Deliver unto me (another election victory)
I often start presentations I’m giving to clients, or conferences, or board sessions, by saying that any government needs to do two things: achieve things; and stay popular. Normally, I pivot onto the second one, where I make the (in my mind uncontroversial, but often not to my audiences) point that popularity and politics go hand in hand, and if you want a politician to do something or not do something, having a sense of public opinion (or important groups’ opinions) on an issue is pretty important.
But the news Michael Barber is back in Whitehall, and setting up a new-new-PMDU*, brings me to the first half my claim. Just how does a government get something done? What to do is complicated enough — given the huge opportunity costs and financial costs of whatever a government decides are going to be its priorities. But having a priority that isn’t achieved can often precede electoral humblings. So if deciding what to do is important, perhaps even more so is how.
“In the writing of history and politics, ‘how’ is a relatively neglected question. Textbooks write of some medieval king that he gathered an army and hastened North without pausing to consider just how difficult this was to do”
(Barber, Instruction to Deliver, Preface)
I cut my teeth as a civil servant almost *cough* 20 years ago at the high point of the theory of New Public Management, and deliverology. The former is a well understood theory of how to run public services which says — simplifying hugely — if you have competition on the provider side, and choice on the user side, underpinned by transparency of information, then that tends to produce better outcomes. The latter is a neologism coined by, and about, the role Sir Michael Barber was playing at the time with his new Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, set up in No10 by a newly re-elected Labour government determined that they were going to improve public services.
I can distinctly recall several elements of Barber’s approach through the PMDU — a small team (no more than 40 or so high calibre civil servants) who were based in the Cabinet Office and who tracked the key governmental priorities, simultaneously acting as a helping hand to delivery departments, but reporting directly into the PM and giving him unvarnished advice about what was working and whether things were on track. In his book describing his time setting up and managing the PMDU, Barber summarises five things which he sees as key to getting reforms to work, and which strike me as even more relevant when considering how to set up a new one in 2021:
— Be clear what the PMDU does, and what a Department does. The PMDU should only have a very small number of priorities (see the excerpt below for the initial PMDU ones). Each major department will have many multiples of that number of priorities just on their own. Being clear what PMDU will track and what the Dept will do is important — including the multiplicity of ‘delivery units’ that now sit within Departments in Whitehall.
— Get the backing of the PM. Barber was clear that as a condition of leaving Blunkett and the Education dept to go into No10 and take his approach wider that he reported directly into Blair; and throughout his time he sought (and received) great authority across Whitehall from that relationship. Otherwise, there is a risk that any delivery unit — even if nominally based in No10 and the Cabinet Office — will be squeezed out accidentally or deliberately by competing interests.
— Details, details, details. Every two months or so, the PM held a ‘stocktake’ with Secretaries of State and priorities were explored down to an incredible level of detail. Why wasn’t truancy improving? Where exactly in the stats were the ‘stuck’ schools; what did they have in common; what was the mechanism the Department was trying to do to move them and what analysis had been done as to why that was or wasn’t working? This is the single biggest thing that worries me about a Johnson Delivery Unit. The PM has to sweat the details, and really care about them — not just hand it off the PMDU to scrutinise.
— Relationships, relationships, relationships. Barber writes clearly and importantly about navigating Whitehall politics and finding yourself a space within the ecosystem to have influence. The new PMDU will have to navigate the Treasury, Permanent Secretaries, sceptical Secretaries of State, the No10 Policy Unit, the parliamentary Conservative Party, and the public services themselves to succeed.
— Have a clear set of methodologies. This is what ‘deliverology’ was coined to describe. Although a lot of flexibility sits within this, Barber’s list includes: setting clear goals, understanding the delivery chain, ensuring that departments gather and analyse the key data sets, and holding the Secretary of State accountable through regular stocktakes with their boss — the PM.
Whole books can be written about whether deliverology worked or failed under Blair and Brown, and whether the Coalition was right to get rid of the PMDU in 2010**. For my own part, I have always been firmly of the view that while No10 remains on the hook for political and public expectations of delivery and public service improvement, they need a way to manage the priorities of the government. It is entirely possible to do so by not needing a centralised delivery architecture, but instead delegating everything to highly competent Cabinet Ministers and departments. This was — sort of — what Cameron tried to do in 2010. I am not being mean when I say that is often not an option, and it is not one open to Johnson now. It was also a decidedly mixed success for Cameron. (One of the many reasons the Lansley reforms ran into political trouble, regardless of their policy merits or otherwise, is that no one in No10 knew anywhere near as much about health policy as Andrew Lansley, and so when he merrily assured them it was all a brilliant idea and rolling out smoothly, no one thought to say — really? — until it was too late)
Even if it were possible to have a Cabinet filled with masters of their own Departmental fiefdoms, the challenges of public service delivery in 2021 are often not ones which sit neatly within one department. The biggest challenge any new PMDU will face in 2021 is defining in practice what ‘levelling up’ means. As Barber said in a recent interview in the Times Higher, this doesn’t sit in one place:
Furthermore, if as is likely they are also given responsibility for delivering on other key government priorities — delivering a successful COP26; managing the increase in spending and achieving outcomes from 2.4% R+D; improving high streets; achieving large scale retraining and youth employment — they will need to work across multiple different departments.
I wish Michael Barber and the new team luck. They may need it.
* Poor Kris Murrin. Forgotten to all but the most nerdy of Whitehall historians, she ran Cameron’s Implementation Unit from 2010. The new Coalition did NOT DO delivery. But they needed someone to make sure that promises were del….implemented. Solution? How about an Implementation Unit….
** Yes, Kris Murrin again
