Part One: The case for change
Inhabiting power
The list of challenges facing the UK in 2025 is daunting. A shifting geopolitical order and increasing instability. Responding to significantly increased pressures from migration. An economy struggling for growth in which both productivity and wages have flatlined since the global financial crisis of 2008. Multiple public services at breaking point. We are living through a period of rapid change, not least in technology and the evolution of AI. And all of this as governments are still seeking to make profound structural and economic changes in response to the climate emergency. This is an era of great opportunities and great risks.
When Labour won the 2024 General Election and Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, he saw that, without tackling another huge problem, government could do little to mitigate those risks or seize the opportunities: ‘the fight for trust is the battle that defines our age’ 1.
Levels of trust in the UK are alarmingly low. In 2024, fewer than one in three Brits trusted their national government and overall levels of trust in UK government, business, media and NGOs were rock bottom among a list of 28 developed countries 2. In June 2024, on the eve of Labour’s return to power, just under half the population said they ‘almost never’ trusted governments of any party to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their own political party, and more than half that they ‘almost never’ trusted politicians of any party in Britain to tell the truth when they were in a tight corner3. And it is a picture that gets worse when looked at by both age and income: the younger and poorer you are, the less likely you are to trust politicians.
That was Labour’s inheritance. Many people are not just distrustful of, but increasingly angry at, the establishment and the government. On social media networks, that anger – and misinformation to provoke and inflame it – spreads ever more quickly. This fury has been growing as politicians have chosen to stand with the angry, and rail at the system rather than take power and fix things. People feel like the social contract does not work for them. The prospect of social breakdown is no longer seen as remote or hyperbolic4.
It would be wrong to assume that this is a party political issue or a reaction to Conservative-led governments. Across the UK people feel let down by administrations led by a range of different political parties, including Labour and the Scottish National Party (SNP). Public inquiry after public inquiry spells out the multiple ways in which our state is failing its citizens. Reform UK are the latest in a long line of political actors tapping into genuine and powerfully felt concerns that what the country needs above all is change – from the Vote Leave and Leave.UK campaigns in 2016, to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the 2017 General Election, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in 2019 and then the Labour win in last year’s General Election.
The stakes are high and the challenge is existential: for social democracy in the UK, but also potentially for the concept of legitimate liberal democracy altogether. Progressive politics hinges on a central belief that, as Keir Starmer argued in his first speech as Prime Minister, “politics can be a force for good”. His government needs to demonstrate that this is still true: that government can deliver for people, in a way that they can feel and attribute back to the actions of the state.
To get (back) to the point where people believe that it is worth putting trust in elected politicians requires the government to fully inhabit its power. As the Prime Minister and his senior advisers have acknowledged, that means they will have to be disruptive.
But disruption must be creative and effective and have a clear, progressive purpose. We are already seeing what the alternative to that looks like: the scorched-earth approach taken by Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the USA, and Reform UK’s attempts to import the same here5.The Labour government should not fall for the shallow ‘disrupt and destroy’ mindset but should instead pursue a strategy of ‘disrupt and deliver’. In assuming responsibility for changing the system – and facing down the special pleading, the risk aversion, the inevitable inertia and defence of vested interests – the Prime Minister and his team can demonstrate that they are on the side of the people who elected them.
Emergency of state
The Prime Minister’s task is made harder because the principal tool he has to address the existential crisis of trust – the machinery of the state – is itself a cause of that crisis. The current structures and operating model of the centre of government are a hindrance, not a help, to his administration’s stated ambition to renew the state.
He has inherited systemic problems in the centre of Whitehall that have been years in the making 6. The ambiguous accountabilities and diffuse responsibilities at the centre of power are not accidental but advantageous for most of the people who work there – perhaps with the notable exception of the Prime Minister. The welcoming of ambiguity is particularly true in a civil service culture which incentivises being involved in the conversation and providing clever commentary but often not then being on the hook for the outcome or the delivery. Like anyone looking in from outside, our perspective is imperfect – but it was surprisingly hard to get a read on who did what in which team and who was responsible for running an issue or question to the ground, or who was in the lead in managing something on behalf of the Prime Minister.
It is not just the centre. Over a sustained period of time, the administrative state has become hollowed out, weak and too often unaccountable for its actions 7. We face, as New Statesman editor Tom McTague has put it, an “emergency of state” 8.
