The avoidable demise of mission led government

Prime Minister Starmer promised that five Missions would be the North Star for his government.

Almost 12 months later they are obscured by cloud. And a storm of cabinet disunity is looming.

There is a strategic void at the heart of this government where mission direction and leadership was supposed to be.

The spending review looks set to fail to prioritise sufficient resources on most of the key mission milestones. Through its dysfunctional divide and rule conduct of the spending review the Treasury has alienated reform minded ministers and severely hampered this government’s prospects of delivering anything other than cuts.

But it doesn’t have to be like this. Starmer’s pre-election adviser Peter Hyman proposed a compelling vision of mission led government to address Starmer’s dire need for a vision for his prospective government. As Hyman envisaged them missions could drive a fundamental change in how government and the civil service work: shifting the balance between central and local, and enabling delivery of the priority outcomes of government.

the intention behind the missions, is that they serve as a battering ram for a more agile and urgent state. Each mission project therefore needs to be set up as a task force. Strong leadership is essential: a CEO figure for each project who…has a direct route to the secretary of state or… the Prime Minister, and who feels “on the hook” for achieving results. That leader needs to be the person in the country with the best chance of achieving outcomes… [they] may well be an outsider. [Hyman 2024-07]

In support, that person needs two things – money and people. This requires a different stance from the Treasury… The upcoming spending review needs to start not with departmental negotiations as is usual, but with agreement on the mission priorities and their allocated resources…Money needs to be set aside for concrete prevention policies that will further the missions. [Hyman 2024-07]

Early on the Prime Minister seemed to reinforce this ambition – declaring he would use missions as his ‘North Star’ to mark a departure from the ‘sticking plaster’ governments that preceded him.

we [will] shift the focus in Westminster towards long-term change… our plan commits Whitehall to mission-led government.  An approach to governing that won’t just deliver change…  But also change the nature of governing itself. 

But most ministers remained as sceptical and disengaged as they were when the mission led approach was first shared with the shadow cabinet before the election.

Shadow cabinet found the mission so broad that each sparked countless debates with the leader’s office over new policy. Ambiguity abounded not the promised clarity.  By the summer Hymans colleagues were briefing against him ‘the missions themselves are a good idea – said one ‘Miliband-style missions and highfalutin language are not‘… ‘we are all annoyed about these missions’ [Maguire and Pogrund 2025]

This detachment guaranteed that departments follow the lead of their ministers, rather than an underpowered and meandering mission board.

For all but one mission there is no sign of mission control teams or high-powered mission leads ‘the best person in the country’. There are mutterings that the mission boards barely function and have turned into talking shops dominated by civil servants saying how difficult it all is. The cabinet office refuses to say who is on the mission boards. Rather than each being chaired by the Prime Minister as originally envisaged, they are chaired instead by the lead Secretary of State, with Pat McFadden on every board. Few civil servants, even in the cabinet office, seem to know what is going on in the central mission delivery unit. The Treasury has belatedly appointed a third permanent secretary for growth – Jim O’Neil. Whether he is the notional mission lead is unclear – but why did it take 12 months to appoint a high-powered external lead for the governments no1 priority?

The one exception to this dismal story is Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy and net Zero (DESNZ). It is no coincidence that he was the only senior minister who was enthusiastic about the idea of missions in the first place. He appointed an external head of mission in July 2024, has published the names of the commissioning board that drives work on the mission, and produced an impressively evidenced and argued plan for action in December 2024. They continue to work in the open, using collaborative innovation methods, for example a hackathon in December 2024 involved 100 civil servants from across the service working together over several days to explore how AI and digital could enable new solutions on five key projects within the plan for action. The contrast with all other missions is striking. But this work is driven by the minister and his Mission Control head  - not the central apparatus of missions. His ability to deliver on the plan for action looks like it is being incrementally shafted by the treasury.

So far senior ministers have been remarkably disciplined in not publicly dissing the notion of mission led government: dutifully using the language of missions in speeches and press releases, and accepting the ‘milestones’ for missions. But by some accounts the demanding milestones involved very limited consultation with ministers – always a recipe for failure.

And the Treasury clearly did not get the memo about supporting these milestones through a mission led spending review.

The lost opportunity of the 2025 spending review

­The 2025 spending review was the new Government’s one-shot opportunity to make some bold shifts in resource allocation to allow time to deliver their milestones and missions in the lifetime of this government. Their decision early on to delay the conclusion of the spending review until June 2025, created the opportunity to use missions to drive the priorities and trade-offs inherent in all spending reviews.

