Thinking about the foundations of mission-led government

In the past week speeches from Keir Starmer, Pat Mcfadden and Georgia Gould¹ have painted a bold vision for the work of government. The Plan for Change is ambitious, rooted in missions designed to tackle the nation’s most pressing issues—from housing and NHS waiting lists to economic inactivity.

It is really good to hear our government talk up a positive, attractive narrative about the future they want for our country. Show me someone dismissing the combined story they’re telling and I suspect you’ve found someone choosing partisan tribalism over good faith engagement although, and perhaps more likely, they may just be someone understandably browbeaten by years of disappointment, frustration and hypocrisy. 

Speaking personally I want to be optimistic. I really want to believe that mission-led government can make a dent in these seemingly intractable problems. And because I’m now working in a team directly tied to this one of the missions I’m closer than most people to what it means to translate these ideas into practice. But that means I can see a stark challenge: acknowledging the extent of the gulf between rhetoric and reality.

How wide is that gulf?

About a month ago I joined the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) team that’s working on bringing a national jobs and careers service (NJCS²) to life. It’s one of the elements discussed in the recent Get Britain Working white paper and is inextricably linked to the Growth Mission. It’s a response to the millions of people who are currently economically inactive—more than 20% of the working-age population. This is superb territory for a mission.

But until this last week I had found the missions were still, surprisingly abstract. There had been mentions in speeches and by ministers but if you’d GOV.UKed ‘missions’ (as I happened to do last week) you would have found very little of any relevance³. The change required to achieve mission-led government hadn’t yet landed in a meaningful way.

Missions are a paradigm shift for the business of governing. So the first challenge should have been understanding and working through how to equip the civil service to serve this vision. But I don’t think that’s happening. I see exceptional DWP and Department for Education (DfE) teams diligently doing diligent civil service things: preparing for the interim Spending Review, standing up programme governance, responding to political vision and documenting the policy intent. And that’s absolutely correct.

Inevitably that remains quite a DWP and DfE focused pursuit of iterating within existing structures while at the same time trying to present a future state of what it means to bring together historically DWP activity (of Jobcentres and benefits claims) and historically DfE activity (of serving those in-work building their careers through the National Careers Service).

The mission-led lens offers something far bigger. It invites a reimagining of how the British state, as a whole, addresses economic inactivity, better serves those not in education, employment, or training, and encourages greater localism. It could even provide the spark for transforming the government’s physical presence on our High Streets and in our communities.

The ambition of mission is there for everyone to see. In theory. But I think it’s still abstract for many civil servants. Georgia Gould spoke to the challenge of helping leaders think differently and that’s important but this is a change that affects everybody and needs more than just leaders to catch the vision.

Obviously the missions now exist, with a URL and everything, but the vision for how that translates into the day-to-day operation of government? I think that piece is still missing.

The promise and pitfalls of missions

Mission-led government is a compelling idea. It suggests a shared purpose, an alignment of resources and energy to achieve meaningful goals. But missions are not magic, they cannot just be spoken into existence; they’re mechanisms that require cultural change, structural support, and political will.

As the Prime Minister noted in his speech last week, the government’s milestones are deliberately ambitious, designed to enable transformation rather than mere metrics for evaluation. “What is the point of setting a target you can deliver without bold action?” he asked. This framing is exactly right: missions should challenge the system to think differently, to act with boldness, and to deliver with creativity.

At the OECD my team were siblings with the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation who have been researching and championing missions in government for many years. I must confess that I’ve always wondered about how the rhetoric really translates into practice. Well, one of the reasons I realised the OECD wasn’t a place to spend the rest of my career was a desire to get back to the thorny problem of putting big ideas into practice so now I’ve got a front-row seat to hopefully seeing that question answered, and answered well.

OPSI have produced umpteen insightful reports that we should all be reading to understand how mission-led innovation can go from bright idea to concrete outcome. Andrew Greenway and Tom Loosemore for their part have also set out 10 excellent principles in The Radical How. And of course closer to home, the Starmer project has Mariana Mazzucato and the team at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose on the doorstep and on speed dial (no coincidence that was where Pat Mcfadden gave the speech). 

We have the research. We know how mission-led innovation shapes a sense of purpose. I’ve personally experienced the energy of cross-disciplinary teams working towards seemingly impossible goals. But I think we have to take stock of where the UK civil service is in 2024. Years of instability and leadership vacuums have entrenched a system that’s cautious, siloed, and often paralysed by uncertainty. Missions cannot succeed in a culture that doesn’t trust itself to act.

This tension plays out vividly in the dynamics between autonomy and guidance. In theory, missions grant freedom to innovate, test and learn, and adapt to local needs. But after years of centralised control and rigid accountability, that freedom can feel like a burden. People often don’t know what to do with it.

This isn’t just a bureaucratic issue—it’s cultural. And in a system still recovering from years of instability and upheaval, it’s particularly difficult. How do you lean into freedom when you don’t trust yourself—or the system—to act decisively?