Addressing this emergency was the driving factor behind FGF’s foundation, and behind our specific In Power project. During the course of our research for the project we identified three problematic dynamics within the centre of government that Labour inherited9:
- There has been a debilitating lack of clarity about the division of responsibilities across the centre. Without that clarity, the operation of the Prime Minister’s office can become muddled or default to behaving like a court. This can then be exacerbated by the sense of being in persistent crises. The authority of the centre with Whitehall departments and their ministers has been undermined when they have been unsure who is responsible for what, and when there has been no properly organised system for handing off the actions that flow from Prime Ministerial decisions nor clarity about what should be a decision for the Prime Minister in the first place.
The centre has tended to operate on a single rhythm: the here and now. Without a conscious effort to carve out space for different rhythms – short, medium and long-term – successive governments have been drawn into crisis response and lost the capacity for long-term political thinking and strategy, in particular during the multiple crises that have beset the British state since 2016. They have been repeatedly unable to get ahead of events.
- The culture within the centre of government has too often tended towards being closed rather than open. The risk at the centre has long been that during moments of crisis No.10 turns inward and closes itself off from the rest of Whitehall – let alone the wider world – when precisely the opposite is needed. This risk has been exacerbated in a situation where trust in government is low, where more and more has been pushed up to the centre, and where the mode of work has regularly been one of firefighting. But a closed, ‘bunker’ mindset will not bring out the best in the people who work there nor deliver on the government’s programme.
The net effect of these three dynamics means that problems have been spotted too late, the connection has not been made early enough between policy making, its political implications in the wider world or its practical deliverability, and the centre has ended up being buffeted by events. The central gearing mechanism of the state is not working to deliver for the Prime Minister.
Traditionally, the role of running the Prime Minister’s writ across Whitehall has fallen to the Cabinet Office. In its heyday, the Cabinet Secretariat was a revered institution, able to broker consensus around decisions and kick the system into gear. Today, a strong consensus across those we spoke to for this project – supported by the wider literature – is that the Cabinet Office has become bloated, particularly at a senior level where there are now multiple Permanent Secretaries and Directors General operating in the same space. There is a perception that it is unclear about its core role and lacking in currency with other Whitehall departments.10
This was Labour’s inheritance, and where it has since tried to create new functions within that prevailing system, they have fallen foul of the same dynamics. The new Mission Delivery Unit (MDU), for instance, which was established to drive progress towards the government’s five national missions, struggled to gain traction. Its remit was not clear to the rest of Whitehall, and it suffered from missions being placed at a distance from the Prime Minister rather than embedded within No.10. The decision in September 2025 to bring the central delivery function into No.10 shows an understanding that such units need unambiguous authority of their own and to project very clearly across Whitehall that they have prime ministerial backing.
More broadly, layers of protocol, process and control accrued over several years – perhaps with the best of intentions – have created so many hoops to jump through that the Cabinet Office is viewed as a drag rather than an aid to getting things done. Those we spoke to inside government were unsure of the roles of different teams, officials or advisers within the centre. Those who report to the Prime Minister, within No.10 and the Cabinet Office, are not provided with nor providing that clarity and too often are operating on the same turf as one another or other teams, undermining the centre’s ability to issue clear instructions across the system.
It is worth stressing that this is a systemic problem: we cannot and should not blame ‘Machiavellian political advisers’ nor ‘the blob’ of civil servants. There are good people working hard and getting things done despite the system. Precisely because the problem is systemic, reforms to address it must be fundamental and aimed at creating a new set of structural and cultural conditions for the centre of government to function properly.
No.10’s responsibilities have continued to grow, and the world beyond it has changed dramatically, but the structures themselves have not kept pace11. The organisation has mostly been patched up and bolted onto rather than strategically shaped for the needs of each incoming Prime Minister. There is broad agreement that the Prime Minister’s office needs to be reformed if it is to lead the rest of government as well as it should in the current era 12.
Even if the office had functioned perfectly for his predecessors, Keir Starmer will still want to reshape No.10 so that it works for him – as seen in the changes he made to the centre on 1 September 2025. Administrations who reshaped No.10 in this way in the modern era are those who achieved some of the most notable and sustained political successes. David Cameron’s team had put thought into how they wanted to structure the centre in 2010 and then were quick to adapt and adapt again once in office and in coalition. Tony Blair did not adapt the Prime Minister’s Office into his preferred shape – with the creation of the Delivery and Strategy Units – until the start of his second term in 2001/02. The task for the current government in much more challenging circumstances is to get to its ideal operating model much quicker than that 13.
