The plates are cleared. The conversation has run its course. Someone is stacking chairs. It was good, perhaps even brilliant, but it’s clearly time to go home.

Leaving DWP has not felt like that.

The image I’ve had has been of walking out of a busy kitchen in the middle of service. Everything simmering away nicely on the stove. The ingredients good. The chefs knowing what they are doing. The smell promising. And yet, for reasons that are right and good and exciting, and of God, leaving before dinner was served.

Except that, last Monday, the metaphor shifted slightly.

Because some of the first plates are now leaving the pass.

The Prime Minister used his London Tech Week speech to announce a new AI jobs tool to help people out of work find the right jobs, create their CVs and get back into work. He was referring to the new experimental Work Hub, with its AI work assistant, CV builder, action plan, jobs board, and support for employers.

Some of this is new. Some of it is remaking things government has had around it for a long time. Some of it is very much at the start of its life. That’s why the experimental badge is important. It’s also why it’s brave. DWP has made something visible early enough for people to use it, test it, misunderstand it, criticise it and improve it.

So have a play, test it to the limits of your amusement, and maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised, maybe you’ll learn something actively helpful.

Still, given what is being imagined for the eventual menu, this is very much the hors d’oeuvres.

But I’m no longer in the kitchen.

I’ve taken off the apron, stepped into a different kind of work, and now find myself watching the first plates appear with a strange mixture of joy, pride and longing.

More prosaically, I’m a couple of weeks into a new job at the Tony Blair Institute after 18 months working with the jobs and careers service team at DWP, latterly split with the work Alan Milburn is leading on young people and employment. I took a couple of weeks in between to stop and breathe, including a few wonderful days with God at Penhurst Retreat Centre. 

I wanted to take stock of this moment, especially because this has been a different kind of work transition.

This is the fourth major work transition in my career. In the past, those moves have come when I was quite happy to be calling time. The work had been good, in most cases brilliant, and while the next opportunity was always exciting, there was a sense that one season had reached its natural end, and I wasn’t doing much looking back over my shoulder.

The next opportunity is exciting, as the next opportunity has always been exciting. The difference this time is that I was still deeply excited by the work I was leaving.

That’s an odd thing to feel. A good odd thing, but an odd thing nevertheless. I’m grateful for the time and excited for what’s next. I’m delighted to be working internationally again, and doing so with my friend Barbara Ubaldi who was also my boss from my time at the OECD.

But I’ve still left DWP with a faint ache. Not regret, more the particular feeling of stepping away from something you’ve believed in and invested in just as it’s beginning to come into the light. 

A season of side quests

When I blogged about my return to work after leaving the OECD, I described the next season as a mix of thinking, advising and doing.

That was what I wanted. I knew I wanted to keep working on the things that had occupied so much of my attention internationally: institutions and systems, digital maturity, public sector capability, and the foundations that make transformation possible at scale. But I’d also missed the gnarliness of delivery. I’d missed the moment when an idea has to survive contact with reality.

The last 18 months gave me both, sometimes in the same week.

There was work with NHS England, supporting Rachel Hope’s excellently put together pocket of brilliant digital practices with Richard Pope and James Plunkett (who has been writing up excellent windows into that and have just published operating patterns we were seeding last year). There was work with GIZ and the Government of Kosovo on how to measure the progress and impact of digital transformation. A good reminder that measurement can so easily become theatre, but when it’s done well it’s about asking better questions. Are services improving? Are people experiencing something different? Is trust changing?

There was a paper for the World Bank about the building blocks low- and middle-income countries might need to consider if they are to harness AI successfully. I’d love to link to it, but unfortunately the paper isn’t going to be published, though I understand some of the material is going to find another home. Its argument was that the foundations for AI are broadly the same as the foundations for more general transformation in government: maturity, governance, institutional capability, responsible boundaries, and public value. The focus can’t be on the shininess of the tools themselves.

There were smaller but no less enjoyable pieces of work too, from an invitation from the UN University in Guimarães to deliver training on interoperability and service design, through to working with Digital Nation as part of their advisory work to the Thai government on digital transformation.

All of that was brilliant.

But it was also, in the nicest possible way, a set of side quests.

The main event was jobs and careers.

The unexpected hopefulness of DWP

DWP isn’t necessarily the department people reach for when looking for signs of public-sector imagination and optimism.

As an institution it carries a heavy load and a weighty responsibility. List the obvious associations and it’s quite the laundry list: conditionality, economic inactivity, sanctions, fraud and error, health assessments, work, benefits, etc. The whole organisation sits in the midst of intense political pressure, media scrutiny and big debates about human worth. No one who has seen I, Daniel Blake can fail to be affected by it. It’s basically impossible not to arrive at DWP without having priors already set.

And yet, the jobs and careers service has to be one of the most exciting and hope-filled things happening in government right now.

The labour market reaches deeply into people’s lives. Work is not the whole of life, and it is always a mistake – in welfare policy, migration policy or anywhere else – to treat employment as the measure of someone’s worth. But work often shapes a lot: our household income, obviously, but also our personal confidence, our sense of belonging, our status in society, our mental health, and our aspirations about what life looks like.

So a service that helps people navigate work is not simply another transactional service.

It is not only a better job board.

It is not only a more modern Jobcentre in your pocket and, hopefully, on the high street.

At its best, it’s a trusted touch point at some of the most difficult and formative moments of life: leaving education, losing a job, returning after illness, changing career, rebuilding confidence, hiring someone for the first time, or trying to work out whether the next step is even possible.

That’s the challenge I have loved being close to.

A year ago I mused about whether we could ever speak of public institutions with something like gratitude. I wondered whether one day someone might say of the jobs and careers service:

The Jobs and Careers Service walked with me. Through the despair of losing a job and the joy of promotion. In my dead ends and fresh starts. It was there. It helped. It did me good. It didn’t save me. But it didn’t fail me.

I hope that’s what this work achieves.

There’s an opportunity here for DWP to reimagine its role and unlock growth in the economy. But more than that, there’s an opportunity to build an institution that understands work not merely as an economic category, but as a human one.

That’s why it was such a privilege to make a small contribution to the work Alan Milburn is leading on young people and work. The interim report does a great job of getting under the skin of a challenge that too readily attracts one of the oldest and laziest arguments: that young people are feckless, entitled, badly mannered, insufficiently grateful, and probably proof that civilisation has entered its final decline.

The harder question is what it takes to build routes into work that are credible, human and matched by effective support. I hope everyone involved in that work is proud of the vision they have set out and of the solutions that now need to follow. And, as I wrote in Strong branches and good shade, I hope that the church can step up and play its part.

The impossible dream

At DWP my job title was “Transformation Lead” and on a good number of occasions people would ask what that actually meant.

The answer I landed on, only partly as a joke, was that I brought the vibes.

That could sound flippant. It’s not meant to be.

Not the vibes that transformation is easy. Not the vibes that everything becomes magically simpler if we say “AI”, “data-led” or “user-centred” often enough. Certainly not the vibes that a prototype is the same thing as a service.

The useful vibes are more stubborn than that.

They are the belief that a better future is possible and worth aiming for. The willingness to imagine an impossible dream, recognise that it is probably impossible, and keep trying to make it real anyway.

That is what public-service transformation so often requires. Not fantasy. Not hype. Not denial about constraints. But the refusal to let today’s operating reality become the limit of tomorrow’s ambition.

AI has made that tension sharper because it has changed the texture of imagination.

Which leads me to the other vibes too. The coding ones.

I have had a frankly ridiculous amount of fun using AI tools to make things, test ideas, break things, rebuild them, and collapse “what if?” into “have a look”. That started as a practical excitement in vibe coding, fireworks and the mortar of government, then became a much bigger set of thoughts about public-sector product management in a vibe-coded world, and what it might mean to go beyond the vibes. There’s still more to share about all of that.

But I wouldn’t argue that the lesson is for everyone to become a developer, or that prototypes are magic, or that public services can be transformed by enthusiastic tinkering alone. But I would argue that more people can now make something tangible, and that has huge potential for good.

Ideas that would once have stayed as hard-to-communicate abstractions can become something colleagues can see, touch, argue with and improve. That should make organisations more adventurous and imaginative.

But it also means they need more discipline, not less. The fact that it’s easier to make something doesn’t mean it’s easier to make something good. Or safe. Or accessible. Or sustainable. That’s why I think we should be talking about AI-assisted delivery.

And it’s where the impossible dream has to meet the mortar of government.

The jobs and careers service has been such a fascinating place to work through that tension because the problem space is both broad and intimate. It stretches from labour-market strategy to local Jobcentre conversations, from AI-assisted tools to the vulnerability of someone wondering whether anyone will ever hire them again.

That is why last Monday changed this kitchen dining metaphor. The Prime Minister celebrating the work in a speech does not prove the service is done. Launching experimental tools does not carry the full weight of the ambition. An AI work assistant does not fix the labour market. Of course it does not.

So while these tools are useful and important, they’re only the first things coming out of the kitchen.

The meal is bigger than the starters.

So what’s on that bigger menu?

Jobseekers, employers and colleagues

The obvious place for a jobs and careers service to start is with the person looking for work.

But even that category is less simple than it sounds.

