Labour won office in July 2024 only four years after Keir Starmer took over a party that had just suffered its worst defeat in 85 years. He set about overhauling the organisation to make it an election-winning machine once more (after four losses in a row).

The incoming government had less time than many of its predecessors to think deeply about how to change the system to deliver results. There was an assumption that the Civil Service had been demoralised by its experience of recent years,¹ and that with the ‘grown ups’ back in charge, new ministers would be welcomed with open arms and this would be enough.². This underestimated the scale of the challenge facing the state in the mid-2020s. Hopefully, it is now abundantly clear that incremental reform or tweaks at the edges will not do; much more fundamental reform is needed to the machinery of the state. The status quo is neither defensible nor affordable.

Despite the considerable challenges, we are optimistic that it is possible to turn the tide on distrust in government, and to deliver for the British people. This exact group of people – Keir Starmer, his cabinet and their advisers – have achieved major system change before. Five years ago, few people believed it would be possible for the newly elected Labour leader to return his party to power in a single parliament, let alone at the head of a government with a parliamentary majority of over 150 seats. Yet that is precisely what he did, and in no small part by ‘turning the party inside out’: radically reforming an inward-looking and outdated institution that was at its lowest point in almost a century and relentlessly focusing it on the voters, their wants and needs. The Prime Minister and his team can and should now apply that same logic to the state itself: to ‘turn government inside out’. The job is bigger, and the stakes are undeniably higher, but the principles are the same.

In its manifesto, Labour argued that ‘to rebuild Britain, we need to change how Britain is governed’,³ and when the Prime Minister set out his Plan for Change in December 2024 he spoke of the need to ‘fundamentally reform the way government goes about its business … [to] first change how we try to change the country’.⁴. At the heart of this new approach is the concept of mission-driven government and its core principles: clarity of purpose, a focus on outcomes, an emphasis on partnership working that engages the whole nation, licence to innovate and experiment (to ‘test, learn and grow’). As we have argued elsewhere, these remain the right principles for a new form of statecraft – but they cannot be done piecemeal or half-heartedly; the government needs to double down on these new ways of working if they are to stick⁵. It is no good to speak the language of reform while in practice cementing the status quo: that is the kind of ‘campaign in boldness; govern in caution’ model that has made the public increasingly furious with their elected representatives.

This government has the potential to make the fundamental change our state needs. In September of this year the reorganisation of No.10 showed that the Prime Minister wants to make that change. He now needs to give the new people and teams around him the best possible tools to start getting things done. That does not mean the caricature of ‘deliverism’ in which aloof national politicians point to a line on a graph and expect voters to be grateful⁶. It is about making change that leads to tangible improvements in people’s lives. If the Prime Minister can grasp the nettle and establish an effective, streamlined and coherent centre of government for the first time in years, it will set his administration up to prosecute its political programme, and bring about the ‘change’ it was elected to deliver and which our country so desperately needs. It is highly unlikely that we have hit upon the perfect model for Keir Starmer’s No.10. If they want to set up a new operation the team supporting him will need to take this and all the other advisory reports and insight that is out there and design what works for him and what works for them.

The easiest argument against – and the one that will be made by the forces of conservatism within government – is that the Prime Minister cannot afford to waste time or effort rearranging the deck chairs in No.10 and that the traditional, quirky, quintessentially British and ambiguous set-up in the centre of government will be so hard to change it is not worth the effort.

If not now, then when? And if not Keir Starmer and his team, then who? Changing the centre is the first step towards changing the state. It is not too late. Yet.