A major speech on reform of the civil service unveiled a shake-up of NHS governance but gave almost no details of any other concrete changes to how government works
The best piece I’ve read on Starmer’s speech which so many of his recent speeches was both weird and underwhelming. Cutting the number of regulatory bodies isn’t the same as cutting the number of regulations and, if ministers genuinely believe that the balance between protecting the public and promoting business interests is wrong, then they should have the debate openly and change the regulations. And Rayner’s plans aren’t really about devolution, but making it easier for Whitehall to control local government by reducing the number of authorities (and it’s certainly time for a more logical and coherent structure) and altering the way that they are governed (by elected mayors covering more than one area). If you really wanted to rewire local government, you’d start by asking what it was for?
Thank you, I appreciate that. For me there are two issues with local government: as you say, the purpose and extent; but also it must have financial accountability and responsibility, which means raising a much larger proportion of the money it spends. Block grants just foster a sense of irresponsibility, and that feeds into low profile and poor quality of councillors and candidates. Something dramatic needs to change to jerk the system out of its current malaise.
Agreed. The two points are related. Mayors are only being given more flexibility to spend the money that government gives them, and what government gives, government can take away. Would Burnham be as keen to spend £200m of GM taxpayer’s money on supporting Jim Ratcliffe? And there are no similar flexibilities being offered to individual local authorities.
Good piece. The disheartening bit of all this is that Starmer doesn't seem to understand the first thing about mission led organisational change. He would do well to read General Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams book to understand the radical cultural change that will be required. Yelling and blaming is antithetical to bottom up improvement. It stops people raising problems and taking on difficult goals. The corporate world's approach to accountability channels this pointless blame, shame, fire, cut approach. But a truly mission led company turns failure into learning and never blames people. The Toyota Production System had a phrase: "confirming the process, not punishing the mistake". This cultural change - servant leadership, trial and error experimentation, failure is learning, push decision making to the lowest appropriate level etc; is the only way to get highly ordered, path dependent state entities working effectively. Top down ordering of the system is just wrong. They need every person in every team to have a simple improvement toolkit then they need to teach every manager how to coach, empower & remove blockages between teams. If they did this, they wouldn't even need to cut. They would create greater than sum of parts outcomes - a genuine productivity increase. It is so depressing that Labour seems to be advised on the one hand by Mariana Mazzucato (who understand missions but not organisational change) and on the other, a confection of ex-corporate / consultant types who see everything as shareholder value, cost cutting. This has been the damnation of Western economies.
There seems to be no guiding hand. I'm not one of these people who thinks Whitehall just needs to be run by businessmen and women - they have valuable skills, experiences and attitudes and can make a contribution but government isn't the private sector and can't be - but there are a number of disciplines which could contribute to making the civil service more efficient and effective, including management, psychology and behavioural science. I disagreed with most of what he did and found him at second hand a chilly and unloveable personality, but to give Sir Edward Heath his due he devoted a lot of time and energy to thinking about this kind of thing in the late 1960s in preparation for government, with the Public Sector Research Unit under Ernest Marples, David Howell and Mark Schreiber, advice from Lord Plowden, Lord Roberthall, Lord Normanbrook and Dame Evelyn Sharp and the "Businessmen's Team" with Richard Meyjes, Derek Rayner, Ronald East, Richard Hutton, Ken Lane, Tim Sainsbury and David Cruikshank, ultimately corralled by the excellent George Jellicoe. It doesn't mean all the conclusions were right but it wasn't for want of effort.
The problem is that corporate types have been infected by shareholder value. I spent 5 years studying all this as an ex management consultant sick of that world. If you go back to pre-Friedman era, you see very different management practices. They’re all about innovation & resilience, 20% time, labs etc . Profit is re-invested into new stuff not sent back to shareholders. Modern corporate CEOs manage for the stock price - so they cut costs, take on debt, merge & try to win markets. We end up with low growth, low innovation, heavily consolidated industries & no adaptive pathways for new business. The businesses that get funded are designed to capture market share very quickly. They are not designed to build products & innovate. I’m not even sure an Apple Computers would be funded today. And I totally agree about behavioural science & psychology. Not just as nudge - that’s fine - but mostly because you get better results when you can pool knowledge in groups. But that introduces behavioural issues - bias, conflict, groupthink etc So managers need the skills to navigate this & produce good outcomes. Matthew Taylor knows a lot of this stuff. He must be gnashing his teeth & hoping he can influence Starmer without getting shut out. He wrote a big paper for Gov in 2008. It’s all in there - soft skills, autonomy, control etc I gather Liz Kendall has read all the Blair era stuff on improving DWP outcomes: ie support, help, lower threat response. But all you hear is fear, sanctions etc What’s the point in commissioning work if you’re going to listen to your gut (heavily influenced by corporate McKinsey types) & apply ineffective methodologies. I hope Starmer is doing a lot of performative barking while focussing on proven improvement methodology. But honestly, the signs are really bad so far.
I've said this several times before, but Starmer (and he's not alone) genuinely seems unable to distinguish between saying something and doing it or it happening in any meaningful way. I'm sure AI will offer potential benefits and savings to the civil service, but what? How? Where? When? Just saying it's "a golden opportunity" is meaningless. It's the implementation. I'm glad I had primed myself to be sceptical about mission boards: they were talked about as if this would be some bureaucratic Year Zero and yet they are literally just cabinet committees.