It includes people who are out of work and desperate to find something. People already in work but needing better work. People whose health has interrupted their plans. People leaving education and trying to get their first foothold in the labour market. People who have skills but not networks. People who need flexibility, adjustments, childcare, transport, proximity, or the right person giving them belief and confidence about their next step.

The visible tools begin to speak to some of that. A CV. An action plan. A way to ask questions. A way to look for jobs. A way to begin when you are not sure where to begin.

For someone who is stuck, that first bit of traction can count for a lot.

But those next steps only become real if there is an employer on the other side of them.

That’s why the service cannot only treat employers as a source of vacancies to satisfy the needs of jobseekers. It would be easy to make the ambition too small: list jobs, improve matching, make the transaction better. That would be useful, of course. But there is a bigger prize available.

I wrote at greater length about this when I explored the idea of DWP as the HR department of the growth mission. What would it mean for DWP to really lean into being the ‘Department for Work’? To make those infamously increased NICs feel like government was offering some value in return? To be HR for businesses that do not have HR? To help an employer write a better advert? To offer a simple way to verify the right to work? To help someone be more confident in how they run interviews fairly? To make onboarding someone just a little less daunting?

Because employing someone is not a light thing.

A business puts trust in a person. A person puts trust in a business. We should all care about that relationship going well, because the health of those relationships is part of the health of the labour market and reflects the wider state of trust in society.

And then there are DWP’s own staff.

Work coaches are unsung heroes. They often have to contain important and complex conversations within appointments that are too short, in a system where the dominant external frame is justification for paying a benefit rather than helping someone take their next step forward. The job is harder, more relational and more morally serious than the public argument usually allows.

There is a huge opportunity for technology to pick up some of the formative activity around those conversations so that coaches can have interactions that are more useful, more human and more hopeful.

That’s easier to write than it is to execute. None of this is easy.

The labour market is under strain. Young people are struggling to find secure routes in. Health-related inactivity is a live and difficult challenge. The welfare bill is big, and getting bigger. Employers are facing their own pressures. Public trust is badly eroded. The technology is changing faster than our institutions are used to changing.

I recently reflected on whether there can be optimism about a pessimistic future of AI-induced work-lessness. Whatever the impact of AI on the labour market, whether the future is more abundant or more disruptive or a mixture of the two, the country will need better labour-market institutions.

If work changes, and if the entry points into work become narrower or less predictable, then a jobs and careers service that is exceptional in how it uses technology so that it can invest more in what it does for jobseekers, employers and frontline coaches is not a nice-to-have, it is critical national infrastructure.

That’s why I’m so glad some of it is now visible.

Not because the first visible version can possibly carry the full weight of the ambition. It cannot. No first version can. But because it gives the work the chance to be used, and misunderstood, and criticised and maybe even praised. It makes the service more exposed, more vulnerable, and more accountable.

And making things open, because it makes them better, is where public-service transformation should always be headed.

Back outwards

Which brings me to the other half of this transition: I have not only left the kitchen. I have gone back outwards.

Joining TBI is a return to the work I was doing after leaving GDS and joining the OECD: working internationally, thinking with governments, and picking away at the hidden machinery that sits between good ambitions and actually changing people’s lives.

I’ve missed that international dimension. There’s nothing quite like bumping up against reality in a different context. A fix that looks obvious in Westminster looks different in Pristina, Rabat or Santiago. The same questions keep appearing, but never in quite the same shape. That mix of recognition and disorientation is one of the things I love about the work.

Already, in the first fortnight, conversations have bounced between Latin America, Central Asia, Africa and Asia-Pacific. Not as abstract regions on a map, but through people close to particular governments, particular leaders and particular contexts. That country team-led model is one of the things I am most excited about: the chance to work with teams who are close enough to reality that the work cannot float forever as nice global theory.

So this is a change that is also a return.

But not just a return.

When I decided to leave the OECD it wasn’t because I’d stopped believing in the organisation. I still believe in it. I would like the UK government to make more of it. At its best, the OECD is a genuinely valuable thing: a place where civil servants can be challenged and encouraged, where countries can learn from one another, and where good evidence and effective arguments give momentum, with ballast, to innovation and reform.

But there is a ceiling.

Sooner or later, the work reaches the place where political appetite lives. The place where a good idea is no longer just a recommendation in a report, but something someone has to own and fund and defend and spend political capital on. Ideas don’t fly because they’re correct. They fly, or die, because someone with authority decides they’re worth the trouble.

That is a big part of my interest in TBI.

Its work sits closer to that altitude. Closer to the people who decide what’s worth tackling, where priorities lie, and how much difficulty they’re willing to accept in pursuit of change. That does not magically solve anything. Proximity to power does strange things to people, and distance from delivery does stranger ones. But ideas that never touch political leadership are elegant things that do not happen.

So I’m grateful for these last 18 months. The nitty gritty of delivery sends me back into advisory work with recent experience of what advice is for. Frameworks and comparison and maturity models all have their place (I’m pretty much duty bound to say that having written several). But their value is tested when someone tries to use them.

Delivery is where theory becomes accountable.

That’s one of the gifts of having spent time with the team at DWP. 

I also grant you that TBI is not a shy organisation. It has earned a reputation for advocating for a technology-led and technology-laden future, and for doing so with a level of confidence or provocation that can make people wince. Sometimes I have winced. I assume there will be future wincing. Perhaps I will even cause some wincing of my own. After all, I’d like to think I’m a team player.

But influence matters. If an institution has influence, the question for me cannot be whether I would have written every sentence, chosen every emphasis, or framed every provocation in the same way. That would be an unbearable test for everyone involved, and particularly if you had to work with me.

The better question is whether I can bring something useful to the table: some delivery scar tissue; some deep-seated affection for the boring things that sit beneath the shiny things; a bias towards user needs, not government needs.

And perhaps also a belief that multi-disciplinary work is not just designers, researchers, engineers and product people, wonderful though they are, but policy people, operational people, commercial people, legal people and frontline colleagues alongside those UCD professionals working in concert to make the same thing real.

TBI sits at the optimistic end of the spectrum. It often asks whether all this technology can do good things for society and for each other. That is an optimism I can share. But I also understand why it attracts criticism. I have made some of those criticisms myself. So part of the contribution I hope I can make from inside that optimism is to keep asking a fairly boring question: if we want all that shiny, can we talk about the plumbing first?

Services. Skills. Data. Governance. Institutions. Infrastructure. Delivery habits. Trust. The stuff that rarely makes the speech, but decides whether the promise survives contact with the people it is meant to serve.

There is something in that optimism that is attractive to me too. If there has been a thread running through my blogging since I dusted this off and started writing again, I think it is hope. Not chirpy hope. Not “everything will be fine” hope. More a refusal to let hopelessness decide the limits of what is worth trying. Those vibes of transformation.

Ultimately, my faith is the source of that. My trust is in God, not in the state. I do not believe government brings salvation or creates utopia or is the Kingdom of God brought to earth via policy papers. But I do believe there is something deeply sacred about the responsibility carried by governments, because the lives affected by policy, services, systems and institutions are not abstract but lived.

This is why I remain so interested in the calibre of those who lead us.

It is an absurd thought, really, but the number of people who sit at the very top of national governments is vanishingly small. You could fit them into a football stadium. And yet the fates of billions of people are shaped by a tiny proportion of us all.

That is part of why I will spend the rest of my life circling the ideas behind Kingdom Democracy: what it means to love those who govern, without getting weird about power; to pray for leaders as children loved by God before they are ever avatars of a particular policy programme; to seek the good of public institutions without confusing them with God’s Kingdom.

Prayer as the engine, not an ornament.

I do not know how much of that is likely to ever come up in my work. Probably very little. Perhaps more than I expect. But I am excited by the possibility of meeting more people around the world who are trying to inhabit similar tensions: close enough to power to be useful, wary enough of power not to be taken in by it, and hopeful enough not to spend their lives rolling their eyes from the sidelines.

Mostly, I’m excited to learn more, meet more and hope more.

That’s not a bad prayer for a new job, really.

So yes, this is a move back outwards.

But I hope it’s not a move away from what DWP has brought home. I hope it’s a move carrying those lessons somewhere else.

Because the point of advice is not advice.

The point of advice is that, somewhere, somehow, someone is better able to make something good happen.

And after 18 months in the kitchen, that feels clearer to me than ever.

Cheering for the kitchen

So I’ve left grateful. Grateful to have been invited into the team at all, and grateful for the work I got to be near. But I’ve also left with mixed emotions, and with the full meal still unfinished.

But I’m still cheering for the people in the kitchen.

I hope NHS England colleagues pull off the changes they are working towards. I hope the work with Kosovo creates useful ways of seeing impact. I hope the World Bank’s AI material finds its way into something that helps governments make better choices. I hope the training and advisory work in Portugal and Thailand nudges good work forward.

But I especially hope DWP serves up something worthy of the people it exists to support.

For jobseekers. For employers. For work coaches. For people who have been left on the shelf for too long. For young people trying to get into the labour market. For people whose confidence has been knocked out of them. For businesses that want to do the right thing but need help.

I do have a couple more jobs and careers posts that I’ll finish writing, so this is not quite the end of my going on about it. But it is the end of this more formal chapter. And, honestly, this has been such a wonderful 18 months. 

