Oral evidence: Mission Government, HC 116
Oral evidence, 27 October 2026.
Witnesses
Hannah Keenan and Alex Thomas.
Chair
Good morning, colleagues, and welcome to this meeting where we will look at mission Government. Welcome to Alex Thomas, executive director at the Institute for Government, and to Hannah Keenan, associate director at the IFG. You are both very welcome. Thank you for finding the time to see us this morning. Let me ask you the most direct question: against the backdrop of how our systems of governance have evolved, particularly in the context of devolution, is mission Government or a mission Government approach possible?
Alex Thomas
I will kick off and Hannah, I am sure, will also have thoughts. If you want a binary answer to that question, I would say yes, but Government, joining up Government and aligning Government to missions are difficult. It is possible, but you need the conditions to be right, a combination of: strong and clear political leadership, with objective and priority setting; the structures that create the incentives to align the Government machine—the civil service, but everything else as well—to whatever mission and mission approach you choose; and the capability in the civil service and the rest of the machine to do it.
Chair
Let us pause there. We had a party coming into Government in July 2024, which had 14 years to prepare for Government. It had a thumping parliamentary majority, which in effect meant that the Executive could do whatever they wanted to, certainly in those early stages—they had carte blanche. The Prime Minister had a chief of staff in the form of Sue, now Baroness Gray, who was well versed in how the civil service worked, and a new Cabinet Secretary, hand-picked by the Prime Minister. If we had been looking at the entrails—if we had slaughtered a dove or something to work out whether the entrails were favourable to delivering something like this—all the signs were pointing good to fair for a party elected on the prospectus of changing how this country is governed. What, in your assessment, went wrong?
Alex Thomas
I suppose that is one reason why we do not use entrails to predict the effectiveness of Government—
Chair
Perhaps we should—I mean, it has worked. The Romans seemed to do rather well.
Alex Thomas
That is a controversial view for the Institute for Government. We might have moved on a little. But no, sorry to be flippant, your question is an important one and absolutely correct. What happened before and after the election of the Government in 2024 led to—we would certainly say this—the mission not succeeding in the way that they intended it to succeed. In an attempt not to go on too long—Hannah will have lots of views on this as well—a set of issues, problems and developments was there before the Starmer Government came in, in 2024, and yes, they were a Government who had had 14 years to prepare, but the previous Parliament was a choppy one, and the Starmer Government had probably focused on preparing only in the last two years or so before the election—possibly 18 months, or even less. There is a set of questions about the amount of time that they had to prepare. There is also a set of questions about whether they had really boiled down the missions to the objectives that they wanted to achieve—whether they had aligned the political and presentational aspects of the missions with a clear theory of change as to what they were going to apply to the machine. Then there is the time and the political energy that the Prime Minister gave to the missions after coming into Government. There is a question as to whether the civil service was fit for that. We can get into this in more detail but, as you heard from Darren Jones, there are questions about a civil service that had become too passive about how it would engage in government. I am sure that we will dig into all those things, but a set of conditions and decisions was made that meant that missions did not get a grip on the system in a way that I think they could have done.
Chair
Let us just pause. Everybody got terribly excited and people were going around citing what the missions were in the same way that we all used to go around talking about the long-term economic plan and so on. For mission Government, we might as well just have said joined-up Government. For mission boards, we might as well just have talked about Cabinet sub-committees, in essence. To what extent were they the governmental version of a meringue: often beautifully crafted, but one tap of the spoon and it just crumbles to dust? There is nothing substantial holding it all up; it is just air and froth. I may be being terribly cynical, in which case, forgive me.
Hannah Keenan
No, I think what you are getting at—and I think we would agree—is that a lot of the problem sitting underneath how missions worked is that the Government could say that they had five missions, a plan for change and the milestones that sat underneath them, but they had not really thought about, and did not get a grip on, how missions were meant to change the way that Government worked. That underpinning bit of getting Departments to join up with each other and break open those silos with the rest of civil society and with wider Government. In theory, something like the “Plan for Change”, which was published in December, should have been one of the tools that was used to get to that point, not only setting out some of the milestones that supported those missions but using that to galvanise the whole system. In practice, the milestones that were set out in the “Plan for Change”, under each mission, were confused. There was a set of inputs and outputs and some outcomes, and they did not consistently galvanise the system as a whole.
Chair
Is the system galvanisable? The crusty old cynics sitting in the “ivory towers” of Whitehall will probably go, “We’ve seen all this before. A new Government comes in, wet behind the ears, and like an Irish red setter puppy running around the place, they are energetic and enthusiastic, but barely housetrained. We’ll knock it out of them within six months, and then everything will go back to the status quo. We really just have to smile sweetly at meetings and say, ‘Yes, Minister’, knowing full well that in six months, something will have happened and everybody will have forgotten the issue.”
Alex Thomas
The system is galvanisable. There is a lot of work to do to improve the capability of the civil service. I don’t think we are in a fundamental, “nothing can be done, let’s blow the thing up” position. However, the learned behaviour from both the political and the administrative sides in an endless, rapid cycle of Ministers, choppy governance, and a “Let’s put our pith helmets on and wait this one out because we are not sure if it is going to get purchased or not” attitude, has created an unhealthy culture in some parts of the system of, “Let's wait it out”.
Chair
Which parts have you identified, Mr Thomas?
Alex Thomas
I would say that the bits of the Government machine are effective on their own terms, but if a Minister comes into the Treasury and says, to use the Darren Jones example from last week, “I want to do X, Y, and Z”, the machine responds in the moment, but once Darren Jones has gone, the waters close. The institutional culture of the Treasury is very strong. It is not entirely irrational, if you are in the Treasury and you think you are going to get a different political direction in six or nine months, not to take irrevocable decisions that go beyond that. I don’t think it is as simple as naming a particular Department or bit of it. However, the 10 years of political instability since 2016 has created a set of incentives and responses in the civil service where the perception is that the right answer is to lean back rather than to lean in. One of the things we argue is that the civil service now—I am hopeful and optimistic that the current Cabinet Secretary gets this and is trying to address it—under political direction and with Ministers taking the policy decisions and setting direction, must do more to lean in to understanding and executing what the Government want.
Chair
Two final quickish questions from me. Do you have any sympathy with the thesis that I advanced last week with Darren Jones, and in other meetings, that the lack of depth of experience of managing stuff and delivering change in environments other than government on the part of a hell of a lot of Ministers actually means that they have no hinterland of experience of how to drive, monitor and deliver systemic and strategic change? There is therefore a presumption that we have a civil service that is Rolls-Royce. You give a one-day instruction, but you expect it to be done in six months, and when you remind yourself to ask the question, you are slightly amazed that nothing has happened since the day you had the initial meeting.