Historically spending reviews have never been a collective endeavour amongst politicians (or senior officials. The Treasury is hardwired to act as a secretive controller of a strongly bilateral process that hands out the spending bottom line to departments with no place for meaningful collective political and official discussion and trade-offs about what to fund and what to cut to fund priority areas. The lack of weight and expertise in number 10 on economics and spending has meant there has been no challenge to how the Treasury has worked this time round.

At the launch of the spending review the Chancellor of the Exchequer promised:

Departments will be expected to work closely together to identify how their work contributes to the Government’s missions, meeting in mission clusters throughout the process to agree priorities and links. 

Instead on the eve of publication of the spending review, with mission led government dead in the water, it seems that business as usual has triumphed again. Departments were told to model large ‘efficiency’ cuts of up to 15%. The other treasury staple of ‘relocating civil servants’ out of London has popped up alongside unspecified reductions in the number of civil servants (‘there is no target’ but the right answer appears to be about 10-15% nonetheless).

Missions could have filled the strategic void that is the curse of spending reviews. As my fellow veteran from the Osborne’s 2010 spending review Sam Freedman acutely observes:

… most organisations have a [spending review] strategy decided by a central team responsible to the CEO, which provides some kind of decision-making structure to what would otherwise be a series of unconnected bilateral negotiations. That function does not exist in our government. It just about worked under New Labour when there was a strategy unit shared between No 10 and HMT, plenty of money, and Blair/Brown were broadly aligned on where to spend it. But since 2010, when every review has been painfully tight, there has been almost no central strategy about what to prioritise (beyond the NHS) and what to strip back. Downing Street doesn’t have the bandwidth to do it, nor do Prime Ministers typically want to be the ones held responsible for cuts. The Cabinet Office has neither the authority nor the right personnel to do it. So there is no strategy. [Freedman, 2025-06]

Consequently we are set for a re-run of the impact of the Osborne’s musk style 2010 budget. But this time the consequences for local public services will be catastrophic if Rayner didn’t prevail in her end game with the treasury. Central government funding of local public services fell by 46% in real terms between 2010 and 2019. Adjusting for inflation and population growth core funding was 26% lower per person in real terms. (Ogden & Phillips, 2024)

By contrast in the ten years following the 2010 spending review central government bounced back to being larger than it was before. Civil service employment fell initially by 19% between 2010 and 2016 before rising to 5% above its 2010 level by 2024 (IfG Explainer: Civil service staff numbers, 11-6-2024).

The services that are crucial to many of the Government’s missions were severely diminished by Osborne  - most notably planning, housing and youth services. Unlike central government there has been no bounce back in resources and staffing. Particular low-lights of Osborne’s cuts include:

• Fuelled by pressures from responsibility for children’s social care, there were large cuts to other services: 40% for housing, culture, leisure and highways and transport; 60% to planning and development. The sharpest cut of 67% was in spending on sure start and services for young people. (Ogden & Phillips, 2024)

• Councils whose areas were among the most deprived tenth in England in 2019 faced cuts to overall core funding per person averaging around 35% between 2010–11 and 2019–20, compared with ‘just’ 15% in the most affluent tenth of councils. (Ogden & Phillips, 2024).

It is telling that those ministers who hold the most challenging milestones for change refused to settle early with some still holding out in the last few days before publication of the spending review.

The spending review was the Government’s big chance to make some bold changes. It doesn’t look like they have taken it.

What is the guiding narrative for public service and civil service reform?

Pursuing cuts (badged as efficiencies), reducing the size and changing the location of the civil service are not in themselves wrong – but if they are to result in anything other than further cuts to local and national public services, they would have to be accompanied by radical changes in how government operates. Changes that include much less centralisation, less siloed policy making, less constrained ringfencing of resources - and much more devolution, including fiscal delegation. Central government needs to act as a system steward rather than as a tin eared controller and micro manager down departmental silos.

Twelve months into government there isn’t a coherent narrative on public service reform or civil service reform. There are signs of serious reform intentions amongst some senior ministers, notably Streeting, Rayner, McFadden and Miliband. But their approaches seem fragmented and detached from Starmer’s sometimes clumsy rhetoric about civil service reform. The work in the cabinet office’s public service reform team (the impressive test and learn programme) is not visibly connected to specific missions and seems to have little senior engagement from ministers outside the cabinet office. Twelve months after the election the Cabinet Office has only just appointed a director general (the highly regarded Janet Hughes) to lead work on civil service reform (and efficiency).

When the 10 year plan for health is published shortly we will see whether the system leading, community focused and devolutionary rhetoric of Streeting is matched by his plans for action. Some of his speeches indicate the danger it may end up looking too much like Blair/Burnham mark 2, with a misplaced faith in top down control and intervention using centralised performance management and indicators. He is in the process of setting up a ministerial delivery unit which suggests he may be trying to fight today’s war with yesterday’s weapons.