So, to my former colleagues at DWP: keep going. Keep aiming at that impossible dream of making the service better than people expect government to be. Keep making the tools better. Keep making the service more human. Keep iterating and learning and imagining new ways to help jobseekers, employers and your colleagues.

And, obviously, keep bringing the vibes.

When the first plates leave the pass - bmwelby's blog - Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

That fun left me thinking about what it all might mean for public sector product management and how we organise our work. I’m not going to spend this post re-running the argument that sets out why more members of the multidisciplinary team can now directly shape the product, or getting excitable again about what happens when the distance between intent and something runnable collapses. If you want to read that, you can do that in The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World.

This post finds its origins somewhere else: in a throwaway comment someone made that, by making those arguments, I seemed to be excited for the most pessimistic future of the labour market.

I’d rather think of it as being optimistic about being pessimistic. And hopefully by the end of this you’ll see what I mean.

Because this is a post that asks what follows if the argument is even half right.

I’m not here to make any kind of prediction that all office jobs will disappear by Christmas. I am not trying to join the queue of people announcing that everything has already changed. 

But I think we should sit with a possibility.

What if AI doesn’t destroy work, but shrinks, thins or rearranges it enough to expose how much our social fabric relies on a particular framing of work in order for it to function?

Because the more I have played with these tools, the less I think the interesting question is simply whether they make work faster. They do, obviously. The more interesting question is what’s happening when they make the boundaries of our work more porous.

What used to be a slog — drafting, formatting, getting a first pass off the ground, turning a half-thought into something someone can react to — becomes increasingly close to frictionless. But the deeper change is not only that the slog gets easier, it’s that the first move into someone else’s otherwise intimidatingly complex world becomes a possibility.

A policy person can prototype. A product person can create code. A service designer can visualise data. One person can produce a service map, and a comms strategy, and a research plan, and a slide deck, and a tool, and some analysis that would have required several others even to begin.

This isn’t because expertise has stopped mattering. It absolutely has not. But we can now cosplay competence long enough to shape the thing, ask better questions, learn enough to become half decent, and bring in the actual experts at the most useful moment.

That’s exhilarating. And that’s disruptive.

Whole categories of work become less a dedicated role and more a couple of hours on Tuesday. Jobs become tasks. Tasks become something you can do between meetings, almost like brushing your teeth. It is an exponential Wardley Maps shift to the right.

And you know what?

Some of this is simply good.

Because what is progress for, if not this?

Isn’t human endeavour partly about finding ways to reduce toil, improve how work gets done, and waste less effort getting from idea to reality? If my argument about the impact on digital products holds up then public service teams should be able to get value into people’s hands faster and more safely than before, provided we maintain our standards.

But if that logic is real, it is going to leak into the wider economy.

And once it does, the question stops being whether a team can move faster, and becomes something larger, and more uncomfortable: what happens to a society when salaried jobs provide less of the organising model for society than they used to?

Because work does much more than pay wages.

Work organises organisations.

Work organises local economies.

Work organises the transition into adulthood.

Work organises status.

Work organises time.

Work organises place.

Work organises tax revenue.

Work organises large parts of the modern state.

And if that is true, the question is not simply whether AI changes work.

It is what happens if work starts doing less of all the other things too.

Work Organises Organisations

Organisations are not just collections of tasks.

They are places where people figure out together who is allowed to do what, who learns from whom, what counts as seniority, and how people become trusted over time.

That’s why the AI story can’t just be about productivity, it’s also about structure.

If the first draft is easier, what happens to the person whose job used to be getting first drafts off the ground?

If the prototype is easier, what happens to the route by which someone learned how products work?

If the analysis is easier, what happens to the junior analyst who was supposed to learn by doing the slow work first?

If the slide deck or the policy note or the consultation analysis or any number of different artefacts can all be produced faster by people whose main job is actually something else, then the organisation isn’t only becoming more efficient, it’s changing how capability moves through the organisation.

That doesn’t mean we stop valuing specialists. If anything the value of specialists increases because everyone else can now produce plausible rubbish at speed. Judgement matters more when production gets cheaper.

But the journey someone goes on in order to become a specialist is going to look different.

This is where Weak Bundle, Strong Bundle: How AI Redraws Job Boundaries by Garicano, Li and Wu is an important read. Their argument is that labour markets do not buy isolated tasks. They buy jobs that bundle tasks together. Where a job is a weak bundle, AI can peel away the more codifiable parts and leave a narrower human residue behind. Where it is a strong bundle, AI may improve the work without breaking the job apart.

That feels closer to the world we are actually entering than either simple doom or simple reassurance.

We’re all familiar with how organisations bundle work into different roles. Some of that bundling makes sense. Some of it is about protecting professional identity. Some of it is pure hierarchy. Some of it is convenience. 

One of the most disruptive impacts of AI is that it disturbs all of that. It does not need to replace professions outright to matter. It can thin the bundle of the job by redistributing tasks, reducing the need for hand-offs, and making some junior work look less necessary than it really is.

You probably saw the viral imaginings about what the future might look like. Whether it was Matt Shumer’s “Something Big Is Happening“, Citrini Research’s “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis“, or anyone else subsequently heralding the idea that things are about to change radically, it’s easy either to be swept up by the mood or to dismiss it as hype. I am trying to do neither. The point is not that the most dramatic version of the story must be true. It is that the less dramatic version may still be serious.

A total jobs apocalypse can be turned into a cartoon. The robots arrive, the laptops close, everyone is sent home. But the future almost certainly will not happen like that.

The more plausible risk is quieter.

The labour market doesn’t collapse, it adjusts.

Then it adjusts again.

Then it adjusts again.

This won’t be experienced as a single shift but a combination of many small changes. What if total employment holds up for a while, but hours fall, security falls, progression falls, and the number of properly developmental roles falls? What if teams stay the same size for a bit, then stop hiring? What if the graduate scheme becomes smaller, then symbolic, then gone?

At what point does that stop being a manageable adjustment and start becoming a social problem? What percentage change can the labour market absorb before it stops making its contribution to social cohesion and the quiet functioning of the state?

I don’t know.

And I’m not sure who does. We’re used to expecting the labour market to absorb whatever technology, management fad, tax policy, immigration rhetoric, and institutional neglect we throw at it, because it always has before.

But what if it can’t?

What if 5% is enough to matter? What about 10%? What about 20%?

Paid employment does not only distribute income and contribute a solid chunk of government revenue. It distributes routine. It affords status. It provides identity and standing amongst our peers. It gives us permission to participate in society. It legitimises rest. It creates the basis from which people can volunteer, give, care, organise, coach, serve, build institutions, and create structure for others.

That is a lot to load onto one institution. It is also a lot to assume will keep working by accident.

Work Organises Local Economies

One temptation is to imagine that if AI eats into the worlds of software and analysis and design and law and journalism and consulting and communications and policy and finance and management and anyone else counted among the laptop-wielding, lanyard-wearing, working-from-home class, then the problem belongs mostly to the people who currently enjoy the greatest flexibility and the softest chairs.

And for some there would be a certain narrative satisfaction in that.

But it would be wrong.

Comfortable middle-class employment supports a great deal of the economy closest to home. Cafes, cleaners, gyms, lunch spots, trades, childcare, cinemas, theatres, taxis, eating out at the local restaurant, the regular takeaway, hairdressers, tutors, charity giving, season tickets, high-street spending.

Those are largely things that are less exposed to AI. They’re more physical, more relational, more local, and therefore less directly automatable. But they’re also largely supported by the incomes, routines and habits of people whose work is more exposed.

So if comfortable employment gradually plateaus, and then suddenly contracts, the consequences will not be confined to comfortable people.

One version of this post could have become a middle-class anxiety piece. My exposure to AI through software engineering has certainly left me with serious questions about the sort of work that has made my own life possible. And if you are in the laptop-wielding, lanyard-wearing, working-from-home class, then you probably cannot avoid feeling some of that anxiety.

But the last 18 months at DWP have made that anxiety feel smaller than the wider question.

Because in the UK we are not talking about a pristine labour market being hit by external disruption.

We are talking about disruption landing on a labour market that is already under strain.

Work Organises The Doorway Into Adult Life

Work is not just what happens after adulthood begins. In many ways, work is the way in which adulthood begins.

It is where confidence is built, habits are learned, skills emerge, and people discover the contribution they can make beyond the horizons of the world they already knew.

That is why the current focus on young people matters. They are not the whole labour market story. There is health-related inactivity. There is disability. There are older workers who fall out and do not come back. There are carers. There are places where the local ladder has fewer rungs than the national story likes to admit.

But young people are where the warning lights are flashing.

In May 2026 the Office for National Statistics estimated that more than 1m people aged 16 to 24 were not in education, employment or training (NEET). Some of those numbers are still below their peaks earlier this century, so this is not a simple story of collapse. But the direction of travel is ugly.

In the previous month, The Resolution Foundation argued this is not just a post-pandemic blip. The UK has a structurally high NEET rate by European standards, now made worse by weaker labour demand, worse health, weaker vocational offers and a benefits system that is better at tolerating detachment than reversing it.

That’s why Alan Milburn’s interim report matters. It sharpens our focus, or it should do. This is not a story of temporary youth unemployment it’s increasingly one of detachment: more young people economically inactive, more routes into work weakened, and more of early adulthood shaped by health, waiting, rejection and systems that certify incapacity more easily than they build capability.