Alex Thomas
Yes.
Chair
That is all I need on that. I have the imprimatur of the IFG on my thesis. I could die a happy man. Maybe I’ll ask you my next question, Hannah. We are all familiar with the phrase, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. It is not in the Treasury’s interest, irrespective of who the Chancellor of the Exchequer is, to have joined-up, mission-led Government because Treasury prospers and remains top of the tree by playing spending Departments off against each other: “Oh, you want 2%? But Education is asking for this, Health is asking for that.” They just want Secretaries of State to argue among themselves, leaving the Treasury sitting stroking a cat, Blofeld-like, and smiling sweetly—or sinisterly. That is the problem as well, isn’t it, the mindset of the Treasury? The Treasury needs to be top dog and does anything to make sure that it is, and mission Government undermines that.
Hannah Keenan
I would agree that the Treasury—
Chair
You agree? That is all I need to know.
Alex Thomas
I have set a very dangerous precedent; I apologise.
Chair
Good, we like that.
Hannah Keenan
It is one of the reasons why mission-led Government did not work, right? Because lots of the money was allocated along departmental lines, you did not get that follow-up. Who are we talking about in the Treasury? It should be in the interest of civil servants and Treasury to serve Ministers and to find a way to do that. I am sure we will come on to that relationship and the ability of Ministers to drive that system. I do not think it is the only way that you can run a system; there are other ways to do it.
Chair
According to Darren last week, it seemed to just run into the sand: “Right, we have a new way of doing this,” “Well, I am frightfully sorry, Minister, you cannot do it that way, because there's somebody in each Department who is accountable to Parliament for what they spend, and therefore we have to allocate to a Department, not to an overarching mission.” “Oh, well, if that is what the system says, well, we can’t do it”. Rather than that, it should have been, “How do we change the system?”.
Hannah Keenan
In that moment, you have a few options. Alex might have thoughts on this, but you could say, well, we need to shift that system and change the accounting officer model. I think there was more that we could have done, or that the Government could have done, within the existing system to try to drive some of that joined-up thinking around the spending review. Perhaps you would say, “Of course we are going to keep this accounting officer model, but we are going to run a joint accountability system within Government, where we hold permanent secretaries to account to the Prime Minister,” for example, or to another board. I do not think we saw the bounds of the existing system tested to the limit that it could have been.
Peter Lamb
Just on that question of finance, let’s start with the accountability point. You say that there is more that the Government could do within the system. I am sure that is the case. When you think about things like covid or wartime scenarios, there was a whole-of-Government approach and people found a way to make it work. The impression that you get from the former CDL is that it was left to Ministers to sit down and work out how that was going to happen. Wouldn’t a functional civil service be one in which they came to you with the answers as to how to make things happen, rather than reasons why they could not happen?
Alex Thomas
Again, at the risk of being too black and white, yes. I was surprised reading Darren Jones’s evidence last week, not that there is a bit of resistance and a bit of grit in the system when you are pushing against the conventional ways of doing things, but by the sense of collective passivity, if you like—that “this is the way that it’s been done.” We know that there are problems and challenges with the accounting officer model. We know that if you come in and say, “We’ve got five missions and we want to achieve these collectively,” as the Chair said a moment ago, for all that you can make a case that there is a novelty about missions, joining up Government is not a new thing. I would argue from the IFG’s perspective that there is a strong case for looking at the way the accounting officer model works, not to undermine the accountability for the spend of money to Parliament or the ability of the Treasury to keep control of public spending, but because if you are serious about a set of collective, cross-departmental actions that you want to take, the main lever that you have to achieve that inside Government is allocating the money. To take the collectively passive approach—this is not aimed at any individual—that “we’re not going to look at the fundamentals of how we allocate that money” seems to me to be a missed opportunity. It is worth saying in this context—again, Mr Jones said this last week—that we do not have a codified constitution. The constitution can change and evolve. The conventions around the accounting officer go back a very long way, to the 19th century—to Gladstone, and Parliament and the Public Accounts Committee’s correct desire to keep track of money—but in the end, they are just set out in “Managing Public Money”, the Treasury document that governs these things. If you want to change the way that is done, and if you want to change the way money is allocated, and if you want to reorganise the accounting officer system, it is absolutely within the power of a determined Government to do that.
Peter Lamb
But they wouldn’t necessarily know that.
Alex Thomas
They wouldn’t know that. That partly comes back to the Chair’s point about experience. It also comes to this point: I do not know the conversations that Darren Jones was having with the then Cabinet Secretary or anything else, but if it is the case that elected Ministers were advocating a particular approach and getting a “computer says no” answer from the civil service, that is a real problem. The civil service should be leaning in to providing the structural solutions to those questions, because that should be the civil service’s expertise.
Peter Lamb
It certainly came across as a quantum situation where if you are not actively observing people, they are not doing the thing that they are supposed to be doing. But then I suppose no one has ever been fired for failing in a conventional way, but you can absolutely lose your job for succeeding in an unconventional way in a lot of these systems. I recently met the Treasury to talk about a whole-of-Government change to the way financial decisions are approached—something that both civil servants and Ministers love as an idea but absolutely no one can find a way to implement. The reason is very much the departmental approach: people argue for spending for their Department and within their Department, and while you could make a lot of these things work within Departments, no one can think of a way of making it work across Departments, to consider these broader issues. Are there any ideas for how that might be done?
Alex Thomas
Various things have been tried: we have had joint Ministers and we have had joint units between Departments. Those have always felt to me like sometimes effective but pretty limited sticking plasters on top of the whole system. One of the things that you could think about—to be frank, we have not done the work on it—is how you align the accounting officer model and the way you allocate budgets to the priorities of the Government, as stated, in a much more fundamental way. Do you have super-accounting officers, if you like, who have the authority to move money between Departments in a different way and have ultimate responsibility for that? One of the failings of mission Government in the Starmer Administration was the enormous missed opportunity of the 2025 spending review. The way it felt at the time was that they had done a very classic, conventional departmentally organised spending review with a little bit of missions sprinkled on the top. The Treasury did not start—this comes down, ultimately, to the political leadership of the Treasury—by saying, “We are going to run this spending review in a very different way where we actually look in a zero-based way at the money that goes to missions and is allocated jointly to Departments, or with the authority to move across and between Departments.” It will be very interesting to see what this Government does with the next spending review, but that spending review for me was the moment the missions died.
John Lamont
Good morning. I want to continue a theme from what Darren Jones said last week. He is sometimes presented with the argument from civil servants that what he is asking to do is not constitutional. Similarly, when I was a Minister, I was told at least once, “What you are suggesting is against the law, Minister.” You are both former civil servants. Is that something you have ever experienced as a way to stop Ministers or political masters achieving? Hannah, you are nodding.
