Introduction
Nine months have passed since the general election. A new PM and a new generation of ministers have settled into post. They have had time to assess the legacy from the last administration and familiarise themselves with the ongoing work of every department. Delivery of the programmes on which they will be judged has now begun.
Senior ministers including the PM, the Chancellor, and the Minister with responsibility for civil service reform have declared the bold and ambitious intent to do government differently. We think these plans must include a deep and wide commitment to relational practice. In this pair of blogs we dig into the practicalities.
In part one of the series, we hear from Paul Morrison, a civil servant with 30 years of experience. He is currently the Chief Executive of the Planning Inspectorate. The blog represents his personal reflections. Here, in part two, we hear from Rich Bell.
Rich Bell is a policy adviser and researcher with a focus on the politics of community and connection. He is currently supporting The Relationships Project to develop our training work.
Mission-based government has the potential to remake the state. To unleash it, Ministers should lean into the model’s implicit focus on relationships and trust.
Since coming to power, Labour has persuasively communicated that its policy agenda will be shaped to reflect five national missions. This governing approach, however, demands not just clear prioritisation but a capacity to partner with – and galvanise action by – local authorities, social and private sector organisations, and communities. That the government is at an earlier stage in instilling these qualities within Whitehall is hardly surprising.
At present, civil servants operate within a system which encourages them to work in silos, project certainty, and maintain tight control over policymaking and delivery. Re-orienting that system towards more collaborative, open, and empowering ways of working was always going to be challenging. That the government is seeking to affect this change at a moment of pronounced financial constraint and growing internal insecurity speaks to an admirable sense of ambition on its part.
It also speaks to an awareness that realising the Prime Minister’s Plan for Change will require a relentless focus on social and economic outcomes over issues of process and control and – by extension – a meaningful break with how government works currently.
Others with deep expertise in these matters have argued that this will necessitate changes to Whitehall’s budget-setting approach, its team structures, and the behavioural and career progression incentives which shape civil servants’ attitudes and work. But, to make these new ways of working habitual, Ministers will also need to actively support officials to develop capabilities and skills which haven’t always been valued within the corridors of power.
This includes the relationship-building and cultural translation skills, and the ability to foster psychological safety, needed to bridge institutional divides and mobilise partners.
It also includes an understanding of policymaking approaches centred not on rule-setting or resource allocation but on enabling the formation of productive relationships (whether within communities; between public servants and citizens; or across public institutions).
Consider the government’s vision for the future of the NHS. Policymakers won’t be able to create a Neighbourhood Health Service without first strengthening collaboration both between NHS bodies and with the communities they serve. Similarly, they won’t be able to deliver the long-promised pivot to prevention without working in intentional and impactful ways to cultivate preventative networks of community and connection. Executing these shifts will require action to build up what the policy thinker James Plunkett describes as the ‘relational capacity’ of the state – its ability “to do things with people, or to enable people to do things with other people”.
A drive to promote relational practice could also help to bring coherence to the government’s increasingly complex agenda for the reform of the British state.
Labour has recently initiated several complementary and overlapping projects aimed at reshaping government. Agile ‘test and learn’ approaches reinforce an unrelenting focus on system-wide outcomes over programmatic outputs. Devolution enables collaborative governance between a strategic central state and mayors and councils who better understand their places’ particular needs and strengths; as well as policy action at a scale supporting partnership-working with community stakeholders. Even moves to dismantle the ‘watchdog state’ are, ultimately, intended to facilitate cross-society action towards the delivery of the national missions.
There is, though, a risk that these projects might be viewed as separate and disjointed, rather than part and parcel of a larger shift towards mission-led working. To address this, the government should seize upon the golden thread which binds them together.
There is a powerful story to be told about the way in which these ideas and models, taken together, signify a movement from control and risk mitigation towards trust and empowerment. A mission-based approach requires the state not to issue directives, but to ‘act as an orchestrator’. ‘Test and learn’ methods only succeed in high-trust settings where policymakers feel that they have permission to recognise, and act in response to, failure. Devolution and deregulation are, fundamentally, exercises in strategic empowerment.
In order to substantiate this narrative and bring onboard the public servants whose work will be impacted by this shift, Labour should set out the valuable and skilled role which they will play within its reformed state: how they will build trust and power in practice.
Relationships are the bedrock upon which trust is built – they are catalysts for collective action.
A drive to support officials to develop as relational practitioners would allow them to take practical action to put the government’s reform agenda into effect. It would also lead to their feeling a part of a project of change – generating a sense of momentum and creating the conditions for positive peer-to-peer influencing.
If anyone doubts that mission-based government is – at its core – an effort to construct a more relational state, they should perhaps consult with its chief proponent. Speaking on the steps of Downing Street – in the crescendo to his very first speech as Prime Minister – Keir Starmer invited each of us to “join [his] government of service in the mission of national renewal”. What was that, if not a call for a different, closer, and more substantive form of engagement between the British people and its government?
In the December speech through which he launched his administration’s Plan for Change, the Prime Minister went further still: describing his intention to forge “a state that builds its capacity through partnership” and his desire to “tear down the walls” of Whitehall and “let the nation in”. It is clear that Starmer himself grasps that his government’s national missions will stand or fall on the ability of its officials to work relationally. Now, his administration needs to bring forward a proper plan to turn those words into action.
Read part one of this blog series, A relational approach to public policy: why it’s now essential, by Paul Morrison. Please share any thoughts or questions in the comments, or message david@relationshipsproject.org.