That interim report provoked me to pen some thoughts about the ask for the Church. This post lands somewhere else. It is a wider political and civic version of the question: what happens if a brittle transition into adult life collides with tools that make entry-level work thinner, rarer, or simply easier not to offer?

The most useful recent evidence is not, in fact, the apocalyptic stuff. It is the quieter suggestion that the first effect may be at the doorway: fewer openings, harder entry, more reasons not to take a chance on the young.

Anthropic have been publishing their research on impact to the labour-market. There is no clear spike (yet) in unemployment for the most AI-exposed occupations overall but it is finding suggestive evidence that those aged 22 to 25 are becoming less likely to be hired into the more exposed occupations.

That feels like a warning. The first effect may not be the drama of people losing their jobs, it may be fewer people being allowed in to begin with.

And that connects back to the organisational point. If jobs are bundles, and AI starts peeling away the junior, codifiable, first-draft parts of those bundles, then the risk is not only that existing roles shrink. It is that the early work through which people learn, prove themselves and become trusted starts to disappear from the route in.

This is not just something that “technology” does by itself. It happens through hiring freezes, procurement choices, restructuring, offshoring, outsourcing, and the very prevalent habit of treating short-term efficiencies as though they have no social cost.

So this is not about whole professions disappearing.

It is about the quieter narrowing of the on ramp to them.

Fewer openings. More caution. Higher bars. More reasons not to take a chance on someone who is new, unsure, unwell, unsupported, or not yet polished.

And that lands on a British reality that is already uneven and already place-shaped. DWP’s own labour market insights show large differences between local labour-market types, and a clear story about the compounding effect of different challenges. The places with the strongest participation in the labour market are not the places with the greatest strain.

So I would hope that the Milburn Review is a gateway into the broader conversation. The challenges facing young people are serious but we can’t shrink the argument. Their lives do encapsulate a whole dashboard of warning lights. But those same lights are flashing for disabled people, people with long-term health conditions, older workers, carers, and people navigating anxiety, poor mental health or neurodivergence in a labour market still too often designed around the fiction of the frictionless worker.

So the question is not simply “will AI take jobs?”

It is something closer to this: what happens to a society when the lower rungs of participation are already fraying, and then the labour market becomes less willing to absorb beginners, people still finding their footing, and the not-quite-well?

That is a dignity question before it is a fiscal one.

Work Organises Dignity and Status

I don’t want to argue that employment itself should be defended as though it has some uncomplicated moral character.

Surely less work is the point of progress?

If progress does not mean more time, more freedom, more capacity to live rather than grind, then what exactly have we been doing? If all we manage is to automate drudgery and then re-invent it at a higher resolution, that is not liberation. It is a treadmill with better branding and, more than likely, a subscription model.

So I wouldn’t subscribe to the argument that it is work that gives life worth. Some of us do find our identity and our fulfilment in the work that we do. That is an important gift. But while it can be dignity for some, it can also be coercion with a payslip.

Work exhausts people. It wears out bodies. It traps people under bad managers, bad shifts, bad environments, bad incentives, bad customers, bad commutes and bad backs. It gives some people confidence and others a chronic sense of being measured and found wanting. It can form character, but it can also waste life. It can be service, but it can also be mentally and physically scarring.

So the fact that there are implications to work disappearing is not a reason to sanctify it.

We should be able to agree that some jobs should go. Some tasks should disappear. Some forms of hard graft should be automated out of existence and never mourned. Some working weeks should be shorter. Some meetings should be emails. Some emails should simply never exist.

But then the old promise of leisure catches on something.

Leisure has almost never arrived evenly. The people with the greatest flexibility have it because someone else is doing the necessary work. Sometimes that someone is a low-paid service worker. Sometimes they are a migrant worker. Sometimes it is invisible and routine and undersung care work in the home. My ease is something of an illusion, it’s not a pure creation, it’s a rearrangement of burden shouldered elsewhere.

And I don’t think this time we are on the cusp of anything different. Even if we achieve abundant computation, clean energy, excellent software and a world where the administrative sludge is cleared away, then some work will remain. Care work. Maintenance. Public safety. Physical infrastructure. Pastoral care. Anything involving trust, interruption, awkwardness, weather, risk, or bodily fluids.

There is no future in which the world stops needing people to do things.

And once we get to that point then what had been an engineering problem turns back into a political one.

If computers create more ease, but necessary work remains, who gets the ease and who gets the work?

So then we’re into a distribution question. And it’s no longer abstract, it’s become very much an everyday set of questions about how individuals get to live with safety and security in this work-less future.

Because the nightmare scenario is not that everyone now has leisure.

The nightmare scenario is the work lottery.

A society where some people are in meaningful, well-paid roles, with the security and esteem that comes with it. While others are not, perhaps permanently. Maybe we’ve come up with a good enough model of welfare that means they’re not necessarily starving in terms of food in their bellies. But they may not be full in the softer, perhaps more corrosive sense: that the world no longer really knows what you are for.

So in that work-less world, who is lucky? 

Is it the person who still has a job and we continue to lionise income and status as entry to their place in the world? Or is it the person that’s freed from work, with time, rest and a chance to contribute differently?

I think the answer to that depends on how we as a society think about the wrapper that our lives sit within.

If those who are freed from work can access security, community, recognition and useful participation then that’s a positive.

If those who are freed from work end up in a world of means-testing, suspicion and a weekly reminder that your lack of ‘participation’ means you aren’t valued then that is not freedom. It’s abandonment with less commuting.

This is where my slightly affected spelling of work-less is deliberate. “Workless” is already a word our systems use to mark people negatively. But a work-less future could mean something different: pessimistic enough to recognise how easily people are categorised as surplus, but optimistic enough to imagine less paid work being designed around time, dignity, care, service and common life.

And if there is less work to go round, then forcing everyone to prove their worth through work becomes both cruel and incoherent.

A job isn’t just a wage – it’s how we justify our place in society and demonstrate that we’re contributing. The result is permission to be tired, to complain, to have needs, to be part of the “we”.

And for those of us who have experienced work as an abundance then it’s easy to think that being employed is what adult life looks like. But if (when?) work becomes scarce then we’ll start to experience the world as others have been. A world where access to employment is not so straightforward, and where being out of work quickly draws the suspicions of others.

It’s not that we have consciously signed up to a Victorian worldview but we haven’t done the hard work to develop a better framing for defining who counts, and what matters.

This is evident with the problematic proposals for Earned Settlement. On the surface that looks like it’s a conversation about migration but underneath it sits a redefining of the very ideas about membership in our society. Once we tether our welcome of others to their wages and their economic utility then we’re codifying something dangerous into our social logic. It’s putting a price on people. That logic is worrying right now but in a work-less future it is absolutely toxic.

So we need to be widening the framing of what it means to participate and asking the question about what replaces work as the way in which we understand legitimacy.

Our instinctive policy answers are economic. We’ll find a financial floor that we’re comfortable with and given that we’ll now potentially have swathes of the middle class accessing it there’ll probably be some pressure to make it less punitive. And maybe there will be a point in time where we consider universal basic income as the answer.

But all of that is only going to try and answer the question about income. 

That isn’t going to answer status. It won’t answer contribution. It won’t answer the need to be expected somewhere, missed when absent, known over time, relied upon by others, or invited into responsibility.

That does not necessarily make it a bad idea for meeting material needs, it’s just that money isn’t the whole answer.

And then there is the conundrum of social mobility. We have talked about mobility as climbing: better jobs, better pay, better prospects, a route from here to there. But what does mobility mean if there are fewer ladders? What does opportunity mean if the rungs of the ladders have been removed?

I definitely don’t have the answers for that.

But I’m fairly sure the answer can’t be one where we keep equating employment with dignity and respect.

If someone doesn’t earn, what gives them legitimate purchase in our common life?

If participation isn’t only paid work, then what is it? Can we start to recognise it in care? In study? In recovery? In service? In building institutions? In turning up? In lending an ear? In offering a shoulder? In giving a hand?

These are the things which have always mattered and always existed, and often without expectation of any reward.

The trap, obviously, is moralism. Nobody wants a future where support is conditional on passing a fresh respectability test. The point is not to invent a new bureaucracy of worthiness.

It is to recover the good things work has carried without pretending the bad things were holy.

It is to stop letting the labour market have a monopoly on dignity.

Work Organises Time And Place

A work-less society is not only an income problem. It’s a time problem.

Inevitably I can’t help but think about this public policy problem in the context of my faith. And to particularly pause to think about the monastic tradition.

I don’t want to over-romanticise it. The point is not only old buildings, beautiful chanting and excellent ale. It is the older intuition that time can be ordered around something other than paid production or private consumption.

Prayer. Cultivation. Study. Service. Hospitality. Beauty. Shared meals. Common work. A rule of life.

If paid work takes up less of our lives, what is that time for?

Rest, I hope. Care, I hope. Prayer, craft, friendship, learning, repair, service, making things beautiful, making things useful, becoming less frantic and more human.

But also possibly scrolling, loneliness, grievance, consumption, status games, and a lot of people sitting at home being told they have technically been liberated.