Hannah Keenan
It is worth looking at the intent underneath that. I am sure there are a few bad actors in any system. What I experienced the majority of the time was not, “Here’s a malign way to go about thwarting the intent of the Minister.” Alex alluded to a default back to the status quo, a bit of passivity or an attempt to protect the system. I was in the Cabinet Office from 2020 to 2025, which was a reasonably turbulent time to be in the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat. Across the civil service at the time, we saw a sense of wanting to protect some of the institutions and the status quo, understanding the limits of what you might advise Ministers. What am I trying to say? The case of using it actively to thwart feels rare. From the work we have done it feels rare. The passivity problem of leaning back and saying, “I’ll wait until I get told exactly what I need to do,” is more of an issue.
John Lamont
You are suggesting it is an instinctive reaction. It is not like the permanent secretary, the head of the private office, team leader or directorate leader is saying, “Okay, team, we are going to try to stop this, and this is what we are going to do.” It is just that you all instinctively decide to move as a herd in the same direction.
Hannah Keenan
I think it is more pervasive across the system. You get brought in to this as how the system works. I also would not underestimate—
John Lamont
You have got trends. Could you expand that a little? Is that part of your training or induction?
Hannah Keenan
No. I was about to come to the point that it is almost a lack of training in some senses. I would describe it more as a culture. We certainly hear Ministers talk to us about something that feels a bit closer to a departmental view: “This is how things are done in the Department.” I would not underestimate the impact that Brexit, covid and structural workforce changes had on the majority of the civil service between 2016 to now. That is a big boom in numbers of civil servants, at the same time as hollowing out lots of formal learning and development. We saw big changes, with the super-boosting of careers and the grade inflation we have spoken about, such as jobs being advertised and how people were being promoted earlier. It has brought some really positive things—the ability to respond quickly to crises and navigate different structures—but resulted in a hollowing out of the ability to think deeply and creatively about how to meet what a Minister is after. That is where some of this starts to come in.
Alex Thomas
Briefly, at its best that can be a constructive tension between the ambitious, energetic, time-conscious Minister who is agitating to go further faster, and the civil servant whose incentives are to be more cautious. I think back to the work I did on constitutional policy, with lots of legislation during the coalition Government, such as on animal health and welfare issues. Yes, I would tend to be the official in the room saying, “I think it is going to take us two months to do this,” with the Minister saying, “That is not acceptable. I want to introduce this into Parliament in three weeks.” Not entirely—but almost—universally, my experience pre-2018-19 was a constructive and positive dialogue where we broadly ended up in the right place. We were two notches above where the civil service was comfortable, but we were not doing things that were reckless or set up to fail. One of the difficult things over the past few years, though it is easy to say now observing from the outside, is that that kind of relationship of trust has broken down into two tribes where they are lobbing rocks at each other. We have done quite a lot of work on the trust relationship between Ministers and civil servants. It feels like an unconstructive, “You are blocking me and I am trying to push.” That meeting has not been happening as much.
John Lamont
I had not really intended to go down this line of discussion, but some opinion polls, not just now but maybe a year ago, suggested that there might be quite radical change in terms of the outcome of the next election. Thankfully, the polls have moved on a little from there, but how do you think that the civil service would have reacted to that type of dramatic overhaul of who was in government—for example, a brand-new party, entering government with all sorts of radical ideas? Given what you have described and what we heard from Darren, how would the civil service react to that type of scenario? Would they go back to their instincts and try to stop some of the radical change that was being proposed?
Hannah Keenan
You would rightly expect civil servants to serve the Government of the day. That is a reasonable expectation that we should hold. The question, regardless of whether it is a very radical Government in the way you describe, is whether you have a civil service that has the capability and the culture to really try to think themselves into the way Ministers are trying to approach problems—as I said, regardless of what that reform programme looks like? I would argue that, at the moment, we do not have that, because we have hollowed out that capability and culture and it is not what we are consistently rewarding in the civil service.
John Lamont
We have touched on this already—there were five missions, three foundations and six milestones. Do you think that it was clear, given the tapestry of different missions and milestones, what the actual outcomes were supposed to be?
Hannah Keenan
In some ways, it was too clear, in that once the milestones were published—it took five months for the milestones to be published—those were the things that lots of Government geared around, and because they were in many cases solely departmentally focused, you did not get the big galvanising of the system that the Chair was referring to.
Chair
I am going to ask a stinker of a question. Without looking at your notes, what were the missions?
Alex Thomas
Oh wow! We’ll do this together, Hannah. Safer streets, which included tackling violence against women and issues related to that. A growing economy—something about the economy.
Hannah Keenan
Growing the economy the fastest in the G7. An NHS fit for the future.
Alex Thomas
Which was mostly around elective waiting lists, in terms of the detail.
Hannah Keenan
Being a clean energy superpower, and breaking down barriers to opportunity, and the milestone was around school readiness.
Chair
Gosh, yes—and motherhood and apple pie. That was very impressive. I am glad nobody asked me the question.
Charlotte Cane
To return briefly to the financial discussions, there is a concept you may have come across—Beyond Budgeting. That has peers debating how money should be used. Do you think that might be an interesting concept to try, with heads of Department effectively working together to deliver the missions?
Alex Thomas
Yes, I think it would be. This comes back to what I was talking about with Mr Lamb. There are a lot of techniques, organising principles or interventions that the civil service and Governments can use to take better decisions—to kick the tyres on decisions and gather the best possible knowledge and insight from across the system. Government are not always very good at that. As the Chair said, when I first started in the civil service, it was all about JUG—joined-up government. That has evolved, and some of the aspirations have just gone on throughout the last 25 years. My caution around interventions like that is not that there is anything wrong with them—the civil service should always be striving to do the best—but do they really tackle the underlying incentives that are the obstacles to some of the things that you are trying to achieve, if you are really trying to drive change or tackle a complicated, wicked problem that touches on lots of different Government Departments? What I always come back to is that permanent secretaries and finance directors in Departments are not stupid people and not normally ineffective people. They are responding to the incentives that they are set, and the Treasury is responding to the incentives under which it is operating. So unless a Government—politicians and officials—have the ambition to really tackle and get to grips with some of these fundamental things, we will continue talking about the same sorts of mid-tier interventions, which might help but not be transformative.
Charlotte Cane
As you say, the missions were meant to ensure consistent prioritisation. They do not seem to have entirely succeeded—I think we all agree on that—so what can the Government try to do to focus on the policy and resist the pressure for short-term changes?