The best piece I’ve read on Starmer’s speech which so many of his recent speeches was both weird and underwhelming. Cutting the number of regulatory bodies isn’t the same as cutting the number of regulations and, if ministers genuinely believe that the balance between protecting the public and promoting business interests is wrong, then they should have the debate openly and change the regulations. And Rayner’s plans aren’t really about devolution, but making it easier for Whitehall to control local government by reducing the number of authorities (and it’s certainly time for a more logical and coherent structure) and altering the way that they are governed (by elected mayors covering more than one area). If you really wanted to rewire local government, you’d start by asking what it was for?
Thank you, I appreciate that. For me there are two issues with local government: as you say, the purpose and extent; but also it must have financial accountability and responsibility, which means raising a much larger proportion of the money it spends. Block grants just foster a sense of irresponsibility, and that feeds into low profile and poor quality of councillors and candidates. Something dramatic needs to change to jerk the system out of its current malaise.
Agreed. The two points are related. Mayors are only being given more flexibility to spend the money that government gives them, and what government gives, government can take away. Would Burnham be as keen to spend £200m of GM taxpayer’s money on supporting Jim Ratcliffe? And there are no similar flexibilities being offered to individual local authorities.
Good piece. The disheartening bit of all this is that Starmer doesn't seem to understand the first thing about mission led organisational change. He would do well to read General Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams book to understand the radical cultural change that will be required. Yelling and blaming is antithetical to bottom up improvement. It stops people raising problems and taking on difficult goals. The corporate world's approach to accountability channels this pointless blame, shame, fire, cut approach. But a truly mission led company turns failure into learning and never blames people. The Toyota Production System had a phrase: "confirming the process, not punishing the mistake". This cultural change - servant leadership, trial and error experimentation, failure is learning, push decision making to the lowest appropriate level etc; is the only way to get highly ordered, path dependent state entities working effectively. Top down ordering of the system is just wrong. They need every person in every team to have a simple improvement toolkit then they need to teach every manager how to coach, empower & remove blockages between teams. If they did this, they wouldn't even need to cut. They would create greater than sum of parts outcomes - a genuine productivity increase. It is so depressing that Labour seems to be advised on the one hand by Mariana Mazzucato (who understand missions but not organisational change) and on the other, a confection of ex-corporate / consultant types who see everything as shareholder value, cost cutting. This has been the damnation of Western economies.
There seems to be no guiding hand. I'm not one of these people who thinks Whitehall just needs to be run by businessmen and women - they have valuable skills, experiences and attitudes and can make a contribution but government isn't the private sector and can't be - but there are a number of disciplines which could contribute to making the civil service more efficient and effective, including management, psychology and behavioural science. I disagreed with most of what he did and found him at second hand a chilly and unloveable personality, but to give Sir Edward Heath his due he devoted a lot of time and energy to thinking about this kind of thing in the late 1960s in preparation for government, with the Public Sector Research Unit under Ernest Marples, David Howell and Mark Schreiber, advice from Lord Plowden, Lord Roberthall, Lord Normanbrook and Dame Evelyn Sharp and the "Businessmen's Team" with Richard Meyjes, Derek Rayner, Ronald East, Richard Hutton, Ken Lane, Tim Sainsbury and David Cruikshank, ultimately corralled by the excellent George Jellicoe. It doesn't mean all the conclusions were right but it wasn't for want of effort.
The problem is that corporate types have been infected by shareholder value. I spent 5 years studying all this as an ex management consultant sick of that world. If you go back to pre-Friedman era, you see very different management practices. They’re all about innovation & resilience, 20% time, labs etc . Profit is re-invested into new stuff not sent back to shareholders. Modern corporate CEOs manage for the stock price - so they cut costs, take on debt, merge & try to win markets. We end up with low growth, low innovation, heavily consolidated industries & no adaptive pathways for new business. The businesses that get funded are designed to capture market share very quickly. They are not designed to build products & innovate. I’m not even sure an Apple Computers would be funded today. And I totally agree about behavioural science & psychology. Not just as nudge - that’s fine - but mostly because you get better results when you can pool knowledge in groups. But that introduces behavioural issues - bias, conflict, groupthink etc So managers need the skills to navigate this & produce good outcomes. Matthew Taylor knows a lot of this stuff. He must be gnashing his teeth & hoping he can influence Starmer without getting shut out. He wrote a big paper for Gov in 2008. It’s all in there - soft skills, autonomy, control etc I gather Liz Kendall has read all the Blair era stuff on improving DWP outcomes: ie support, help, lower threat response. But all you hear is fear, sanctions etc What’s the point in commissioning work if you’re going to listen to your gut (heavily influenced by corporate McKinsey types) & apply ineffective methodologies. I hope Starmer is doing a lot of performative barking while focussing on proven improvement methodology. But honestly, the signs are really bad so far.
I've said this several times before, but Starmer (and he's not alone) genuinely seems unable to distinguish between saying something and doing it or it happening in any meaningful way. I'm sure AI will offer potential benefits and savings to the civil service, but what? How? Where? When? Just saying it's "a golden opportunity" is meaningless. It's the implementation. I'm glad I had primed myself to be sceptical about mission boards: they were talked about as if this would be some bureaucratic Year Zero and yet they are literally just cabinet committees.