That’s why Ireland’s basic income experiment for artists feels like a small but useful glimpse into something bigger. It is not a model for everything but what is interesting is that the value was not only in art sold or immediate fiscal return. The pilot pointed to less anxiety, more stability, more time for practice, and a wider cultural contribution. Secured time is not necessarily empty time. It can become practice, recovery, contribution, culture and gift.

So this is not only about how people receive income, it is about how people inhabit their time.

And that is where time and place begin to meet.

One of the default assumptions of modern policy is that when work moves, people should move too. Be mobile. Be flexible. Go where the opportunities are. In one form or another, it is Norman Tebbit’s “get on your bike” instinct.

And sometimes moving is necessary. Sometimes it is brave and right and how people survive. Economic migration is not an abstraction to me. It is there in the lives of people I have met through Vineyard English School, many of whom would far rather be living in the countries of their birth, but who are here because staying was impossible or unsafe or simply no longer held a future.

So I do not want to be glib about rootedness.

But the idea that people should always move to where the work is remains a poor description of the good life. It assumes that a job is the only serious reason to stay anywhere, and that everything else that makes life human – friendship, family, familiarity, responsibility, the sense of being known – is secondary.

People are not simply labour units.

They are neighbours. Members. People who belong somewhere.

If paid work becomes less central, one possibility is a more frantic version of the current pattern. The young and mobile peel away towards the cities, pressure intensifies, and “left behind” becomes not just a phrase but a permanent category.

But doesn’t another possibility open up?

If fewer people have to chase work in quite the same way, then more people can stay. The push to migrate weakens. The pressure on already overheated cities changes. The possibility of rekindling places we have quietly written off becomes more real: market towns, seaside towns, post-industrial neighbourhoods.

You might dismiss this as nostalgia but it feels like a genuinely plausible outcome of a world in which there are fewer jobs.

But it relies on a different view of participation: one rooted in common life, not only in the personal bank balance.

So of course this is where I think about the Church because at its best it is not a place for commentary, it’s a place of practice. A place where stability is not stagnation but faithfulness. Where you are known over time. Where you are more than your CV. Where help is not only an algorithm but a knock on the door. Where someone can still be inside the life of a place while learning, serving, healing, rebuilding, praying, making, cultivating, cooking, listening, organising, resting and beginning again.

That does not solve macroeconomics. It does not answer the tax question. It does not tell us how to distribute the productivity dividend.

And it cannot become austerity with hymns. Churches, charities and voluntary groups cannot be asked to absorb the consequences of a broken settlement while the state congratulates itself on localism. Community is not a cheap substitute for wages, housing, social care, mental health treatment, transport, colleges or local government.

But it does answer part of the more human problem.

What holds a person steady while the labour market does less of the holding than it once did?

Work Organises The State

I do not think the only story here is bleak.

A world where we can meet human needs with less human labour is a success condition. It should mean shorter weeks. More time with children, friends, ageing parents. More time for prayer, rest, art, cultivation, service, repair. It should mean that making a life is not the same thing as making a CV.

But that optimistic story of the pessimistic future is not going to happen by default.

It is going to need to be designed.

That, in the end, is why this is a question for the state.

Not because the state can answer every human problem. It cannot. Not because policy can manufacture belonging. It cannot. But because we have built a state, a tax base, a welfare system, a labour market, a skills system and a politics around the assumption that paid employment will do a great deal of the holding.

It will distribute income.

It will give people status.

It will create progression.

It will structure adult life.

It will fund public services.

It will make welfare mostly transitional.

It will make social mobility sound plausible.

It will hold enough of the country together that the rest of our institutions can muddle through.

What happens if it does less of that?

If AI is to bring about a productivity dividend then what is actually being distributed, and what will people experience? It isn’t enough for productivity to rise somewhere in the economy if the gains appear as margins, valuations, subscriptions and offshore profits while ordinary life becomes less secure. The dividend has to become tangible as income, time, security, status, lower costs, better services, or some combination of them.

If employment contracts, thins, or hardens at the edges, what level of change can the status quo absorb? What happens if it is not 5%, but 15%, 25%, 40%? At what point does the labour market stop being merely difficult and start being unable to carry the social expectations we have loaded onto it?

If AI takes away comfortable jobs in air-conditioned offices, what do we do with the necessary work that does not go away? The sweaty, mucky, people-facing work that is actually the work that keeps modern life running. Will we take the chance to make it pay properly so it becomes desirable? Do we shorten it and share it so these jobs become more humane?  Do we raise its status? Do we automate what we genuinely can in order to give those workers ease as well?

If work becomes harder to find, what is the welfare state for? Is it a bridge back to employment, as the expectation is today? Undoubtedly that role will not go away. But can that be enough if work itself is scarce, or if the doorway into work has narrowed? More than ever, we would have to question the value and merit of conditional regimes that focus on compliance theatre at the expense of actually investing in someone else.

And a biggy in all of this, how does the state pay for a decent common life if wage tax is no longer the whole engine, and even more so if all the gains that we’re talking about here are mediated by platforms and firms outside our borders? At least when the Luddites smashed the machines they were focusing their energy in the direction of landowners and millowners whose business interests were still located in the British economy. The machines that are reshaping our common life today are elsewhere and the inflows and outflows are not geographically focused on the same communities that will bear the brunt of their impact.

Then there is the institutional question.

What is trusted enough to carry our nation through a change like this?

We know that the UK has some of the lowest levels of trust in the world. We know that frankly our electoral system is not fit for today’s purposes. We know that significant parts of our social infrastructure have been dismantled and that which remains is stretched and overburdened. 

Local government. 

Schools, colleges and universities.

Unions and community organisations. 

The parish and its equivalents.

These are not soft add-ons to the real economic question. They are part of whether a labour-market shock becomes a civic and emotional one.

Those are not questions for “society” in the abstract.

They are for ministers and departments. For Treasury economists and service designers. For mayors and local authorities. For employers, unions, the third sector and faith groups. For anyone responsible for an institution that people might still trust when the labour market does less of the holding than it once did.

All that sounds alarming, and I suppose it is. But I am not really coming at this from a place of uncomplicated pessimism. I do not expect the labour market to halve in size. I do not expect us to shed one in four jobs. But neither of those things now feels impossible in the way I would like it to feel impossible. And I do expect some contraction, or thinning, or hardening, and our current settlement probably cannot handle that well. The Milburn interim report would suggest that our current settlement cannot even handle the current status quo.

And so the point is not to predict perfectly.

It is to prepare.

It is responsible to be pessimistic about the default path, because the default path looks like a labour market doing less and less while we keep pretending it is still the main route into adult life.

It is responsible to be optimistic enough to design something better before we are forced to react.

To build belonging that is less conditional. To honour the work that remains without pretending all work is good. To widen our idea of participation so that paid employment is not the only way we judge value. To build local stories of local life before grievance becomes the preferred narrative.

We can have the dividend, or we can have the resentment.

The technology does not care which one we pick.

The work of choosing, and of building what follows, is still ours.

If less work is the dream, why does it feel like a threat? - bmwelby's blog - Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

This morning Alan Milburn launched the Young people and work interim report. I tuned in to hear his speech and the follow-up Q&A, and I’d recommend you find the time not only to read the report but to listen to him speak to it.

It is arresting stuff. Not only because of the scale of the crisis being described, though the scale is staggering, and not only because of the policy detail, though there is plenty there worth wrestling with. But what especially struck me today was the moral seriousness with which Alan spoke about young people who are quietly disappearing from participation in the life of the country.

Over the last phase of my time at DWP, I shared my time between the team supporting this review and the jobs and careers service. Mine was a small contribution in the scheme of things, but enough to see at close quarters the seriousness, care and determination Alan and his team have brought to it. It also means I am not a wholly impartial observer. I want this report, and the final report coming later in the year, to be read carefully, argued with seriously, and met with a level of response that matches the gravity of what it describes.

Because this is a report that asks important questions:

What happens to a society when more than one million young people are outside education, employment or training?

What happens when the pathways into adulthood no longer reliably function?

What happens when institutions each hold fragments of a person’s story, but nobody holds the whole?

And perhaps most importantly: what kind of country are we becoming if we learn to normalise this?

The review’s argument is not that this requires a temporary focus or a short-term policy tweak around the edges. We’ve been here before, oscillating between panic and amnesia. We briefly notice a crisis, announce something, fund something, brand something, and then move on before anything has changed.

No, the argument is that there has been a structural break in how young people move into work, confidence, belonging and adult life, and therefore structural change has to be the response. And that means harder questions to answer about institutions, relationships, participation, and the kind of social fabric that is required for young people to flourish.

This should arrest government.

But that is the minimum we should expect from a report like this.

The question I want to press here is not first what government should do next, but what the Church should hear in all this.

Because it should also arrest the Church.

One million is a number, some one has a name

The latest ONS figures put the number of young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training at 1,012,000.

At that scale, the figure becomes anaesthetising. It belongs to news bulletins, select committees and spending reviews. It becomes something for the machinery of the state to deal with.

But bring it a bit closer.

Spread a figure like that across the country’s few hundred local authorities, and now the impossible national number looks like a few thousand young people.

Bring it closer again.

Here in Croydon, with a couple of hundred churches across the borough, it starts to sound less like an abstraction and more like names.

