Announcing the new administration’s civil service Plan for Change, Cabinet Office head Pat McFadden outlines an ambition for the institutions of Whitehall to operate more like those of Old Street
A major reform agenda set out this week by ministers is intended to help government operate “more like a start-up”.
Announcing the ‘Plan for Change’ this week, senior Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden outlined an ambition to get more civil servants to adopt the “test-and-learn culture” used in the most successful government projects and by leading digital companies. To support this objective over the coming months and years, “crack” teams of “problem solvers” will be deployed across departments to work on the government’s priorities.
“Test it. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again. Tweak it again. And so on, and so on, for as long as you provide the service,” he said. “Suddenly, the most important question isn’t, ‘How do we get this right the first time?’. It’s ‘How do we make this better by next Friday?’ That’s the test-and-learn mindset, and I’m keen to see where we can deploy it in government, where we can make the state a little bit more like a start-up.”
To support the rollout of the plan and the Labour administration’s five missions, McFadden said the government will also aim to enable departments to make greater use of secondments to bring in top tech talent and people with direct “front line” public service experience. He has also instructed departments to simplify “mind bogglingly bureaucratic and off-putting” civil service job application processes.
“If we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve,” McFadden warned.
The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said a £100m innovation fund provided for in October’s Budget will be used to deploy the new “test-and-learn” teams around the country, who will be asked to apply this mindset to the public sector’s biggest challenges.
The teams will be a mix of policy officials, people with data and digital skills and staff from local and public services, who will be given the freedom to experiment and adapt – “adopting the ‘test-and-learn’ mindset of Silicon Valley”.
“Instead of writing more complicated policy papers and long strategy documents, the government will set the teams a challenge and empower them to experiment, innovate and try new things,” the Cabinet Office said.
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The first teams will focus on two projects across Manchester, Sheffield, Essex and Liverpool from January: family support and temporary accommodation.
On temporary accommodation, they will begin by looking at how to reduce costs. And on family support, they will look at how family hubs can increase the number of disadvantaged families that they reach.
“We’re not going to dictate how they do that,” McFadden said. “The central point of these test-and-learns is that we set them a problem and then leave them to get on with it. They’ll be empowered to experiment and find new and innovative ways to fix problems.”
The government will then expand the test-and-learn teams to other parts of the country “and start setting them bigger challenges, like reducing the need for temporary accommodation, or finding new and effective ways to help people into work”, McFadden said.
McFadden admitted that “each of these projects in the early stages are small” and won’t “reshape the state by themselves” but “could help improve the way we that we work across the whole of government and start to rewire the state one test at a time”.
He added that there will also need to be “an appetite for risk, because some things won’t work properly the first time, but if we’re terrified of failure we’ll never innovate and we’ll carry on doing what we’ve always done”. He says the government will have to be “flexible enough to spot when things don’t work, stop and try something different”.