Alex Thomas
Some of it—although this is a cop-out from a structural point of view—is a Government with a clear agenda, and Ministers who know how to execute that agenda and are in their jobs for long enough to keep the pressure up. In so far as there is a silver bullet in the current system and set-up, it is consistency of ministerial application and the ability to hold the civil service to account. There is a really interesting question about whether there are structural, institutional or legislative changes that you can make to incentivise long-term policy. In recent years, we have seen both the pros and the cons of that. For example, the Theresa May Government legislating for a net zero target was a powerful example of a long-term intervention that, short of that legislation being changed, incentivised and created the requirement to take decisions based on the long term. Equally—as politicians, you will all know this better than I do—you need to constantly relegitimise the politics of those long-term goals. Personally, I am slightly cautious. From a tidy-minded bureaucrat’s point of view, it is quite nice to say, “Let’s have these long-term institutions that are setting objectives that the Government then have to work to.” However, unless, through each cycle, that long-term objective is relegitimised through the political system and through this place, in the end it will fray and create unhappiness and resentment, and the policy will not stick. Sorry, I am waffling a bit now, but the sort of elixir of aligning long-term administrative application with politics and political skill feels like the only real, fundamental solution to achieving things over the long term.
Charlotte Cane
The Prime Minister has control over how long a Minister stays in post, pending outside issues, so can solve the rapid turnaround of Ministers relatively easily. But is there a place for some sort of training for Ministers—or for all politicians, because who knows who is going to be a Minister next?—to make sure that they have those skills? The politicians who come in have a whole range of skills, but we do not all necessarily have the skills to lead teams to get things done. So should there be training in place?
Alex Thomas
Yes—another firm yes. That goes to my rapid agreement with the Chair’s point about skills and support for Ministers. We do our bit at the IFG; we have a part of the organisation called the IFG Academy, which is always available to any Minister, politician or Select Committee that wants to talk to us, or for us to convene useful and interesting people to talk to them. I saw that Darren Jones talked about the lack of support for Ministers and special advisers, as well as civil servants. There are different interventions that you would need, but it is one of our fundamental objectives at the IFG to be available and present to help support Ministers.
Chair
It is almost too late then, isn’t it?
Alex Thomas
Well, and wannabe Ministers, if you like—the pipeline and shadow spokespeople and so on. We see that as a core part of our mission. This goes slightly against what I think Mr Lamb was saying, but I also think that the civil service, both in its active day-to-day work with Ministers and structurally, whether through a branch of the National School of Government or whatever, needs to be able to support Ministers. This is my reflection on the work that we do with Ministers from outside the civil service versus when I worked inside, but if you are a serving civil servant, there is something a bit odd about telling a Minister how to do their job. It feels a bit uncomfortable, because you are there to serve. Sometimes it is easier for outside organisations, whether that is us or anybody else, to just have that conversation, because there is a bit less institutional pressure on it.
Charlotte Cane
I guess the problem is that, if it is not built into the system as an expectation, who is going to encourage you to do it, if it is not someone you are working with closely who tactfully says, “Minister, have you considered?” Should there be a programme in place for people to do that?
Alex Thomas
Yes. There is no monopoly of wisdom, whether it is the civil service, Ministers or think tanks, around how to succeed in Government. Some of that is sharing the basics: how do you work with your private office and how do you get most out of your diary? Those are things that some people will be excellent at instinctively or by experience, and other people will find more challenging. There is also a convening, “How do we wrestle our way through shared difficult problems?” One reflection I have on the work we did before the 2024 election is this: did we elevate that work beyond the nuts and bolts of how to do Government and do the civil service? That is, not to say to an Opposition party, “You should have this set of policies,” but to say, “If you do not have a really clear set of objectives, it will not work. You cannot always develop those on the fly in Government. You need to know what you are about beforehand.” It is about creating the conditions to have those conversations as well as the conversation, “How do you work with your permanent secretary or private office?”
Chair
On the work of the Cabinet Secretary, do you think she and her colleagues should wrestle with something that is my personal view, though you may share it? That is, too often, civil service impartiality manifests itself as indifference to outcome.
Hannah Keenan
Again, a simple answer: yes, absolutely.
Chair
I love the IFG; we must have the IFG more often. I think we will have to have a weekly session, because everybody agrees. It’s marvellous.
Hannah Keenan
I think she is. The future civil service programme is starting to grapple with some of these things. I would put that in a broad bucket of, “Are you giving your civil servants agency over their work?” That comes with the flipside of accountability. There has been a real lack of agency felt by individual civil servants, which manifests itself in structural things: can you move up a pay band, can you get promotion in your team, are you rewarded for building expertise? To the point that Alex was making about trust, can they have a direct conversation with the Minister and feel empowered to do so? That has been hollowed out of a lot of the civil service, and speaks a bit to the impartiality point. Can you navigate that politics better?
Alex Thomas
May I briefly add one point on impartiality, because it is a mild obsession? There is nothing inherently good about impartiality; it is not there for its own sake. Impartiality is not this wonderful, shiny thing we must protect at all costs. The whole point of the importance of impartiality in the civil service is the civil service’s permanence. That is where it came from. If you want to go back into the deep history of the Northcote-Trevelyan settlement, that concluded that a permanent civil service was the best way to an expert, capable civil service. If you want a permanent civil service, that civil service needs to be able to serve Governments of different political flavours. To your point, Chair, about indifference to outcome, it is much healthier to think about the civil service as being permanent and, therefore, needing to re-legitimise itself for each generation of politicians, and be extremely—I’m trying to think of the opposite to indifferent—focused on achieving the outcomes of that Government, because that is the best way to ensure its legitimacy. Impartiality can metastasise into passivity or a reluctance or resistance to do something. It is important to reconceive of impartiality as about enthusiastic delivery for Government, based on the model of a permanent civil service.
Peter Lamb
Drawing on that, is the problem that Ministers do not understand that or that civil servants do not understand what neutrality is?
Alex Thomas
It is a bit of both. I do not think it is neutrality, by the way. Sorry to jump on that. Neutrality implies a sort of passivity. It is permanence or non-partisanship.
Peter Lamb
Duty to the Government of the day.
Alex Thomas
Yes. There is something really interesting here that comes back to the cycle of Governments over the last decade or so. There was a sense, before 2024—particularly in the Johnson Administration, to call that out—of playing fast and loose with the constitutional conventions, the rules, the norms and, at points, the rule of law. The civil service felt very uncomfortable about that. The signal that was being sent out by the activity of Johnson and Cummings was something the civil service was very uncomfortable with. Both Ministers and civil servants overcorrected for that after 2024, where there was this sense of “Well, let’s restore the previous status quo,” and it led, as we saw from Darren Jones this week, a nervousness about authoritatively and strongly challenging some of the advice he was getting and, arguably, over-caution in the civil service about how unchangeable some of the constitutional conventions or other rules are. Those things have come together, and we are now overdue a correction, not to suddenly start discarding constitutional conventions or other things that have served us well, but to test and challenge within the system about whether stuff really works.