That maths is rough, of course. Young people are not units to be allocated and churches are not franchises of the public sector. Some are tiny and stretched. Some are already shouldering deep local pain. Some of those churches are doing amazing work leaning into their gifts for youth work, family support, mentoring, refugee and asylum welcome, pastoral care, prayer, employer connections or community organising.

But the maths offers something important nonetheless.

One million sounds impossible.

Twenty sounds like names.

And that is a better place for the Church to begin.

With names.

Because that is how Jesus teaches us to see people.

A crisis of participation

The report is not just about unemployment. It is about participation: who gets to take part in the life of the country, who is left outside it, and what happens when the systems meant to carry people into adult life stop doing that reliably.

It describes a labour market where the first rung is thinning out. Entry-level jobs now demand greater experience. Recruitment is remote, automated and filtered. The young person who might once have walked into a shop clutching an application, spoken to a manager and been given a chance is now often rejected before another person has looked them in the eye.

It describes an education system that can see risk early but does not always have the incentives, capacity or connective tissue to respond early. Absence, SEND, family adversity, poor mental health, weak exposure to work: these things do not suddenly appear at 16. They accumulate. A young person does not simply “become NEET” as though a switch is flicked on a birthday. Shamefully and scandalously, their path has often been forming for years.

It describes a health system increasingly overwhelmed by the needs of young people, especially around mental health, disability and neurodiversity. But it also describes a deeper problem: treatment without participation. Diagnosis without belonging. A fit note without a future. A system that can name what is wrong more readily than it can help someone discover what is still possible.

It describes a welfare system that must, rightly, protect those who cannot work, but which too often pays attention to incapacity without building pathways of capability. Our institutions end up holding fragments of a life while no one holds the whole person. And our failings are not only cultural. They show up in our priorities too, with the report showing around 25 times more is spent on benefits than on employment support for young people.

Most painfully, it describes young people who are not refusing life. As the voices captured in the companion report Inside the Mind of a Young NEET make clear, many want work, learning, purpose and contribution. They are not idle so much as tired: tired of applying and hearing nothing back, tired of repeating their story, tired of being assessed, referred, paused, categorised and dropped, tired of being treated as a problem before they have been recognised as a person.

That word matters: recognised.

Recognition is something that has kept cropping up during my time at DWP because underneath it sits a question about aspiration.

Aspiration is relational

We say young people need aspiration. Families need aspiration. Communities need aspiration.

There is truth in that, but used carelessly the word becomes a way of locating the problem inside the person with the least power. They have not wanted enough. Tried enough. Dreamed enough. Presented themselves well enough. Built the network. Found the confidence. Opened the next step.

This fails to engage the other side of that equation: the system itself and our aspiration on their behalf. Have we wanted enough for them? Have we tried enough? Dreamed enough? Presented our offer well enough? Identified their network? Built up their confidence? Signposted their next step?

But this also makes aspiration a problem of motivation.

I think it is relational.

People learn what is possible because it is other people who hold open a future for them before they can hold it open for themselves.

A child learns aspiration when someone notices a gift before it is polished. A teenager learns it when their awkwardness is not mistaken for a lack of promise. A young person learns it when a moment of failure does not mean abandonment. A family learns it when care doesn’t only show up at the point of crisis. A community learns it when it contains places people can grow into, not only places they are trying to escape.

That is why this report should be arresting for my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Because, at our best, this is exactly the kind of people we are meant to be.

What the Church can see

The Church is not an employment service. It is not a school, CAMHS, a council youth service or a substitute for a properly functioning welfare state. It must not become an easy alibi for public disinvestment, as though the answer to broken systems is simply for the voluntary sector to do more with less.

But the Church is a body.

And bodies notice when parts are cut off.

The Church is a household.

And households know when someone is missing from the table.

The Church is a people formed around the conviction that every person bears a dignity that is given, not earned. A young person’s worth does not arrive with confidence, qualifications, employability or polish. It is already there, and Christian community exists to recognise it, honour it and help it grow.

The Church is intergenerational. That is not a lifestyle preference. It is part of its witness. Babies, children, teenagers, students, single adults, parents, aunties, uncles, grandparents, widows, people in work, people out of work, people with too much to do, people wondering what they are for now. In a society increasingly sorted by age, income, anxiety and algorithm, the Church is one of the few remaining places where a young person might be known by adults who are not paid to know them.

That matters.

It matters that someone notices the 14-year-old who has stopped coming.

It matters that someone can say, “You’re good with children. Have you ever thought about early years?”

It matters that someone can say, “Come and help me set up the sound desk.”

It matters that someone can say, “I know a builder who might let you shadow and build up some experience.”

It matters that someone can say, “Your anxiety is real, but it is not the whole truth about you.”

It matters that someone can sit with a parent who is exhausted by school meetings, assessment delays, forms, thresholds and acronyms.

It matters that a church can be a place where confidence is rebuilt in almost invisible increments: stacking chairs, serving coffee, leading prayer, helping with kids work, joining the worship team, supporting someone else to learn English, making lunch, visiting someone lonely, learning to arrive on time, learning to be relied upon, learning that contribution is possible before employment is secured.

These are mustard-seed things.

Mustard seeds and systems

Jesus compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed: tiny when it is planted, but growing into something with branches large enough for birds to perch in its shade.

The point is not that smallness is holy in itself. The point is that we often misunderstand how the kingdom grows. It begins in hiddenness, soil, patience and place, and becomes shelter.

We tend to think scale means centralisation, visibility and a model that can be rolled out nationally. Sometimes those things do work out well. Machinery and institutions have value. Funding and accountability are definitely important. Fixing data and the underlying national plumbing on which good services rely are non-negotiable.

But one of the strongest things in this work is the insistence that it cannot be solved by any one institution acting alone. Government, employers, schools, health services, welfare systems, charities, communities, families and faith groups all have a part to play.

And it is incomprehensible to me that the Church would hear this diagnosis and not immediately ask what our part is.

Not because we’re angling to replace the state or claim the ability to sort out the labour market. It’s because the story we have to tell has everything to do with participation, belonging, hope, and a kingdom that grows differently.

The Kingdom of Heaven grows when something is planted.

What does that planting look like? It looks like the steady work of what churches are always up to: A person encouraged. A family supported. A young person introduced to an employer. A teenager trusted with responsibility. A child prayed for by name. A parent given rest. A youth worker showing up reliably time after time. A congregation receiving young people as active parts of their community now, not as a risk to manage or a future asset to retain.

One of the report’s sharpest diagnoses is that Britain lacks a participation system. The Church is not going to build that system on its own. But in countless ordinary, local and often unremarked ways, churches are already practising participation rather than merely talking about it.

Churches are communities where participation is not reserved for the already confident. They’re communities where contribution is not only for the already employable. They’re communities where people aren’t left alone to translate their wounds into acceptable institutional language before anyone helps them. They’re communities where the question is not only “what can you do?” but “who are you becoming, and how do we walk with you?”

None of this is sentimental, and it will be difficult even when the national figure is brought down to the scale of a local church community. Some young people will not respond neatly. Some situations will be more complicated than a local church can hold. Safeguarding must never be improvised. Churches will need humility, training, partnership and proper boundaries. They will need to actively collaborate with schools, colleges, councils, youth services, employers, mental health services and local charities.

But the alternative is worse.

The alternative is that churches read the headlines, lament the state of the nation, perhaps pray in general terms for young people, content themselves with their existing kids and youth work, only to then carry on as though the crisis is somewhere else.

It is not somewhere else.

It is in our boroughs, towns, estates, schools, colleges, families and pews. It is in the young person who has slipped through the cracks of society’s institutions. The cousin who cannot get an interview despite hundreds of applications. The child whose anxiety is turning into a refusal to go to school. The parent who is losing hope. The teenager who has never met an adult in work who could imagine a path for them. The young adult who is not in education, not in work, not claiming support, and not visible to any system at all.

What churches might do

Start by reading the report. Not as policy homework, but as an act of attention.

Then ask better questions.

Who are the young people already connected to us who are drifting? Who haven’t we seen recently? Which families are carrying anxiety about school, work, disability, mental health or the future? Which young people in our congregation have never had a serious conversation with an adult about vocation, work, gifts and adulthood?

Then gather the adults who are already part of the answer.

Which employers are already in our churches? Which teachers, social workers, youth workers, work coaches, nurses, counsellors, business owners and public servants are already engaging with pieces of this societal need?

What would happen if we all read the report, then got into a room with our young people, listened carefully, prayed, and acted?

So begin small and concrete.

What responsibilities could we give young people now? What work experience could we broker? What mentoring could we offer without making it strange? What would it mean to know the local college? What would it mean to ask the council what they are seeing? What would it mean to partner with organisations already doing this well, rather than inventing something because our church prefers its own logo?

And see the transition into adult life for what it is: a discipleship issue.

Discipleship is not less than prayer, worship, Scripture and holiness. But it is more than private piety. It is learning to live truthfully before God and neighbour. It is learning how to carry responsibility without being crushed by it. It is discovering gifts and offering them in love. It is becoming the kind of person who can participate in the life of the world.

Young people do not need churches that simply tell them to be more successful.

They need churches that tell them they are beloved before they succeed.

They need churches that tell them their life is gift before it is output.

They need churches that tell them work can be good without making work into salvation.

They need churches that understand rest without blessing disengagement.