Rayner’s push on local government reform, single settlements and neighbourhood renewal could enable a bold flip to devolution and decentralisation – if done in the style of a rebooted total place programme. That reform from 2008-10 showed that local areas respond energetically to the challenge to pool their efforts and assets in pursuit of shared objectives. They exposed waste and ineffectiveness – often driven by siloed policy making and ringfenced resource allocation from central government, as well as local fragmentation. Single financial settlements to the newly strategic local government groupings as standard rather than earned autonomy would break this cycle. The treasury wouldn’t like it though!

Barriers to the reforms that are needed

There are profound barriers to the changes that a full blooded, devolving and innovating approach to mission led government would require. These have hampered or foiled every analogous reform efforts over the last 30 years: from the social exclusion unit in 1998, cross cutting PSAs in 2007, total place in 2008-10, and fusion (national strategic framework) of 2016. Two barriers stand out:

1. Resources and accountability

The hard wiring and accountability of Whitehall is a huge barrier to more meaningful devolution of control, resources and policy making – regardless of any evidence that such an approach is more likely to deliver on national priorities.

A central finding of the Total Place pilots was that Whitehall departments would have to devolve significant decision-making power and resources relating to ‘their’ services to the local level for this radical approach to work (Hambleton & Howard, 2013). This was something they were not poised to do as at the end of the programme in 2010. The system of ministerial accountability for spending is cited by many as a key factor in this blockage.

2. Power, control and identity

Perhaps the most serious barrier to meaningful public service reform is how politicians and senior civil servants see their roles and identity, and the centrality of power and control to both. Within that the orthodoxy and identity of the Treasury is an especially tough nut to crack.

For those policy domains where devolution and collaborative policy making are most relevant (health education, local government, housing, benefits administration, employment etc) senior officials would no longer be the principal policy adviser. Instead they would require system stewardship capabilities that their careers rarely equip them with.

As Kate Bingham the highly successful leader of the covid task force in 2020 put it:

Officials are not generally rewarded for specialist skills, flair or drive, but for following correct procedures. Individual energizers and doers were outnumbered by officials able to think of reasons not to do something.

For those officials who have made their career by succeeding in the old world it is a big ask for them to see the value and importance of selectively breaking it. There are of course senior officials who were energised and active in earlier efforts – but many of the best have left the civil service over the last 5 years.

How to re-set missions and get the government back on track?

A re-set is urgently needed– and possible. It should focus on 6 critical elements:

1. Reset the ambition and key milestones for an amended set of missions. This has to start with creation of a guiding coalition of senior ministers and officials who are supported to re-frame missions and key milestones. They must then launch the serious business of innovative policy making and collective re-prioritisation of resources that should have started 12 months ago. This reset should be the number one obsession of the Cabinet Secretary and senior permanent secretaries. The Government should end the sleight of hand that levers housing into the growth mission, and submerges defence and national security (including border security) in the word salad that attempts to distinguish between foundations and missions in the plan for change.

2. Create mission controls and appoint the ‘best people in the country’. This should be done in the way prescribed by Hyman and many other thoughtful experts who have written on mission led government (for example NESTA/Institute for Government (IfG) and the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose). These prescriptions apply the lessons from analogous efforts in the past and other sectors. Mission Controls need to stand apart from business-as-usual policy making in order to bring challenge and creativity to mission thinking. The way they work must borrow from the atypically supportive and collaborative playbooks of the most successful central units of the last 30 years: the SEU, the Delivery Unit, the Government Digital Service and the Behavioural Insights Team – to which you can now add the Test and Learn Team in the cabinet office. Those teams pioneered a different way of working: more open, collaborative, innovative and engaging. They acted simultaneously as a critical friend and supportive co-problem solver – helping departments and local coalitions  to succeed on their top priorities. At the heart of these teams’ success was their brilliant business model, methods and tools, and diverse staffing – a blend of insiders and outsider, analysts, relationship builders, connectors, mavericks and expert facilitators. Without exception they chose not to play by the usual Whitehall rules (and were supported in doing so) .  

3. Redirect resources where needed to support mission milestones. Ministers and senior officials need to challenge the inflexibility of the Treasury’s bizarre spending review conventions and re-open elements of departmental settlements in order to resource critical mission milestones. This should be done through a collective politically led, cabinet secretary supported process.

4. Establish a clear narrative for public service and civil service reform. There is still potential for serious re-wiring of government and the civil service. Rayner and Streeting are both pushing hard for potentially bold reform which could shift the dial on centralisation, devolution and silo based policy making. This reset should build up from where there is serious reforming zeal amongst ministers and join up the thinking behind them into a clear narrative for the reform that this government wishes to drive in service of its missions.  Rather than reform central government to join up better (which has never worked), would it not be better cut the old departmental policy and funding allocation silos out of the equation and enable local institutions to better join up through single settlements in a total place 2.0 type wrapper. There is also a desperate need to think differently about what performance management and accountability look like in this world.