Peter Lamb
I do not want to go too far down this road, but it really touches on other work this Committee has been doing and John’s point before about parties that might want to come up and turn everything on its head. Is there a higher duty with the civil service to something above the Government of the day?
Hannah Keenan
The civil service must be impartial. It must find a way to serve the Government of the day. That exists within the constitution or the limits that this place sets upon that. We exist in a wider democracy where the Executive does not have full power over everything, so you would put that in your broader system of democracy. But I suppose I worry that this argument takes us into a space that becomes quite an easy way to bash civil servants. What I would get at a little more is the idea we were talking about of studied neutrality because of a fear of not appearing impartial. For me, this becomes another way to throw civil servants under the bus on some things, and that is part of the problem we had. As Alex was talking about, part of that studied neutrality—this passivity, this fear of taking a position—was, over the past 10 years, because of being scared of being told “You are against us.”
Peter Lamb
There is a different, isn’t there, between not being able to set up a dashboard in Excel and the Cabinet Secretary being ordered to instruct the Army to storm Parliament? The concern that I and other members of the Committee have developed increasingly is that there are insufficient safeguards for that latter scenario—even if Ministers are still frustrated about not being able to get their spreadsheets set up.
Alex Thomas
That is obviously an extreme example; let’s hope we don’t get a January 6-style—
Peter Lamb
The Cabinet Secretary essentially would not accept the premise of the question.
Alex Thomas
The way the debate often manifests itself is on whether the civil service has a stewardship obligation over and above the Government of the day. I think that, beyond the rule of law, it is quite difficult to define what that stewardship function is. When you want a civil service that is under the control and authority of Ministers and the elected Government of the day, where does the stewardship function kick in? Does it lead to what Darren Jones was describing, which is a sort of ossification of constitutional conventions, when actually, it is perfectly legitimate for an elected Government to say, “We want to evolve and change those conventions.”? Where I think—we have written a lot about this—there should be a clearer exposition of this sort of stuff is on what the responsibilities of civil servants are. We could be much clearer about what the underpinning tenets of what a permanent, impartial civil service look like. We could entrench those more in the law than we do by building on the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. We could expand that out. At the same time, we can and should be much clearer on what the responsibility of civil servants is to maintain the capability of the machine. Where the accountability of civil servants becomes quite fluid is who is responsible for the performance of that machine, and when should the Cabinet Secretary be being held to account or be holding permanent secretaries to account for a machine that is not performing well. I have tried to do it in reports that I have written for the IFG, but we have never really defined the sphere of what the civil service capability is. Doing that would help the Minister who is frustrated that the dashboards are not coming good. Ultimately, it would also leave a clearer space, if you like, for that debate in Parliament about what the constitutional and other safeguards should be around the civil service.
Peter Lamb
The constitution ultimately is the law. It might not be statute, but we accept it as being the overriding principles about how the system operates and that Government should not act contrary to that, with the civil service being a part of that Government structure.
Alex Thomas
Parts of it are in the law.
Peter Lamb
It sounds, though, that without having it written down there is not a lot of protection there outside of the Cabinet manual, which of course is within the control of the Prime Minister.
Alex Thomas
We do think that the Cabinet manual should be updated, and as I understand it work is going on to do that. Parts of the constitution are not the law. It is mostly written down, which is why the geeks would say that it is uncodified rather than unwritten. But the constitution does evolve and change. The critical thing is that you are having the right debate and discussion around that evolution and change, and you are not doing it in a blow-the-place-up, willy-nilly sort of way. There is value in being clear about what the underpinning aspects of the constitution are, but I would worry that you then get into this ossified, unchanging situation that we have seen. You see some of the problems with a constitution that is impossible to change in the US. We need a means of evolving.
Peter Lamb
It is part of the wider conversation, but the constitution is the law. That is exemplified by the fact that we had the Supreme Court essentially overturn the decision of the Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament. That indicated that there are constitutional principles that sit above anything that is written down and that that is accepted by the legal system. Turning back to the actual question of the day, fascinating as that was, as has been touched on in various questions so far, one of the main challenges for Government in trying to institute mission-led government is about the structure of that Government. Do you think that the Government managed to establish an institutional framework for delivery of those missions? We are leaning towards no, really. If not, how much responsibility should the Government bear for the failure to establish those institutions in the failure to deliver on those missions?
Hannah Keenan
That lack of institutional framework sits at the core of the failure to deliver missions. There are lots of different ways that you can think about it. To answer the first part of your question, they got there—or somewhere approximating closer to there—in the end. The structures that existed around missions got better as time went on but took far too long. What am I saying about that? You had mission boards, but those were always quite unclear about what their purpose and value were. They could have been a handful of things. They could have been big blue sky thinking to crowd in lots of different ideas because you are testing out different ways to do missions. I am not convinced that they were open enough to do that. DESNZ actually had a different type of board that served that type of purpose much better, so it does not look like it was there. The mission boards could also have been accountability mechanisms. In which case the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero pulls everyone else around the table and makes sure that everyone is delivering on their bit of the mission. You do not really have the authority across Government to be able to do that as the Secretary of State. You would have needed a better broker in that space, ideally the Prime Minister, or perhaps the CDL. I do not think that the boards were necessarily working as accountability mechanisms. If they were trying to do that, they were overlapping with your mission delivery unit. If they were not working as accountability mechanisms, they were doing policy decisions. In that case, you have something that is quite confused with the Cabinet committee system that existed alongside that. There was a real lack of clarity about what the mission board was for and what it was doing. That kind of galvanising structure was not clear. You did not have a single place at the centre where trade-offs between missions were being discussed. As we have discussed, you did not have a spending review that actually changed the institutional framework about how money was allocated to different people. I would say that things got better in September to November 2025, when Mr Jones was appointed as Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister and the mission delivery unit got re-established, moving from the Cabinet Office into this No.10 Cabinet Office bit. That started to bed things in: there was a single figure at the centre, who might have been able to hold a bit of that accountability and do some of those trade-offs. But it was never given the time to bed in. The other bit that I would say about institutional structure is that all that is about the “what” of missions—what are you trying to deliver? What was missing was a coherent description of how you were going to change the state—the civil service, specifically—and the plans that sat underneath that. We saw increasing numbers of productive and agile AI-enabled state programmes such as Places for Growth—“We will put civil servants out into the country and have more secondments.” Those were all badged as being the “how” of missions. I do not think that was a clear set of plans, and it did not result in the change that we need to see in the civil service.
