Missions are the new way to guide government action. The Labour government put mission-driven government at the heart of their 2024 election manifesto. Since taking office, there has been a great surge of administrative action towards building mission boards, setting up test and learn projects, and creating milestones. But in January it seems the government may have fallen foul of Quitter's Day. This is the day of the year defined as the second Friday of January when most people give up their New Year's Resolutions. And with some controversial policy announcements over the last few months, we might reasonably ask if the mantra of mission-driven government has given way to economic growth at all costs.

Anyone who's ever made a New Year's Resolution may sympathise with the sentiment of Quitters Day and recognised the challenge of sticking to a mission, however noble it may be. But this does not negate the value of having a clear, meaningful and realistic goal or mission. Just because something is hard doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. So how can the government reassert its commitment to missions and ensure they drive meaningful change?

I believe there is a lot to learn from previous examples of mission-driven government. For, in fact, this is not a new way of working at all. Most former students of public administration(from the 1990s) are likely to remember the Osborne and Gaebler book on “Reinventing Government” which set out ten key principles on how best to do government. These included mission-driven government. Their philosophy of government was highly influential in the US Clinton administration, particularly with Vice-President Al Gore, and later came to the attention of those in the Strategy Unit at Number 10 under the UK Labour government. But why has this past experience seemingly been forgotten?

As a recent article in Civil Service World exposed, so much institutional knowledge has been lost in the civil service that we have officially entered “an era of amnesia”. The sell off of the National School for Government in 2010 helped spur on this decline of intellectual knowledge and it was further exacerbated by a slow and gradual malaise in public administration education at UK universities (with a related pivot towards international students in the absence of sufficient national demand). But there are some recent examples of mission-driven government that may offer some valuable insights.

A particularly comprehensive example of mission-driven government that I have been researching for many years is the case of the Scottish Government and their National Performance Framework (NPF). Established in 2007, the NPF was a one-page account of the government’s ambitions encapsulated in a single overarching purpose:

To focus government activity and public services on creating a more successful country with opportunities for all of Scotland to flourish through increasing sustainable economic growth

This was underpinned by 5 strategic objectives 15 national icons and 45 national indicators.Public bodies set out their contribution to delivering on the outcomes through single-outcome agreements and much energy was put into logic models and theories of change to account for how activities would link to outcomes. So far, so technocratic. But what is crucial here are the reforms that the Scottish government made at that time in relation to strategic practises,strategic practitioners and strategic praxis that moved the NPF from being a “strategy as a plan” to being what is theorised as “strategy as practise”. This is where the UK government need to turn their attention if mission-driven government is too last beyond the good intentions of most New Year's resolutions.

Some of the reforms that I believe the UK government should consider, building on this prior experience, include:

• Building new organisational structures to better facilitate cross-governmental working
• Creating new funding models that set out a shared understanding of outcomes-based working and reduce ring-fencing to facilitate innovation
• More delegated authority to those in frontline roles
• Investment in strategic leadership capabilities to help embed new strategic ways of working
• Greater community empowerment and use of participative approaches to decision-making to enable communities to co-design and co-create local public services

These points reflect some of the measures that were taken in the early development of the National Performance Framework in Scotland. It would be fair to say that some have persisted longer than others. Most recently the Deputy First Minister has announced that the current review of the NPF (which began in 2022) will be paused and a more comprehensive reform of the NPF undertaken in order to be more suited to driving the next decade of public service reform. Whether designing something new, or reforming something more established, it is important that all governments take the opportunity to learn from the lessons of prior experience – otherwise they risk not getting beyond good intentions.

Read the full article on the LGiU website.

First published: 25 February 2025

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