They need churches that honour disability without closing down possibility.

They need churches that can tell the truth about what is stacked against them without telling them they are powerless.

They need churches that can keep hope alive long enough for them to believe they are not beyond it.

Branches for shade

The mustard seed comes to life when planted.

Not admired. Not preached about. Planted.

In soil. In place. In relationships. In the patient, mundane faithfulness of people who decide that the young people near them are not someone else’s responsibility.

The branches do not appear overnight. Shade takes time.

But somewhere the seed has to go into the ground.

And if the Church cannot hear a call in more than one million young lives waiting outside the ordinary routes into participation, confidence and contribution, then we are missing something very important about the role of the Church.

Not because the Church exists to replace the state or fix the labour market.

But because the Church exists to bear witness to the kingdom.

And the kingdom has branches.

And the branches are for shade.

Strong branches and good shade - bmwelby's blog - Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

I am sorry about the title.

Not very sorry, obviously. But sorry enough to acknowledge that “one weird trick” belongs more naturally beside adverts for miraculous belly-fat solutions, obscure pension loopholes, and things dentists apparently hate. And that it is not usually the hook into a conversation about democratic renewal.

Still, I think there is this weird trick available to Keir Starmer.

It is this: govern.

Govern with the majority he has to begin fixing one of the things that is most obviously, repeatedly, structurally broken in British politics. Not by avoiding disagreement. Not by finding the correct grid of announceables. Not by setting up the right combination of technocratic delivery boards. Not by locating the mythical median voter hiding somewhere between a focus group in Nuneaton and a laminated pledge card.

Govern with the majority he has to fix British politics by making votes mean something closer to what voters intend them to mean.

In other words: electoral reform.

I know. I know. Nothing says “urgent political response to last week’s electoral earthquake and this week’s leadership crisis” like constitutional reform. I know you and everyone else is crying out: at last, regional deliberative democracy methodologies.

And yet. It kind of feels like precisely the moment when you swing for the fences and you say the bigger thing.

Because the noise now is all about Starmer. Whether he can survive. Whether he should survive. Whether the speech worked. Whether the cabinet is wobbling, marching, whispering, briefing, plotting, or merely standing near a door with an unusually thoughtful expression.

This is Westminster’s favourite kind of drama, because it can be reported almost entirely through human weather. Who is up. Who is down. Who is loyal. Who is “loyal”. Who is thinking of the party. Who is thinking of the country. Who is thinking of the country in a way that it just so happens involves them becoming prime minister instead.

And some of that matters. Of course it does. Leadership matters. Judgment matters. Political authority matters. If a prime minister cannot command confidence, that is not a trivial problem.

But the problem runs deeper.

The danger is that the Labour party convinces itself that this is fundamentally a personnel issue. Change the leader, change the mood, change the story. A new face, a new operation, a new grid, a new solemn promise that lessons have been learned and listening has occurred.  

Perhaps that would help. Perhaps it would not. But I reckon the forces now swirling around Starmer would swirl around whoever succeeded him.

Because I don’t think last week’s elections were really simply a verdict on one man.

I think we’ve been getting closer to this sort of outcome for years.

The electoral map was wobbling. Now it has toppled.

Reform is no longer merely an irritation on the right of the Conservative Party. The Greens are no longer merely a place for protest votes in seats where everyone already owns a bicycle. The Liberal Democrats continue to possess their strange and enduring ability to appear locally inevitable while nationally implausible. Independents, local parties, national parties and post-party moods are all tugging at the fabric.

The country is not behaving like a two-party country.

It has not done for some time. But last week made the point harder to avoid. Voters are moving in different directions at once. They are not simply swinging neatly from red to blue or blue to red, like a polite constitutional pendulum maintained by a retired civil servant in a cardigan. They are fragmenting, protesting, experimenting, hedging, punishing, searching.

And Westminster is still trying to cram that into a machine built for a different political world.

This is the thing about First Past the Post. Its defenders always present it as the sensible shoes of electoral systems. Sturdy. Familiar. No nonsense.

But what if it is no longer producing stability? What if it is producing distortion and claiming it as stability?

The great promise of the system was that it delivered strong governments. But strong in what sense? Strong enough to govern, perhaps. Strong enough to command the Commons, also perhaps. But strong in legitimacy, consent, or public trust ? Um…not so much?

That is the bind Starmer is in.

He has, at least on paper, the kind of parliamentary majority that prime ministers dream of. The sort of majority that ought to make legislation possible, discipline manageable, and ambition something other than a word smuggled into speeches by a special adviser at 1.15am.

And yet the whole thing feels oddly brittle.

A huge majority, but a shallow mandate. A government with power, but not much consent. A prime minister with authority, but no great sense of permission.

This is what happens when the system can turn a fragmented public mood into an apparently emphatic parliamentary outcome. It creates governments that are legally secure but politically thin. It gives someone the keys to the machine while leaving them unsure whether anyone particularly wanted them to drive it.

And there is something faintly comic about the whole thing. Labour won a large majority and has behaved as though it had been asked to carry a loaded tray of drinks down a moving train. Careful now. Don’t spill the mandate. Don’t alarm the commentariat. Don’t let anyone think you intend to use the thing.

But what is the point of a majority this size if it cannot be used to touch the machinery of politics itself?

What is the point of winning power if power is then treated as an administrative inconvenience?

The usual response to an election shock is already under way. There are calls for a reset. There are always calls for a reset. British politics now resets so often that “have you tried turning it off and on again?” must be the unspoken first principle of our unwritten constitution.

Starmer has given the expected leadership-crisis speech: the stay-the-course, I-have-heard-you, Britain-needs-change, I-will-not-walk-away speech. It may well have contained good things. But the question is not only whether a speech contains good things. It is whether it rises to the size of the moment. Whether it is shift-the-needle, save-the-job, heal-the-land good.

There will be further speeches along similar lines. There will definitely be stern-faced briefings about delivery. There will be attempts to rediscover “working people”, as if they have been left behind a sofa in Labour HQ. There may be reshuffles, relaunches, triangulations and phrases so drained of life that even the autocue will look embarrassed.

Message matters. Delivery matters. Labour has often failed to explain itself, and Starmer’s personal unpopularity is real enough.

But beneath all that, our political system is trying to force a plural country through a binary funnel.

The status quo teaches people to vote against what they fear rather than for what they believe. It rewards tactical calculation and punishes sincerity. It tells voters in safe seats that the national drama is happening somewhere else. It tells voters in marginals that their power lies mostly in being targeted, courted and frightened every few years.

It turns democracy into a form of emotional arbitrage.

And then, every few years, we look around and wonder why public trust is low.

Now, the obvious objection is that Labour cannot simply use its majority to impose proportional representation. That would be both constitutionally reckless and politically self-defeating. It would be dismissed instantly as a stitch-up, and not only by bad-faith actors.

A governing party changing the voting system that gave it power needs to be more careful than that.

The trick, then, is not “Labour should pass PR next Thursday and hope nobody notices”.

The trick is to start a process that is serious enough to be trusted.

Not a commission of the great and the good, though some of the great and the good may be allowed sandwiches at the back. Not a consultation in which the answer has already been drafted by clever people in a windowless room. Not a national conversation in the usual sense, which generally means a hashtag, some stakeholder roundtables and a PDF at the end of it.

Something more demanding than that.

A network of citizens’ assemblies, rooted regionally, with proper time, evidence, facilitation and power. Assemblies in different parts of the country, reflecting different political cultures and electoral experiences.

Let people in safe Labour seats, former Labour seats, Reform-surging towns, Green-leaning cities, Lib Dem strongholds, Conservative remnants, rural areas, post-industrial places, commuter belts, coastal communities and ignored edges of the map look honestly at what the current system does to them.

Let them hear from experts. Let them hear from parties. Let them hear from people whose votes have counted too much, and from people whose votes have counted too little. Let them examine the options properly: STV, AMS, open lists, AV-plus, the whole alphabet soup. Let them understand the trade-offs rather than being patronised with slogans.

And then let their recommendations matter.

That is the important bit. 

Britain has a genius for inviting citizens into the room after all the doors have been welded shut. We ask people what they think, thank them for their contribution, publish a summary of findings, and proceed with whatever was going to happen anyway. This is called engagement, and like many British constitutional conventions, it relies on everyone agreeing not to laugh.

A democratic reform process cannot work like that. If this is to mean anything, the assemblies need teeth. Their recommendations should shape the legislation, the referendum question if there is one, the timetable, and the public education needed to make the choice meaningful.

Because the process is the point.

A country with a trust problem cannot be bounced into democratic renewal by people it does not trust. It cannot be told, from the centre, that the centre has discovered a lovely new way for everyone else to be represented. The way we transform democracy has to model the democracy we say we want: patient, local, plural, honest about trade-offs, and willing to let people be more than electoral demographics with weather.

This is where the proposal becomes politically interesting for Starmer.

Or, frankly, for whoever ends up leading the government.

A leadership contest might change the face at the podium. It would not change the underlying facts. It would not unfragment the electorate. It would not make protest voting disappear. It would not restore trust by rearranging the order of names around the cabinet table. It would not make a country that has spent years learning to distrust political promises suddenly decide that this time, this time, the relaunch has really got it.

