Good afternoon, everyone, it’s a pleasure to be here, doubly so to be speaking in such esteemed company. I’m embarrassed to admit that, despite literally living next door to the old Walton Street site for four years in the 1990s, this is my first visit to Ruskin, and I would like to thank both Peter and Graeme for the invite.
For those of you who haven’t heard of The Future Governance Forum, we were founded in 2022, going public in 2023, as a think tank dedicated to how an incoming progressive government – in this case a Labour government – might set about reforming the state and implementing credible, long-term solutions to some of the key economic, political and social issues facing the country. To this end, we’ve undertaken work on devolution; on the economic, financial and institutional reforms needed to boost UK infrastructure; on investment and wider developmental opportunities; and on how we might renew, and potentially recreate, robust national institutions fit for the 21st Century.
Crucially for today’s discussion, we’ve also spent time thinking about missions, and particularly the potential of mission-driven government as both an emerging theory and practice of statecraft across the UK, working in collaboration with politicians, practitioners, academics and representatives from the wider public, private and social sectors. I thought it would be useful if I spent my time today setting out the key principles underpinning mission-driven government, as I see them; what early steps Sir Keir Starmer and his team have taken to realise these; and what more they need to do to make them a success.
Definitions and principles
Essentially, missions are a mechanism, or series of mechanisms, aimed at changing behaviours and promoting more positive policy outcomes. A bit like one’s maths exam in school – or whatever they’re called nowadays (I sat my maths GCSE almost 33 years ago) – showing the workings out, how we get to the final outcome, is almost as important as achieving the right result. To put it another way, the purpose of missions is not simply to solve the problem at hand but to improve and strengthen our abilities to solve problems more widely.
The concept of mission-driven government is underpinned by six principles.
The first principle is that missions should set out bold, audacious goals, providing a clear purpose and clarion call to action. Good missions, whatever their policy substance, set a direction but do not determine how goals are achieved. The aim should be to focus minds on outcomes, empowering actors, both within and outside the state, to innovate and generate collective solutions to the problems at hand.
The second principle is that missions should focus on long-term goals, forcing policymakers to grapple seriously with the future beyond the constraints of electoral cycles – a mindset that must be embedded into how policy is developed, funded and evaluated for them to succeed. We must fully embrace the messy, networked and complex nature of change, understanding that the right solutions will not emerge overnight.
The third principle is that missions should galvanise meaningful action beyond central government. Missions represent a significant departure from traditional top-down, command-and-control methods, instead encouraging all aspects of government and strands of society to work together towards agreed, shared goals. This activity should be orchestrated by an open, collaborative, empowering state, and a centre of government that understands change cannot be achieved within the confines of Westminster and Whitehall alone.
The fourth principle is that missions should be a shared national endeavour. If they are to succeed and endure, missions must, as far as is practicably possible, belong to the whole country, not just to the government – and certainly not just to a single minister or department. They require a legitimacy which comes from broad ‘public ownership’, with everyone from communities to national institutions embracing their role in this collective national effort.
The fifth principle is that missions should encourage and stem from new, innovative approaches to policy design. As much as they rely on action and legitimacy beyond the length of Whitehall, missions also demand transformation along it. A cultural shift is needed in government to deliver on a mission-driven approach and navigate a complex, fast-changing world – one that tolerates uncertainty, embraces constructive challenge, and empowers officials to take risks, iterate and build new skills as they do.
And the sixth principle is that, as far as possible, missions should help direct public and private investment – by being hotwired into Whitehall’s financial decision-making processes. That includes crowding in private investment with patient public finance, whilst also maintaining strong commitment to missions across multiple political and financial cycles to create an enabling environment for business.
Taken together, these principles present a new way of thinking that recognises central government cannot achieve ambitious objectives alone. Instead, it must move towards a system where the state leads with purpose – setting a clear, strategic direction from the centre – and governs in partnership – mobilising action from a wide range of partners across and, crucially, beyond Whitehall. Only by harnessing the collective energy and resources of wider society, orchestrated by a more purposeful state, can we meet the complexity and scale of the increasingly interconnected challenges facing modern society.
Challenge and response – what the government has done so far
Reforming the state is a significant and multifaceted challenge in itself. Next year it will be eighteen years since the run on Northern Rock gave us what was, in hindsight, the first glimpse here in the UK of the economic, political and increasingly social convulsions to come. In that short time we’ve lived through the global financial crash; austerity; the Scottish nationalist assault on the union; the rise and fall of Corbynism; Brexit; the rise and spectacular fall of Boris Johnson; the evolving impacts of Covid and lockdown; the 2022 gilt market crisis; war in Ukraine and the global energy spike; the rise and rise of Nigel Farage; the escalating climate crisis; perpetual technological innovation and upheaval; and, casting a shadow across the entire period, Donald J. Trump ‘45 and now Donald J. Trump ‘47.