Peter Lamb
What changes would have been necessary for delivery on those missions?
Hannah Keenan
Again, I would split it into two things—we talked about some of the spending changes: clarity over how Departments were being held to account—whether through mission boards, stocktakes or a delivery unit, and how that was working—and a central way to do the trade-offs between missions. We did not have any of those in place. Then there should have been a clear plan for how to change the culture and capability within the civil service to enable this type of much more open work. We saw some good things in bits of the Test, Learn and Grow programme; the Cabinet Office started to move to a bit more of that way of working in some places, but that is really very small at the moment.
Alex Thomas
Really importantly, the Government made a very bad mistake in putting Secretaries of State in charge of their own mission boards. I am with Michael Gove on this model: you need a powerful, authoritative Minister at the centre, who would have been Darren Jones after he was appointed, to chair those boards and hold departmental Secretaries of State to account. The effectiveness of the boards was undermined right from the start, given that neither the Prime Minister nor a senior Minister was at the centre chairing the board.
Peter Lamb
Would it have made any difference if they had been set up as a Cabinet committee rather than as a sub-committee?
Hannah Keenan
I don’t think so. Ultimately, you are using Cabinet committees to secure collective agreement to cross-cutting Government policy—you had a route through which to do that. I don’t think it would have been a fundamental change.
Peter Lamb
The fundamental problem was that Ministers did not have a clear idea of what they wanted to use the boards for and they were not taken seriously as a result.
Hannah Keenan
And that you had the wrong governance structure because the Secretaries of State were chairing those mission boards and that sat within a wider institutional architecture, where there was not the drive from the centre and clarity about what was happening. We talked earlier about the “Plan for Change” and having those milestones, which the Government then started to go around; that really narrowed down what missions we were focusing on.
Peter Lamb
That leads to my next question about having a strong centre. Is there a strong enough centre of Government to co-ordinate across departmental activity at present?
Alex Thomas
No. The glib line that I have used before and will use again is: “The UK is a highly centralised country with a pretty rubbish centre.” As Hannah said, the appointment of Darren Jones was a good sign. I am trying to be optimistic about what the Burnham Government are now doing around the Office of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. However you badge it, the centre needs to be smaller, and not to be accruing all these different extra functions. It should be more authoritative—not in intervening in everything under the sun, but in setting direction and priorities, and giving a clear signal to the whole system about what it expects. One of the challenges—this runs through a lot of the conversation about missions—is that there was not that kind of crystal clarity and prioritisation around a set of objectives. Obviously, you can raise questions about the political leadership and vision of any Government, but we have evolved a system where you have a small No. 10 that bends itself around the Prime Minister’s style and will, a bloated and over-large Cabinet Office that either duplicates or is sidelined, and a Treasury that is very powerful and performs a necessary function but overwhelms the institutions around the Prime Minister, unless you have a very strong No. 10 to counterbalance it. The answer to your question is yes, and we have done plenty of work that points to what needs to change on that.
Peter Lamb
It sounds like a complete overhaul of the whole of how central Government works is long overdue.
Alex Thomas
There are things that work—the best people in the civil service are often found at the centre, and the nature of the No. 10 private office, for example, is good and effective—so I would not just scrap the whole thing. One of the reasons I came around—with some reluctance, as Cabinet Office was a big part of my career: I was Jeremy Heywood’s principal private secretary, which was formative for me—to the “burn the Cabinet Office” point of view is that it has become dysfunctional and it needs symbolic cultural change to say, “No, actually; this is a whole new thing we are working with now.” Again, let us see, as it is early days for the new Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, but they need to move faster than they are currently to establish a new culture and a new structure in the centre.
Hannah Keenan
May I add something on that “burning down the Cabinet Office” point? I was in the Cabinet Office from 2020 to 2025, and it is interesting how much the Cabinet Office lost its authority during that time—I am talking about the secretariats in particular. As Alex said, you are either duplicating what No. 10 are doing, or you start to be sidelined by them. This is not a commentary at all on the quality of people in the Cabinet Office; it is more about the institutional structures and incentives for people. During that time, you had different Prime Ministers in No. 10, so the system ran very hot: No. 10 was running the Cabinet Office very hot, and the Cabinet Office was running Departments very hot. That was often on standing-up processes: “What are the trackers that we can get on this or on that?” Of course, part of that was inevitable during covid, but there was a real move towards that being the default way of work in the Cabinet Office: “We will pull in information from Departments. We will email out to you on a Friday afternoon, and we will want it back by close on Friday.” Then, it is not quite clear what happens with that. I do not want to say it was short-termism, but because you are responding to immediate pressures from No. 10, you lack a long-term vision, and Departments no longer trust that what the centre is doing is in favour of the whole of Government. This also speaks to the point about needing to reset the culture in, and how Departments engage with, the Cabinet Office. It is also indicative of what we see in other bits of the civil service, which has been driven from the centre a bit: abdicating responsibility and desire to see outcomes, and instead going, “Well, I’ll just run a process.”
Peter Lamb
We need more strategic thinking.
Hannah Keenan
Yes, and more capability in the centre to do that.
Peter Lamb
My final question is not directly aligned with the questions that I have asked so far, but do we think the missions might have been more successful if they had been developed in Government, with civil servants, and therefore had institutional buy-in, rather than delivered outside, with a not insignificant view to electioneering?
Hannah Keenan
We might have different views, but I am not convinced that that would be the case. My view is that the Government came in with five headlines, and they had five months to put out the plan for change with the support of the civil service. During that time, looking at the “Plan for Change”, I did not see something that had a clear theory of change that aligns with the idea of missions, so for me, the evidence does not point in that direction.
Alex Thomas
The more fundamental question is: were the missions a communications tool, or were they an organising tool for Government? They became both, which meant that, perhaps crudely, they were sort of neither. If you had Mariana Mazzucato, who promulgated the concept of missions, here, she would say that the Government—whether when they were in Opposition or once they were in—never properly embedded the original concept of missions as a way to tackle the wicked, complicated, cross-departmental, cross-organisational policy problems that we increasingly see in a complex modern society. I will probably get the terminology wrong for how Mariana would present her views, but she would say that there is the concept of a grand challenge—the really big thing that you want to do—and the missions are the means by which you do that. In that sense, the political vision and direction are set at the grand challenge level—the societal level—and the missions are the set of more complex interventions that you make beneath that. Maybe I am talking myself round to saying, “Yes, actually, you should’ve treated the missions more as a bureaucratic organising process in Government.” I do not think there is anything inherently wrong in theory with coming up with that model in opposition and then refining it with the civil service in the first few months once you are in government, which is sort of what happened. I think it was more the fact that the decisions then taken in Government did not enable the missions to have purchase on the system.