We have also focused on the very centre of government because transformation there would have a catalysing effect beyond Downing Street, by providing a blueprint and serious impetus for reform across the rest of Whitehall. That change has already begun, and its implementation must be fast and effective: this government does not have the luxury of waiting for things to improve slowly over time.
What needs to change
The Prime Minister and his team need to to shift from a set-up that actively makes it harder for them to effect his will through the system, to one that is purposefully designed to deliver on his behalf. There will be traditionalists who will argue that the answer is a return to the heyday of a strong Cabinet Office and a small No.10. In an ideal world, you certainly would not start from the centre as it is now – an overloaded No.10 and an oversized, unfocused Cabinet Office. But given that is where we find ourselves it is not sensible to actively re-create a bifurcated model with all the complexity that brings. A twin-track system is not fast enough for the world as it is now. There are strong reasons for giving the Prime Minister his own department: a properly resourced office built around his agenda, with levers that work and including the capacity to appoint junior ministers within it. This would allow for a stronger operation, directly under the Prime Minister’s control, to inject drive and discipline, and reconnect the government with the people it serves.
The centre of government should be set up such that the Prime Minister and his core team have strategic advantage as a political operation across the whole of government. There is much more freedom and flexibility in the set-up of No.10 than any other government department: to a large extent it is a much more fluid and political operation. Political appointees make up a third of the operation in contrast to a government department where the ratio of political appointees to senior civil servants at the very top of the organisation would not be anything like that.
Getting there requires addressing the three challenges we have identified:
- The centre of government needs much more clarity about who is doing what and why – with an emphasis on simplicity wherever possible – to improve effectiveness and productivity. This should start by identifying the activities the Prime Minister needs around him and then working backwards from those to design an arrangement that will optimise for the best decision-making.
- The centre also needs to be set up so that it can operate at the distinct rhythms that governing a country requires. This means moving on from the dominant mode of crisis management, to intentionally having different groups of people in the centre working to short, medium and long-term time horizons respectively, and doing so in harmony with one another.
- Reforming structures and processes also provides a moment for a cultural reset: the centre should become more open and porous, both internally and externally. The operation should face both inside and outside government, avoiding the repeated tendency of the centre to adopt a bunker mentality. Fundamental reform is an important signal of things turning around: to the country as a whole, but also to those who work (or aspire to work) in the centre of government, motivating the existing team and bringing in the best new talent.
In Part Two we set out our recommendations for a new model of the centre of government, aimed at addressing the challenges we have set out in Part One by making those three shifts around clarity, rhythm and culture. In doing so, we are not seeking to design a timeless template for an idealised British state; throughout we have set ourselves the challenge of proposing a model that will work for this Prime Minister, in the specific context of the multidimensional challenges of the mid-21st century. We also know that change needs to happen urgently, and so we have deliberately made sure our proposals could be implemented at pace and do not require any additional funding nor legislative change.
Our principles when designing this new model are:
- Form follows function: we start with the activities that the Prime Minister needs around him to be successful, and the structures, teams, processes and culture he needs to support him.
- Simplification: we simplify and clarify much of what is happening at the centre of government currently, which will go a huge way towards improving effectiveness for teams with a shared focus, pace and ethos.
- Clarity: our focus has been on the quality of the decision-making processes, rather than the decisions themselves.
- Practicality: all of our suggestions are pragmatic, focused on real life and what is practical at this time. They are designed to enhance the effectiveness of the operation at the heart of government so it better delivers for the country.
- Rigour and breadth: we leverage the considerable weight of experience we have drawn into this project, from Whitehall, Westminster and further afield. No.10 is in many ways an exceptional place to work, but that does not preclude learning from elsewhere.
- Cultural transformation: we focus as much on culture and behaviours as structure and process.
There are many broader questions that this work does not seek to answer or explain. For example, with our focus on the very centre – those who work directly to the Prime Minister – we have not made recommendations about wider reform of the Cabinet Office, or about key roles at the centre such as the Cabinet Secretary. There is a legitimate question about the role of the Cabinet Office once the majority of the civil servants reporting to the Prime Minister are firmly located on the other side of the ‘link door’ separating the Downing Street estate from 70 Whitehall.
We see an ongoing important role for the Cabinet Secretary as guardian of the principles of Cabinet government; the knotty questions on the operation of government and propriety and ethics should be under his or her purview. The Cabinet Secretary would remain the boss of the civil servants. There is plenty of public administration for the Cabinet Office to be getting on with. It is helpful to the good functioning of the state when the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster can chair cabinet committees and drive Whitehall on behalf of the Prime Minister. This is not incompatible with a stronger Downing Street.