The net, cumulative result of all of these? We’re all exhausted. The public, politicians, policymakers and practitioners more widely, the very functions of the state have been worn down and degraded by the near constant crises of the 2010s and 2020s. This makes the need for reform more urgent but also more complicated: the government needs to make the system it inherited last year work whilst also thinking seriously, and urgently, about long-term reform.
In start-up parlance, the government needs to be running separate Day One and Day Two solutions. Or, in what I fully admit is an improbably vaudevillian analogy, the prime minister needs to demonstrate his mastery at spinning plates. He’s got to repair the state as best as he can, making it work better today whilst simultaneously contemplating fundamental reform in the pursuit of a more effective and sustainable tomorrow.
Last year’s Plan for Change is best understood as the first plate in motion: a serious attempt to bend the broken system of central government to the will of the new administration, providing key targets to drive performance and mission milestones that Sir Keir and his team want to be judged on in four years’ time. Alongside this, the Cabinet Office’s Test and Learn pilots, currently underway in Essex, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, are prosecuting the argument for reform through experimentation and iteration at grassroots level, promoting bespoke collaboration across communities and local stakeholders to improve approaches to family support and temporary accommodation.
Both initiatives point in the right direction, but if the government is going to get the second plate spinning, it needs much greater propulsion. Mission-aligned working practices are counter-cultural for Whitehall: they will not flourish in a system which has not been sufficiently changed. Our research last year suggested that Whitehall is capable of operating in a more collaborative manner but needs to know that the most senior politicians would take this shift seriously, expending political capital on ‘big bet’ decisions to make cross-departmental missions ‘stick.’
The system as it is – working in silos, arguing over turf and territory, remaining stuck in old ways with old means and old ends – is never going to meet the ambition for change articulated by the prime minister and demanded by an increasingly desperate electorate.
… And what it still needs to consider
Because I love a list, here are four questions that I think the prime minister needs to work his way through as he overcomes these challenges:
First, what more can be done to define and articulate his administration’s overarching vision for the country? And how might ministers be encouraged and empowered to campaign and govern according to this vision? This is something which sits above the missions and is an essential precursor to their success. It is how you ‘govern with purpose’, redefining the five missions where necessary to reflect the dramatically changed world since they were first announced in 2023. The prime minister, working with the chancellor of the exchequer, needs to give ministers greater incentive to take part in genuinely collaborative new ways of working towards shared goals and clear disincentives for failing to do so. That vision, and those incentives, should then flow through to more ambitious, outcome-driven theories of change to support each mission.
Second, how can the centre of government carve out space to think in at least three- to five-year time horizons and ensure day-to-day decisions are connected to broader strategy rather than taken purely tactically? There will be no shortage of crises in the coming years; strategic functions in the past have shifted the culture of the centre to carve out space for a mode other than political firefighting. That sort of strategic function is needed again now – perhaps more than ever. But it will not emerge organically or by accident. It requires dedicated capacity at the centre to think long-term, set the purpose and then test all subsequent decisions – proactive and reactive – against how they contribute to delivery of the overall strategy.
Third, how might new capabilities be built at the centre of government that flow from this political vision? As I’ve set out, good missions are prescriptive on ends, but not means, and the centre needs to think about how it supports innovation and experimentation across the public sector – not least by providing the political cover that gives officials and those in charge of delivery the confidence to trial new methods without fear of being scapegoated for failure. New capabilities might include: managing strategic portfolios; building new infrastructures devoted to learning and evaluation; co-designing theories of change for the principles and intended outcomes; cross-sectoral strategic communications capabilities; similar frameworks for cross-society partnerships and engagement. They should be able to engage with a wide range of government levers (including, for example, policy, procurement, investment, market shaping) and be confident about directing these towards more effective delivery.
Fourth, how can government align communications, policy and delivery functions with its overall strategic vision so that the five missions are seen as a collective national endeavour in which all layers of government, strands of society and the public all have a stake and a part to play? Missions are as much about communications as they are about policy. A clearer political direction on the missions should therefore start to align communications, policy and delivery functions with the overall strategic vision – and will improve authority across Whitehall. Ideally, government should communicate its vision and how it’s being delivered rather than just point to the label for that ambition, to the point where missions need not be referred to explicitly.
The scale of the task is enormous, but Sir Keir has been here before. He needs to ‘turn government inside out’ – making it purpose-driven, long-term in outlook, innovative and collaborative in approach – just as he did with the Labour Party in opposition after 2020. The job is bigger, the stakes are undeniably higher, but the principles are the same. Reforming the state is not a luxury to be set aside in the face of new geopolitical and economic crises; it is the way to respond to those crises and in so doing rebuild the country and renew the nation. Now is the time for the prime minister to double down.
Nathan Yeowell is Executive Director of The Future Governance Forum
The Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (RISE), Ruskin College, Oxford
Thursday 24 April 2025