Sam Carling
I have found this a very interesting discussion, as someone who was in the room when the missions were launched; seeing them come almost full circle is certainly a unique experience. I would like to ask a bit about the funding side of things. It may well be that your answer is quite similar to your answers to some of the questions Peter has just asked. How well do you think the missions were integrated into spending decisions?
Hannah Keenan
Not particularly—not very is probably the simple answer. I know that Mr Jones gave evidence last week about how mission boards were asked to produce shared bids into the spending review, for example. I suppose it was very hard to see any evidence from the outside, or from lots of people we spoke to at the time, that that was anything other than a fairly standard spending review.
Sam Carling
There was a lot of talk about there being horizontal accountability for missions across Government, which has tended to work in very vertical ways. To make missions succeed, how would you have expected or wanted the current vertical accountability mechanisms to change to take account of the need for horizontal ones?
Hannah Keenan
It comes back to the point that the existing governance structures are not set up to support, as you say, that horizontal accountability. I do not necessarily have a good answer for that, but I would expect some slightly more creative bit of governance to sit around it. Do you use your mission board to try to generate a bit of that horizontal accountability? Do you do it through spending? Do you do it through something like a mission delivery stocktake? I think some of the problem was that it became quite focused on the milestones, rather than the full set of questions across the mission.
Alex Thomas
It goes to what Hannah was saying earlier about what you can do within the current system and where you need to change the system to achieve. If you go back to the early Blair Government, for example, the Social Exclusion Unit had some quite big budgets and numbers attached to it that could be used to tackle those cross-cutting problems. You would need to look at the different missions and priorities to come up with the right funding and responsibility arrangements for each, given that they were quite different things in some respects and some were more cross-cutting than others. Could you have created a unit in the centre, much like the Social Exclusion Unit in the early noughties, to look at the safer streets mission and related aspects, and to become a relentless champion for addressing those issues—with money attached, and with the authority from the Prime Minister to make life difficult for Secretaries of State who were not playing ball? There absolutely was a set of things that you could have done in the early days of the Government that operated within the grain, if you like, and some of those were done. I do think the net zero structure got more purchase on the system, perhaps because the governance was more naturally contained within DESNZ. Also—not wanting to be too personal about it—Ed Miliband had done more thinking about the structure of Government, based on his experience, and about what structure he wanted to create and apply inside Government to get that mission going. Then you come back—I will not repeat it—to the set of more fundamental, “constitutional” questions around accounting officers, how money is accountable to Parliament and how you play into the spending review.
Sam Carling
Would you say that having dedicated mission budgets would have been pretty essential to make them work, or could it have been done without that?
Alex Thomas
Work could have been done without it. But if you wanted both to have the money to allocate to priorities as the mission demanded and to send a really strong signal to the whole system that, “We really mean this, and if you want the budget, you’ve got to get with the programme,” some kind of mission budget is what you would do—so yes, I suppose.
Richard Baker
You talked earlier about institutional collective passivity in the civil service regarding taking forward the missions. It reflected what the Prime Minister said about the civil service being in a tepid bath of managed decline. There is that cultural resistance, but even if that was not there, do you think that the civil service had the skillsets to implement the missions as they were intended by the Government?
Alex Thomas
The civil service is 500,000 people, and the wider public sector is a whole load more millions, so it is difficult to say yes/no as to whether it has the skillset or not. The civil service absolutely had the core ability to administer a process, to give advice to Ministers and so on. There are some capability gaps in the civil service that come from its structure that has evolved over time. For example—this is one of the things that the IFG bangs on about all the time—the policy civil servants move around too much and there is too much churn. That has consequences for the expertise of civil servants, which has consequences for the quality and authority of the policy advice that they give, which also has consequences for their networks and relationships and how they are then able to execute policy decisions within the whole delivery structure and system that they operate in. That is a capability question, and I have no doubt that the civil service would be more capable of executing missions if people did not move around so much in the policy civil service. I find it difficult to then make the leap and ask, “What were the actual consequences of that for missions?” As I say, there is absolutely a set of capabilities.
Hannah Keenan
In theory, for mission-driven Government, you set your mission, you might set milestones to track whether you are approaching it, but you do not necessarily know exactly how you are going to go about achieving it. So you need the creativity of the civil service, the wider public sector and wider civil society. Because of the churn—and because of a civil service that has ultimately done crisis response since 2016—that creativity does not exist. If you have spent your career responding to what the state needs in any given moment, you lose the muscle memory of how to figure out what the state wants—what Ministers want—and to think creatively about that. If you have a series of civil servants who have moved up through the ranks during Brexit and covid in that kind of environment, they are not necessarily passing that creativity on to junior civil servants. That is a pervasive problem.
Richard Baker
How do you change that environment and the learning from those experiences as civil servants. Hopefully we will not need to respond to crises all the time, and politics will move on, but how do we create a civil service that at leadership level is more forward looking, forward planning and able to prepare for the demands that newly elected Governments will make on it?
Hannah Keenan
I would split it into two buckets. The first bucket would be, what are the structures that prevent civil servants from developing that type of expertise, knowledge and experience? Part of that is what you are rewarding them for, and at the moment we reward our policy civil servants for moving jobs—it is the only way you can get a pay rise or avoid a real-terms pay cut—and that does not reward the detailed knowledge of your area that you need to develop. We also do not get rid of poor performers, and that creates quite a big drag on the civil service and the culture of what you are expected to do. It rewards passivity if you cannot get rid of your poor performers. Can you reward civil servants for doing well in their job, so performance-related pay? That was introduced for the senior civil service under the Starmer Government, but on such a small scale that it is hard to know whether it will have much impact. There is some structural stuff you could do. That obviously includes the national school for government and public service and increasing formal, in-person, in-a-place learning and development for civil servants. Then there is a separate question around culture, and I think there is a real problem there. When we—I say “we” because I think this is part of it as well—talk about the civil service and the relationship with Ministers, we often go, “It’s the blob and it’s not working.” That can be a malicious version or a benign version: it is the blob. Or we say, “You need more respect in this individual relationship.” Neither of those things actually gets under the skin of why that relationship is not working and why civil servants are still a little bit in this defensive crouch when they talk to Ministers; they are sometimes scared, and sometimes passive. We need to find a better language to talk about how you improve that relationship.
Alex Thomas
Clearly, addressing both of those requires leadership. Let us see where the review of the civil service goes and how Antonia Romeo’s leadership of the civil service develops. But I like the fact that she is talking about curiosity. I like the fact that she seems to be encouraging civil servants, to use our language, to lean in rather than to lean out. And I actually quite like the fact that she published her objectives; those will send a signal to the system that, “I am doing this and I want others to do it.” That is not everything, and once you get into the belly of Departments, there is lots more to be done, but the leadership side is obviously important.