5. Fill the strategic leadership void. You can’t expect or wait for politicians to act as stewards of the civil service – that is the job of the most senior officials. Collective civil service leadership has dwindled badly since its zenith under Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell. A strategic brain in the cabinet office is needed to support no 10 as well as the civil service board. The old strategy unit and more thoughtful aspects of past number 10 policy units are sorely missed. A new operating model for government is apparently under development and may or may not surface during the summer alongside a narrative for civil service reform. The lack of priority given by the new government and previous Cabinet Secretary to building some heavyweight strategic leadership capacity is reflected by the 11 months it has taken to appoint a (universally well regarded) new Director General for Civil Service Reform and Efficiency  - Janet Hughes – who is starting in June 2025. Alongside her there is a core of excellent officials in the cabinet office who have the right mindset, experience and cross civil service credibility – Cat Little the Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office and Chief Operating Office for the Civil Service and Clara Swinson second Permanent Secretary of the Cabinet Office and head of the Central Mission Delivery Unit. The active leadership of the new Cabinet Secretary and a cadre of his most reformist permanent secretaries and director generals is critical. There are already positive reports about the energy he is bringing to the role and his efforts to rebuild trust and collaboration amongst senior officials. But he only started in role in late 2024 so he will need to go from 0 to 60 very quickly to build the corporate leadership and shared vision of a future civil service that a bold enactment of mission led government would require.

6. Build the civil service and public sector capability needed to deliver on missions. Multiple reports have flagged the crucial capabilities the civil service will need to make a success of mission led government, including the use of AI and digital. Civil Servants do not acquire these skills and ‘transformative routines’ by doing an MBA or a Harvard Executive Programme. They learn them by working alongside top quality central teams on the top priorities of and their ministers and the government. The most impactful reforms and exemplar projects in the UK have acted as mindset changers and capability building factories. Reforms like the Government Digital Service, Behavioural insights Team, the Social Exclusion Unit, the PMDU and the Test and Learn programme show how this can be done in practice. And as the early adopters of new transformative routines move and rise through the organisation and take on new roles, they become advocates and teachers of the routines and practice they have acquired. My heart of my evolving research programme is to explore how reforms build these so-called dynamic capabilities.

Conclusion

It is hard not to be discouraged by the way the government has wasted its first 12 months on missions. In mitigation it was very poorly supported by the central civil service when it came into office, but it was partly the author of its own misfortune by failing to plan adequately for government and failing to staff no 10 for running a government rather than the opposition. The spending review is the icing on the cake of missed opportunities and business as usual.

As it stands mission led government approach and the current spending review look most likely to provide a dismal reprise of Osbornes 2010 spending review, and the failed National Strategic Framework initiative (Fusion) of Cabinet Secretary Sedwill in 2016.

Where we are was presaged by Hyman himself

[there is a danger] that “missions” become the latest “buzz word” to mask business as usual, more lipstick on a pig

And more prosaically by the Institute for Government’s Joe Owen

The risk is they fall into the trap of each mission just being a long list of vaguely connected initiatives or funding pots that, come the next election, don’t add up to change they’ve promised.

A reset is desperately needed.

Many of the pieces needed for bold reform are in place. There are ministers who communicate a compelling but fragmented story about their ambitions and the reform need to deliver them. There is rich learning from previous reform efforts that the government could draw on.

Because ministers now have their feet firmly under the table they are better placed to drive a major reset of missions and bold reform of how government works. If they were meaningfully engaged to create collective cabinet ownership of reset missions – their leadership could still get the government back on track.

One attraction of Starmer as a not very political politician was his seeming preparedness to take a collective team approach to working with his cabinet. This potential seems to have been undermined in part by the factional and high control tendencies of his first two Chief’s of Staff and a lack of weight, expertise and relationships around domestic policy in his no 10 operation.

It is surely better to govern boldly in the belief it will change lives by the time of the next election, than to tuck and trim to win the next byelection as if you are still the party of opposition.

Peter Thomas  6-6-2025

 

References

Freedman, S. (2025, June 1). What are spending reviews like from the inside. What Are Spending Reviews like from the Inside.

Hyman. (2024, November). Kier Starmer must remember his mission. New Statesman.

Maguire, P., & Pogrund, G. (2025). Get in. The inside story of Labour under Starmer.

Ogden, K., & Phillips, D. (2024). How have English councils’ funding and spending changed? 2010 to 2024. Institute for Fiscal Studies.