Keir Starmer’s civil service reforms: what is mission-led government and why is it so hard to achieve?

All governments, it seems, are destined to go to war with Whitehall. The administration of Keir Starmer has been in power only nine months, but there are clear indications ministers are frustrated and dissatisfied with civil service performance.

They have so far avoided the temptation to publicly vilify Whitehall officials for the government’s inability to deliver rapid progress. There is no repeat of the rhetoric that a hard rain is about to fall on the civil service, as Boris Johnson and his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, threatened in the aftermath of Brexit.

Yet it is obvious that behind the scenes, senior figures in the Starmer administration believe the civil service is not functioning as it should. We’ve seen a flurry of announcements on reforming the machinery of government.

The Cabinet Office minister, Pat McFadden, unveiled plans to subject officials to performance reviews, while removing poorly performing civil servants from their posts. The prime minister made it clear he wants to cut back quangos (notably scrapping the health agency, NHS England) and ensure ministers, not regulators, take significant policy decisions.

Meanwhile, there is a determination to unleash artificial intelligence, ensuring public sector productivity improves. Starmer believes the British state has become “flabby”, slow-moving and ineffectual.

The apparent disconnect between ministers and the bureaucracy is scarcely surprising. Before coming to power, Labour had detailed plans to make British government “mission-orientated”.

The Starmer administration declared in its first king’s speech that “mission-based government” would entail “a whole new way of governing” addressing “long-term, complex problems”. This mission mind-set is exemplified by the American general George S. Paton: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what you want them to achieve and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

Missions are intended to galvanise UK government, involving the whole of society in the drive for once-in-a-generation reforms without micro-managing from the centre.

At the outset, there was too little appreciation among officials of the challenge that mission-orientated government posed to traditional ways of working in Whitehall. Starmer’s first chief of staff, Sue Gray, was determined to emphasise a return to reciprocal partnership between ministers and mandarins given the turmoil and instability that afflicted British government in the Johnson/Liz Truss era.

Yet the prime minister now appears more focused on change than continuity. The implications of mission-orientated governance are potentially transformational.

Mission-led government in a nutshell

The concept of mission-led government essentially rests on four principles:

1. Bringing a long-term, strategic perspective to policy development. Missions focus on long-term goals for society, instead of short-term targets or milestones.

2. Breaking down silos across the public sector. Different government services and agencies work together on missions, ensuring issues do not slip between the institutional cracks.

3. Giving professionals working on the front line of public service delivery greater agency. The idea is that fewer rules and edicts mean staff can respond to pressing challenges, adapting organisations accordingly.

4. Incorporating ideas and insights generated outside the civil service, challenging the traditional monopoly over policy and implementation. Missions involve external organisations at the outset.

The reality on the ground

Each of these ideas are important, yet there is too little recognition of the significant challenge they pose to the culture and practices of Whitehall.

UK central government does not do strategy well – and the past 15 years have witnessed a cull of what strategic capability there was. Day-to-day operational management and cost-cutting has long been prized over long-term thinking.

Breaking down silos is necessary, yet difficult to achieve. The problem isn’t so much the mindset or recalcitrance of civil servants, but the prevailing system of parliamentary accountability.

Ministers are responsible for the public money that has been allocated to their department. This reinforces boundaries and makes shared working across departments less tenable. No government has resolved the problem of how to achieve joint working on key programmes with the right blend of incentives, including shared budgets.

Moreover, civil servants, like ministers, are reluctant to give frontline staff greater autonomy. There is a culture of mistrust after 40 years of public management reform.

There is also a prevailing belief that many public sector professionals are ultimately self-interested. Leaving professionals at the front line to get on with implementation is an attractive proposition, but difficult to achieve given Whitehall’s instinct to impose rules, regulations, oversight and monitoring.

Meanwhile, many in Whitehall believe giving a voice to outside “interest groups” potentially corrupts the policy process. Officials view the ideas of thinktanks as flimsy and insubstantial (in fairness, proposals such as universal credit originated by the Centre for Social Justice in the late 2000s scarcely stood the test of time).

None of this makes change in central government unattainable. But it emphasises that all governments need a concerted strategy for reform, including being willing to devote political resources, as few recent prime ministers have done.

And, if the Starmer administration pursues a genuinely mission-orientated approach, it must confront the fundamental question of the constitutional relationship between ministers and civil servants. This is an issue successive governments have avoided since the late 1960s.

There is a compelling argument that in delivering missions, senior officials ought to be publicly accountable for delivery, as is the case, for example, in New Zealand. Yet that would require the doctrine of ministerial responsibility to be overhauled. Many will agree it is an unhelpful facade that should have been dismantled a long time ago anyway.

This article first appeared in 'The Conversation' on 14 March 2025.