the new part, a commitment to a focus on the long-term. The mission concept has had a new lease of life since the publication of the report by the UCL Commission for Mission-Oriented Innovation and Industrial Strategy chaired by Professor Mariana Mazzucato and Lord David Willetts, published in 2019. The mission approach can be seen as a response to the failures of the state in long-term planning, which I wrote about two weeks ago, and which have recently been identified by a number of thoughtful academics as embracing a number of different ‘pathologies’, namely ‘centralisation, siloisation, short-termism and top–down policymaking’. Many of these failings are echoed in a recent Nesta report by Sam Freedman. James Plunkett has written thoughtfully about some of the necessary changes needed in government practice here, and, while recognising the challenges of conflicting incentives in politics towards the short rather than long-term, argues that we may be at a more radical moment which means
we’re finally past the point of writing requiems for New Public Management and ready to estabish its replacement, which is a mix of missions, relational practices, and internet-era methods.
Keir Starmer is supposed to be considering a number of ‘Mission Boards’ to underpin the delivery of his five missions in government. Hopefully, we will hear more soon. As one former civil servant has suggested, Starmer’s personal leadership within government will be critical to this.
Working on a cross-governmental mission-orientated basis won’t be easy, and in my research I have found that former ministers suggest it is one of the hardest things to do. I’ll come to that shortly.
One of the temptations to be avoided by any new government is the creation of new strategies. In my own experience as a minister I found that governments tend to put their brightest civil servants onto strategy-writing, which meant that execution and implementation got less focus. But I also believe that what is called strategy is often just a policy without a plan. Lawrence Freedman writes from great experience about the pitfalls of strategy formulation here. This point particularly should be taken to heart by new ministers:
I prefer to talk more about ‘acting strategically’ than ‘having a strategy.’ Strategy is an activity more than a product, a verb more than a noun. This is why having a strategy document is not the same as having a strategy.
Former Number Ten advisers have similar things to say. Andrew Adonis once wrote, ‘strategy is often an excuse for higher waffle’. Geoff Mulgan warns here
against simplistic, generic approaches (which are very common); over-reliance on committees (also very common, and rarely very effective); and too much focus on structures rather than processes, cultures and relationships.
The truth is, governments have often been rubbish at whole of government working, for reasons of institutional inertia, conflicting incentives, and silos. My research found that attempts have been made to overcome this by governments on a regular basis, including by joint ministerial appointments across departments, or cross-departmental initiatives driven from the Centre to underpin an approach of ‘joined-up-government’. But as Jack Straw has said breaking down siloes
remains very difficult to do…because the departments are so strong. And also, I don’t know whether there’s an answer to this, but a critical part of the constitutional architecture of our system is that individual secretaries of state are responsible for what happens in their department. And you are. These things are done in your name. That makes the departments very strong but trying to work across government much more difficult, and that of course is compounded by inherent rivalry between ministers.
His Cabinet colleague Alan Johnson reflected
this thing about siloes – we always talk about it, but it never works very well. It’s very difficult to work across government departments
George Freeman was in a joint ministerial post intended to stimulate ‘cross-departmental issue-based leadership’ but said that the departmental logics acted against that. Civil servants restricted knowledge of budget bids on the grounds that ministers straddled departments, endangering the integrity of the departmental siloes. For him, the spending review process reinforced that silo thinking The right incentives for cross-departmental working were not there, and
lobbying for money has become the most effective way of preserving a whole myriad of personal and organisational influence and power structures
Other ministers who had held joint postings echoed Freeman’s views. Lord Hunt said
departments don’t really work together so even if you have a joint minister, what effectively you are is a minister in one department and then a minister in another department and there isn’t, I think, a mechanism whereby you are treated differently because you straddle both.
Former (de facto) Deputy Prime MInister David Lidington hoped that a minor change might have made a difference:
There is still a structural problem in dealing with cross-government stuff. Now, that partly derives just from the silo mentality in Whitehall and each department has its own priorities…. And too often, these pan-government issues are not ones that any department thinks about. And one of the last things that Jeremy [Heywood] did, as cabinet secretary, one I worked with him on, was to have a rule where in the single departmental plans, in the grid, there had to be a column for cross-government priorities. So that should be better.
Harriet Harman believed that ministers should be co-located ‘rather than in warring baronetcies’ – this would make getting decisions faster easier. She said that in 1997 all Cabinet Minsters should have been in the Treasury building next to Number 10. The Welsh Government operates that way, as Carwyn Jones noted:
It’s all ministers on the same floor, and all senior civil servants, in the main, in one building’
But even here there are issues. Jane Hutt said
one of the difficulties of government is the fact it’s still so silo-based and competitive between departments and ministers, so we were trying to do more cross-government working.
Ministerial co-location isn’t everything. Government departments would continue working to their own logics, scattered around Whitehall. There is a counter-argument to be made that Ministers located with their departments, provided they can resist over-socialization and attempts at assimilation, can bring that Mission purpose to them.
It’s possible that things may have been even worse in the past, as David Howell reflected, looking back: to the 1970s and 1980s:
somehow inter-departmental relations were much more regimented. I felt you were probably not allowed almost to talk to other departments unless you were given a brief in your hand and you were sitting in a ministerial committee, a cabinet committee or you were off to, in my case, off to Cabinet.
It will be interesting to see how any proposed Mission Boards work around the established Cabinet Committee structure. Peter Mandelson noted the tension between a prime ministerial need for speedy resolution and a slower established Cabinet Committee system:
Cabinet Committees didn’t play a big enough role during the Labour Government. I think we lost something as a result but that’s not to say we simply ran a ‘sofa government. ….The idea that he could simply wait a couple of months for a paper to be presented to a cabinet committee and discussed, possibly inconclusively, was not acceptable to him, and he was right not to govern in that way. But the casualty of it was the formal cabinet committee system, which, when it worked well, did have an ability to collectivise decision-making and secure collective responsibility but was inevitably much slower.
There will be no shortage of advice for an incoming Labour Government (but no complacency!) from former ministers and advisers. One hopes that the experience of Starmer Chief of Staff Sue Gray will mean that Labour can hit the ground running on its key missions, with clear deliverables and some quick wins. But no-one should underestimate the structural challenges.