Last week saw the first Cabinet meeting of the year, and the Prime Minister used it to set out two challenges to ministers: he urged them to focus relentlessly on the cost of living, and to deliver change the public can feel.
Those are well-made New Year’s resolutions for the government. The first is a deliberate choice from a much longer to-do list, and both concentrate attention on what matters to people. But as with all resolutions, sticking to them will be the hard part. My colleague Alex Massey and I have been thinking about what government can do – short of systemic reform – to give it the best chance of doing just that.
Ultimately, the prime minister’s challenges are all about delivery, which has become a familiar buzzword in government circles. Around the world, governments are rethinking how to make things happen and get things done. But those of us who have been around long enough know that delivery is a trend that governments have worn before.
Back at the turn of the millennium, Tony Blair’s government established the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under Sir Michael Barber. It was mirrored across the globe, from Canada’s Results and Delivery Unit to Australia’s own Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and many in between. Most were successful, bringing a new rigour to improving public sector metrics, but they fell by the wayside as new ministers took office and resisted carrying on the legacy of their predecessors.
Twenty-plus years later, the need to elevate delivery is back. The public sector does of course deliver services day in, day out. Councils, the NHS, police forces, benefits call handlers and officials across the sector get amazing amounts done every day without fanfare. But it’s the delivery of new programmes, those dial-shifting, high-profile interventions that seem to struggle. Take Levelling Up. After five years of effort, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) concluded that progress on the flagship policy had been ‘glacial’ and in some cases, metrics had declined. Just a handful of years after it was announced, few people even mention it.
In private, ministers talk about their admiration for many in the Civil Service alongside their frustration with the system and its sluggishness in getting things done. They have discovered that political rhetoric and ambition can come crashing down to earth when they meet the complexity of government, with all the complex stakeholder relationships, resource limitations and trade-offs that come with it.
There are no easy ways to accelerate delivery without systemic reform. However, we think there are three actions that government should consider if it wants to stick to its delivery resolutions.
The first is intentionality. Delivery needs to be pursued actively. It needs to be the outcome that is valued by the system, not good headlines or polls or legislation. Government needs to be clear on its objectives, clear on who is accountable for what and serious about relentlessly tracking outcomes. It needs to be prepared to course-correct delivery plans when outcomes are not being achieved.
The second is the role of the centre of government. People at the heart of government need to encourage, nurture and serve as cheerleaders for the wider system. That’s why it’s really encouraging to see the centre of government use ‘test and learn’ to try policies out on the ground. It allows ideas big and small, from professionals, politicians and policymakers to be worked through by expert front-line teams who can feed back what they learn. It means they can build, destroy and rebuild projects until they deliver the right outcomes, safe in the knowledge that their efforts will not be judged. In the public sector, giving officials the explicit permission to fail is powerful.
The true benefits of ‘test and learn’ will be realised when government grows the footprint and impact of the experiments that work, from local pilots to regional or national programmes. To do that, ‘grow’ also needs to be intentional. ‘Test’ projects can evolve organically but scaling them up requires more programmatic thinking and support for the most appropriate delivery models.
The third action is building government’s delivery muscle. Whether people work in Whitehall or the wider public sector, they need to be given the training, tools and management support they need to make things happen. The Civil Service is full of skilled people and driven people, but you need both for delivery. Teams need to be built – explicitly and deliberately – with all the right people, from policy to execution. You can’t expect high performance from a team that has fallen together by happenstance. Government needs to give its programmes a fighting chance by building multi-disciplinary teams that are both ‘willing’ and ‘able’ to deliver.
These three actions – more delivery intention, greater nurturing by the centre, and building more delivery muscle through better-designed, multi-disciplinary teams – might be just what government needs to stick to its delivery resolutions.
For more on what’s happening across the public sector, keep an eye out for Deloitte and Re:State’s State of the State 2026 – out next month.
Stephen Bediako OBE