An “Episode of Brokenness”

The civil service has experienced an “episode of brokenness” (a phrase I’ve taken from the outgoing head of the school where I chair the governors). Years of bullying, political turmoil, and public dissatisfaction have eroded trust—internally and externally. This is a system that desperately needs healing, not just reform. I’ve written before about how the OECD has judged the catastrophic position the UK finds itself in when it comes to trust. That trust has to be rebuilt, not only between politicians and civil servants but between the state and the people it serves. In all the missions talk that for me is conspicuously absent when it should be the mission above all missions. 

Pat McFadden recognised this dynamic, highlighting the frustration civil servants feel when they’re “banging their head against a brick wall.” His vision for the civil service is encouraging, but it must be matched by a recognition of the damage done and the restoration needed. Without addressing the cultural scars left by years of upheaval, the civil service will struggle to embrace the freedom and creativity missions require.

The Prime Minister has acknowledged some of this. But he’s also used rhetoric that suggests a significant blindspot. His speech included the line “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline.” Understandably this line landed poorly among civil servants. It reinforces old patterns of criticism, painting a picture of complacent civil servants that ignores the realities they face: constrained resources, shifting political priorities, and a culture that doesn’t reward risk-taking.

A throwaway line like this threatens to overshadow the vision. It risks alienating the very people whose creativity and energy are essential to delivering these missions. If the UK is to rebuild trust and inspire change, political leaders must move away from simplistic critiques and acknowledge the hard work and potential within the civil service. A shared mission cannot succeed without a shared respect.

The follow up email (that unlike his first message to the civil service isn’t (yet?) public) struck a different tone. But how much unnecessary damage did his earlier, public, comment do? The PM is a former civil servant, he can speak with a voice that would have rung hollow from his predecessors but briefing against the civil service serves no useful ends and will mean plenty of cynicism greeted its arrival. Which is a shame because I think we should take that email at face value.

One of the parts in the email I was particularly glad to see was a pledge for consistency in leadership. It falls short of my personal hope to see explicit commitment to continuity of ministerial teams, and that remains demonstrably elusive. Louise Haigh’s resignation—so soon after promising radical reform—is a reminder of how fragile this moment is and how easy it is to step back from leading and defending with confidence. Without stability and trust, even the most compelling missions will struggle to get off the ground.

This brokenness also affects how freedom and autonomy are received. After years of centralised control and rigid accountability, the instinct for many is to retreat into the safety of process and reporting, rather than lean into the freedom missions are supposed to provide. It’s not just structural—it’s cultural and emotional. Healing takes time, and missions will need to accommodate this reality if they’re to succeed.

Letting milestones breathe

In the days leading up to the launch of the Plan for Change there was a fair amount of speculation about indicators and targets. It was the sort of language that wasn’t what I expected from missions. That raised the spectre of a return of league tables and gaming of metrics. Indicators and data are understood as tools for accountability, but making that the priority too often makes them the end rather than the means. Measured inputs and outputs start to dominate the conversation, while outcomes—the real reason for measurement—get sidelined.

The apparently vague nature of these milestones could avoid that trap. They’re high-level targets, they’re broad, they’re arguably impossible to achieve in their scope. But that is deliberate. That serves a crucial purpose. They allow the system to seek boldness, scale, and creativity. They provide the space to imagine futures that are grander than the present and to take risks that might lead to transformative change.

Measurement must serve learning, not ranking. It’s not enough to know where you stand; what matters is what you do with that knowledge. So there is a danger. Beneath these broad ambitions, the civil service will almost certainly feel the pull to create a cottage industry of indicators and dashboards. Accountability might become a heavy yoke, stifling the very imagination these milestones are supposed to inspire. Endless monitoring requests (even if some of them could be automated) will squeeze the joy and energy out of the missions, leaving us with metrics that rank and critique but fail to inspire or improve.

The challenge, then, is to let these vague milestones breathe. Use them as mechanisms for exploration, not tools of enforcement. Let them be the framework within which civil servants feel empowered to take risks, to experiment, to fail, and to learn. The civil service has the chance to lean into this freedom—but only if we resist the urge to measure the life out of it.

A world of Spending Reviews

Even the boldest milestones risk being undermined by a system that privileges short-term deliverables and announceables over long-term transformation. The Spending Review process exemplifies this tension and I fear constrains the missions’ potential.

One of the structural challenges missions face is the way they intersect with the government’s funding cycles. The premise of a Spending Review isn’t inherently flawed. Multi-year financial planning, when done well, can provide stability and direction for bold long-term ambitions. Of course there should be an expectation of being able to justify what you’re going to spend money on and how you’re going to go about it but gearing up for a single year SR settlement inevitably reinforces existing patterns of delivery and the status quo of organisational boundaries.

The theory is that “phase 2 will prioritise delivering the government’s missions” but I wonder about the extent to which this first phase has allowed genuinely cross-departmental, cross-functional, mission-oriented teams to get their heads down and invent the future safe from getting embroiled in the bun fight for favour from the Treasury. For those SR bids to be mission-led really needed the principles and practices of missions to land on Day 1, not Day 150, once the SR processes were well underway.