Richard Baker
Obviously, part of that equation and that relationship, which is crucial to Government, is civil service culture and how civil servants interact with Ministers. But the other side is obviously the appointed Ministers. Darren Jones told us last week that he felt he was frustrated by his civil servants in achieving what he wanted to in a number of areas, and that that contributed to the fact that the missions were not delivered. How do you think Ministers could be better prepared and upskilled to handle those relationships, so that they can feel more confident that they are going to be able to get their policy objectives from their working relationships with their civil servants?
Alex Thomas
Part of it is staying in jobs longer, but we have covered that.
Richard Baker
The Ministers might not stay in their jobs very long either.
Alex Thomas
That is what I mean. Part of it is Ministers having the skills and the ability to engage with the civil service. The longer you are a Minister, normally the more confident and effective you get. If you look at those Ministers who have achieved most in the system, they tend to be the ones who have hung around, although not necessarily at the Secretary of State level—the classic example being Nick Gibb. So there is something about having the time to develop those skills, and that is really important. Obviously, there are also the nuts and bolts, like treat people with respect but not over-deference, on both sides. There is also something—again, we have been thinking about this a lot—about Ministers being confident in themselves. I do not want this to sound patronising at all, but the best Ministers are the ones who go in, swing the stick about a little bit and impose their authority on the Department—who want to be the unquestioned leader of the Department and to use the civil servants. It is a cliché to say that civil servants respond to clear leadership, but they generally really do. This sounds odd, given what we have been through over the last decade or so, but I got the sense reading Darren Jones’s evidence last week that he was almost too respectful of the civil service, although not on an individual relationship level—everyone absolutely should be fully respectful of everybody else working in difficult jobs in Government. But, yes, civil servants need challenge and need testing, and you get the best outcomes if Ministers are being the grit in the oyster.
Richard Baker
As a Back Bencher looking into those processes, what you say very much resonates with me. Thank you.
Markus Campbell-Savours
Staying on Darren’s evidence last week, he suggested that, despite being given the authority by the Prime Minister, that was questioned when he attempted to use it. Did the mission suffer as a result of a lack of more direct input from the Prime Minister? Do you detect an issue where authority, perhaps due to the constitutional conventions, is not clear?
Hannah Keenan
I think there are two things. I think that, yes, missions did suffer from a lack of direct prime ministerial input. I think we know that, in lots of things that have shifted the dial on how Government works, knowing that the Prime Minister is involved and engaged and cares does galvanise the system to work. I suppose that the thing that is missing is clarity. Having been inside the system sometimes, I know that a lot of people in the system say that they are speaking with the voice of the Prime Minister. If you are working in the system and trying to pick out what is signal and what is noise, you need clarity over who is doing that over any given point in time. It sounds to me like there was a real lack of clarity. There would have been a way to institutionalise that and make it clear that this was how missions were going to work. It speaks a bit to the broader failure of the institutional set-up of missions.
Markus Campbell-Savours
Right now, what would be the way that a Prime Minister could point at a Secretary of State and say, “You’re going to deliver on this, and I want my civil service across the piece to know that I have given you that task”?
Hannah Keenan
There is a set of fairly dull but quite effective things that you can do. One of them is publishing letters and sending them around the Department. I know that it does not sound particularly radical, but it’s about whether you have set out that institutional framework of the Prime Minister writing to the Minister. You set that out and then you make sure that the permanent secretaries and the rest of the civil service relay that message. That takes clarity of leadership.
Markus Campbell-Savours
Do we know whether that was done in this instance? If so, did it fail or did it just not happen?
Alex Thomas
There was talk of letters at the time. I don’t think any were ever published, and I’m not sure that they ever really saw the light of day. Certainly, as Hannah said, it’s not a silver bullet, but it was something that Theresa May, for example, did with her Secretaries of State. One thing that I would add is that the system responds to whoever speaks with the authority of the Prime Minister, whether it be his Chief Secretary or the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Most of the time, if most parts of the system get an authoritative message from the political leadership of the Cabinet Office—even if it’s not the Prime Minister—they will respond to it. Equally, most Departments, including the Treasury and the Chancellor, are very focused on and responsive to their Secretary of State. You can imagine a situation where the Treasury are getting these messages from the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, and they are trying to reconcile those with what the Chancellor is telling them. In that situation, the Chancellor wins because of the institutional set-up. If you don’t have a set of Secretaries of State who are fully transmitting the message from the Prime Minister, the system gets confused. You have the message coming from No. 10 or the Cabinet Office into a Department, and they might go, “Okay, we need to do this,” but unless you have the same pressure from the Secretary of State, saying, “Yes, we are on board with this and this is what we want to do,” you are serving multiple masters.
Markus Campbell-Savours
Is there any evidence that those masters were pulling in different directions or working against each other?
Alex Thomas
Good question. I don’t know is the honest answer. It was quite hard to see. I would broadly diagnose the problem with the missions less as one of active resistance, and more as one of, “We’ve got other stuff to be getting on with, and how much do these things really matter?”, than of, “We don’t want to achieve them.” That points to the things that Hannah was saying earlier. We heard that the sharper edged objectives within the missions—for example, the elective care target and the metrics around the opportunity mission, with 80% of kids, or whatever the target was, being school-ready—were getting purchase on the system, because they were specific and Secretaries of State were signed up to them. But in a way that was such a partial exposition of mission Government that it was distorting the system in another way. We are gearing everything towards this, but there is a point about not seeing the wood for the trees, if that makes sense.
Chair
I presume that the creation of the Office of the Prime Minister is going to lance all of these boils.
Alex Thomas
We are living in sunny uplands. Let’s see. As I said earlier, I choose to be optimistic about these things. It won’t solve all the problems. If it brings clarity to the role of the centre, if it means that the work that is done in the centre is only that which can be done in the centre and it is smaller but more strategic and has more authority, and if it means that the institutional architecture is able to support the Prime Minister as the executive leader of Government in a way that No. 10 and the Cabinet Office have never really been set up to do, for all sorts of historical and other reasons, it will give Government a better shot at it, but it is not the only thing that needs to be done, clearly.
Chair
I see nobody trying to catch my eye, so on behalf of the Committee may I say thank you so much to Mr Thomas and Ms Keenan for giving us further food for thought? After these sessions, I never quite know whether we’re supposed to skip out full of hope and jollity or slink out looking for a very stiff drink. I shall leave it to individual Committee members to work out how they will respond. Thank you very much indeed for your time.