That is the thinness Starmer is trapped inside. Voters did not so much embrace him as choose the least chaotic available exit from the previous era.

Victory by way of eviction notice. Useful, necessary, but not exactly a love story.

Last week made that thinness visible in lost seats. Labour is being hit from more than one direction at once. The old comfort would be to choose a side of the electorate to chase and hope the others come home in fright. Move right to squeeze Reform. Move left to squeeze the Greens. Become more local to blunt the Lib Dems. Become more managerial to reassure people who mainly want politics to stop happening quite so loudly.

But this is still the old game.

And the old game is part of the problem.

Electoral reform would not magically make people love Starmer. We should be suspicious of anyone promising to make Britain fall in love with a constitutional process. That way lies a very disappointing podcast.

But it could change the nature of his premiership.

It would say: I know the system gave me power, but I do not think the system is therefore good. I know this majority is legal, but I do not think legality is the same thing as legitimacy. I know I could cling to the machine because, for once, it has produced a result I like. Instead, I am going to ask the country how we build something better.

That would wrong-foot almost everyone.

Those instinctively opposed to reform would call it a fix, but would have to explain why randomly selected citizens deliberating in public are less legitimate than a system that can convert minority support into overwhelming power.

Those already convinced of electoral reform would have to accept that democracy cannot be widened only for the people who agree with them. It would mean making room for voters, parties and arguments they might find uncomfortable, irritating or wrong.

Smaller parties would have to move from grievance to responsibility. Some would gain influence they could never dream of under First Past the Post. That is not a regrettable side effect. It is part of the point. If people can stop voting tactically and start voting for the politics they actually believe in, then more of those politics will have to be heard.

The commentariat would have to cope with a political act that is neither a reshuffle nor a vibes reset, so we can only send them our thoughts and prayers.

And voters might, just might, recognise something unusual: a prime minister using power to reduce the distortions that gave him that power.

There is a version of this that sounds like self-sacrifice. But there is also a version where it is the most hard-headed thing he could do.

If Starmer staggers towards the next election offering managerial competence plus slightly shorter waiting lists, he may find that “things are getting marginally less bad” is not quite the battle cry the moment requires. If he becomes the prime minister who gave people a route to voting honestly, with confidence that their choices could be fairly reflected, then this government has an answer to the question that haunts it.

What was the majority for?

It was for this.

For restoring the idea that politics belongs to the public before it belongs to the parties. For admitting that protest voting is not a personality defect. For making it less irrational to vote for the people you actually want. For taking a system that turns national life into a casino of marginals and saying, politely but firmly, that the house has had a good run.

Of course it would be difficult. Of course it would be messy. Democracy is often messy, which is one of the reasons powerful people prefer engagement exercises.

But the alternative is not stability. The alternative is the continuation of a system that is already producing instability, only with the added British comfort of pretending the instability is traditional.

So yes, here is the one weird trick that could save Keir Starmer.

Stop trying quite so hard to save Keir Starmer.

Use the majority. Open the process. Trust the citizens. Transform the machine.

And if, at the end of it, people can vote for who they want and see that choice fairly returned, he might discover that the strangest route to political survival is doing something worthy of being remembered.

Here’s one weird trick that could save Keir Starmer - bmwelby's blog - Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby

And it all has the feeling of standing close to fast machinery. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve ever been to an old mill turned industrial museum where the looms are up and running. Powerful, amazing, machinery. That could absolutely rip your arm off.

It’s hard to imagine what it would have been like when Edmund Cartwright first showed off his power loom, let alone what it was like when mill after mill was filled with them and all you’d ever known was hand looms and spinning wheels.

AI-assisted delivery and the craft of confidence

But I think if you’ve spent any time with AI-assisted development tools over the last year and a bit then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Maybe you’ve only just started with the new models in the last few weeks and you’ve read Matt Shumer’s widely shared Something Big is Happening piece which says things I can absolutely identify with. Or maybe, like me, this has been a slower burn and for a while now you’ve had that intoxicating mixture of exhilaration and dizziness.

Either way, I do think we are past an inflexion point like the one that greeted the start of the 19th century: a kairos moment for digital delivery where the nature of what it is to work in digital government has changed shape.

There’s a popular term for this: vibe-coding. But as I explore in the chapter why vibe-coding matters (and what it isn’t), the phrase is really the hook, not the substance. This world where we can use natural language to describe what we want and have working software generated moments later. But there is a tension in that language. It immediately sounds like flimsy demo-ware, and like a rejection of discipline or craft.

Vibe coding: the hook, not the point

And when it comes to building services that respond to the needs of the public, vibes aren’t enough.

So some months ago now I started to try and write about what this might mean for our disciplines and our craft. It has taken me longer than I wanted, but I’m happy enough with them to publish my reflections on on what changes for product management in a vibe-coded world — and the broader argument collected at https://vc-product.wel.by/.

A small warning: it’s long. I think it deserves your time (which will be much less than the time I gave it), because it’s trying to take seriously what AI-assisted delivery changes, and what it doesn’t. So I’ve woven in links to take you into the dedicated chapters where I try and unpack each idea. You’ll see there’s breadth but that’s because the implications are broad: for how we work today, and how we’ll need to work tomorrow.

But while vibe-coding is the hook, I think we are really talking about something that needs its own name.

Andrej Karpathy, who coined the original phrase, has suggested ‘agentic engineering‘, and that’s useful because it insists that this is becoming a professional workflow: you orchestrate agents, you scrutinise output, and you keep the quality bar intact. That makes it serious rather than a good party trick.

But it’s not the frame we need when it comes to our public services.

‘Agentic engineering’ names how software gets written. But we’re grappling with how public value gets added. In government (and more than likely elsewhere too), the unit of delivery is not an individual with a clever workflow – the unit of delivery is the multidisciplinary team, and the enabling environment wrapped around it. It’s policy, ops, analysis, content, design, engineering, and their leaders getting closer to runnable reality sooner, together. That’s why in my writing I’m using AI-assisted delivery.

Which brings me to a game of telephone.

The old telephone game

For decades, the substance of government delivery has been a game of telephone. Policy intent is translated into requirements, which are translated into tickets, which are eventually translated into code. That’s a translation layer where good ideas go to die.

One of the early pieces of dogma I absorbed at GDS was the importance of blending policy, digital and operations into multidisciplinary teams that break that cycle. It’s a theme I came back to multiple times across written papers and spoken advice at the OECD and in the paper I discuss this in reimagining the team and its roles. And yet my reflection on returning to UK government was that in some places those gaps are bigger than they’ve ever been.

So a big reason why the application of AI to how we make policy and design services excites me is that it becomes harder to sustain that cycle. It becomes possible, if not natural, for the people whose day to day is policy, product or operations to express intent as something runnable, not just describable.

But…

Speed without safety is just a faster way to fail

So the paper is my attempt to hold both truths at once.

Yes, the tools collapse the gap between intent and software. They make it easier to show rather than tell. They let a small team get to something testable quickly, and learn in public sooner — particularly when you treat delivery as learning, testing and scaling responsibly.

But they also collapse the gap between something that runs and something that is ready.

The hard parts don’t get any cheaper

Standards do not get softer just because building gets easier. In fact, they become more load-bearing — something I explore in steady standards in a fast world.

Governance cannot live as a set-piece moment. When the cadence speeds up, governance has to become part of the daily rhythm, and part of the machinery — it must become governance in the whole system. That implies something closer to a shared operating system — a highway code for digital — where guardrails are clear, visible and built into the flow of work.

“It runs” is not a maturity model. Readiness is still expensive: accessibility, security, lawful data handling, monitoring, support paths, and rollback. That makes user research in the age of instant prototypes even more critical.

Teams can move quickly with fewer hand-offs, but they cannot move quickly with fewer perspectives. No clever tooling is a substitute for genuine multidisciplinary work of the kind I start to tease out in this discipline by discipline discussion (but which lends itself to being given its own dedicated treatment).

Abundance for building means changing the operating model

There’s another shift in the paper that speaks to some of the real, underlying plumbing where the real work is.

When building gets cheaper, the job becomes less about tending a ticket queue and more about learning quickly, and doing so in the open. What does delivery start to look like organising when building is cheap?

Backlogs start looking more like outcomes rather than tasks. Roadmaps look more like hypotheses than commitments — and commissioning becomes about buying change, not a plan.

Evidence becomes the thing that earns you permission to scale.

Earning the right to go faster

So the question that I’ve been sitting with is not “how do we go faster?” It’s “how do we earn the right to go faster?”

The phrase I landed on by the concluding chapter is the craft of confidence.

Not confidence as personality, or bluster, or a strong opinion delivered at speed. Confidence as a trail you can point to. Evidence, standards, operability, and governance that is close enough to the work to be real. Not your own confidence, but the confidence others can reasonably have in your work.

And if you read that and think “so what”, that probably means your experience is one where the fundamentals of good multidisciplinary product are already normal. In places where they aren’t, the value of AI isn’t in new principles; it’s in making it harder to keep saying the right things while shipping the old reality.

If any of this resonates, have a read and leave your feedback – the paper is here.

Updated on 04/03/26 to reference Andrej Karpathy’s post discussing agentic engineering and to be clear about why AI-assisted delivery is my choice of words.

Beyond the vibes - bmwelby's blog - Thoughts from the mind of Ben Welby