Pat McFadden’s remarks about the need for efficiency savings are well taken, but they must be coupled with a genuine commitment to reform how the state finances its ambitions. Missions need stability to succeed, teams need freedom to imagine, and that stability and that freedom builds out from the financial architecture underpinning them.

So what of the NJCS?

I find NJCS exemplifying the promise of mission-led government. This is more than a rebranding of Jobcentres or a DWP takeover of the National Careers Service. There’s the potential for a national service providing support for jobs and careers to be an platform ecosystem, connecting housing, health, education, and employment into a coherent whole. That’s more than a branding exercise or a machinery of government change. Done well, done in light of the mission, NJCS will be helping to tackle economic inactivity at its roots, addressing the complex web of factors that prevent people from thriving.

But it also illustrates the pitfalls. If you write down and capitalise the phrase “National Jobs and Careers Service,” it almost immediately conjures a fixed idea—a singular “Service” ready to be delivered by a department. It runs the risk of becoming a product to be housed, not a mission to undertake. And when departments face urgent priorities like preparing Spending Review submissions, managing contracts, or maintaining existing operations, it becomes harder to pause and ask: What does this mission truly demand?

The boldness and aspiration I’ve seen from the minister and leaders in the civil service have made it possible to carve out and defend space to do real discovery work. That deserves recognition and praise. There is an appetite to ensure NJCS connects with the broader opportunities captured by the Growth Mission and the government’s cross-cutting vision to Get Britain Working.

But we’re not there yet.

There is a massive opportunity not only to figure out what NJCS could become but also to figure out a new model of “mission-led delivery”.

This challenge requires teams to think beyond departmental silos, to grapple with big questions, and to embrace uncertainty. But as with any cultural shift, that takes time—and courage. NJCS offers a chance to explore what’s possible when we focus on missions rather than merely building programmes, but it will require a system willing to lean into risk and rethink its own structures.

Leaning into uncertainty

This government, still early in its term and navigating a daunting context, has a rare opportunity to think radically. With the pressure of Year 3 or 4 governance still distant, there is space to challenge assumptions, dismantle old constraints, and test bold new approaches. But to seize this moment requires courage—not just from politicians but from civil servants as well. It demands a willingness to embrace the unknown, take risks, and treat failure as a necessary part of learning.

However, after years of instability and upheaval, summoning that courage is no small feat. Fear of failure has become deeply ingrained, and a culture that prizes control over creativity remains a formidable obstacle. If missions are to succeed, this dynamic must change. The government must foster an environment where teams feel safe to experiment, to stretch the limits of what is possible, and to reimagine how the state can deliver for its people.

This is not just about unleashing ambition; it’s about rebuilding trust—trust within the civil service, between departments, and with the public. Missions must embody that trust, creating a shared purpose that brings everyone into the fold, united in pursuit of outcomes that matter.

Make Things Open, It Makes Them Better

In an ideal world, I’d be pointing you to an array of blog posts from teams working on different aspects of Get Britain Working. They’d be laying out the speculative thinking, tough questions, and the iterations born from the work of discovery. But that’s still culturally impossible to imagine. The culture of openness that is another important part of the mission-led paradigm hasn’t yet been rebuilt. This is, as I’ve discussed, a system still suffering from an “episode of brokenness”.

So this is me, blogging a little maverickly in the open. Forgiveness, not permission and all that.

Missions are exciting. They represent an opportunity to realign government with the needs of its people, to make the state a genuine force for good. But they are also demanding. They require honesty, humility, and the courage to fail. They challenge us to rethink not just what we do, but how we do it—embracing a vision of government that is ambitious, imaginative, and collaborative.

That is why we shouldn’t just gloss over the “tepid bath”. It isn’t just a poorly received metaphor; it’s a statement at odds with what mission-led government requires. Success will not come from perpetuating distrust or reinforcing outdated narratives about complacency. Instead, it will depend on fostering trust, respect, and collaboration within the civil service. A shared mission cannot succeed without a shared sense of purpose—and a shared belief in the value of every contribution.

The foundations of mission-led government can’t be built overnight. It is going to take a good long time to transform entrenched systems and rebuild trust. But the opportunity is here, now. Are we ready to lean into the freedom missions offer? Are we prepared to embrace the uncertainty, take risks, and seize the possibilities of this moment? Or are we still waiting for someone to tell us what to do?

There’s a chance that this is quite an important moment this one. Not just for government but for all of us.

1. At this Demos event to launch their Roadmap to Liberate Public Services which probably warrants a post in its own right ↩︎
2. I’ll use NJCS from here on but don’t take those capitals to mean we’re talking about a single all-encompassing Service as opposed to many parts, coherently joined – national-jobs-and-careers-as-a-platform if you will. But that is a story for another day.  ↩︎
3. Shout out to the GOV.UK search team’s blogging about the work they’re doing to continuously improve search ↩︎