Peter Hyman, former adviser to Keir StarmerMorgan Wild, chief policy adviser at Labour Together
The British civil service was designed to run an empire, not to serve working people. Its purpose was to rule over people as subjects, not serve them as citizens. It was built to command and control. Clever people with the right sort of education who knew the decisions they made were better. Brains at the centre, obedience at the edge. Endless statistical knowledge, precious little experience on the ground.
It is plain to see this inheritance is creaking at the seams. We expect much more of the state than we did in its imperial past.
In particular, it has three problems. First, it’s not good at dealing with complexity. Take knife crime, for instance. It’s a complex social problem. We can’t know the answers from a desk in Whitehall.
Second, the state is too centralised. The state collects 95% of all UK tax revenue, compared with 50% in Germany. Third, it is too slow. Parliamentary democracy has been displaced by vetocracy, where dozens of organisations or people in the hierarchy can slow or stop things but few can speed them up.
The answer is to create a dynamic state. In our paper, A Progressive Case for State Reform, we argue for Labour owning this space – radical state reform – and reclaiming it from the right. Because we believe in the state’s power to improve the lives of working people, we must be its most strident reformers, especially when it fails to deliver.
This is the big call for Keir Starmer this autumn. Does he continue to pursue government in the usual way, relying on lumbering, uncoordinated departments to slowly do their thing? Or does he create more agile, dynamic and urgent mission teams to get the big jobs done?
Building 1.5 million homes, moving to clean power, tackling violence against women, dealing with small boats and asylum hotels are all good examples of what we mean. When people used to speak of a “Rolls-Royce” civil service, they never had Whitehall, as it is today, in mind. No single department has the power, capacity, sole responsibility, or sense of urgency to solve these problems. The result is too little co-ordination, joint planning, or skilful implementation. In short, difficult cross-cutting issues are not being systematically gripped.
Civil servants at work in the House of Commons committee office in London, November 1919. Photograph: AR Coster/Getty Images
And so, problems are being solved on Whitehall’s schedule, rather than to the deadlines the public demands. This may have worked in the past, but not now. News travels too quickly, and the public is too disillusioned.
Compare this with the Covid vaccine taskforce. It reported directly to the prime minister. That taskforce had brilliant talent – the best possible people from the private and public sectors brought together – and the resources and powers it needed. And crucially, it had all the usual bureaucracy cleared away. It’s a no-brainer to create a similar taskforce of multidisciplinary experts dedicated to solving the thorniest problems of government.
When Donald Trump, or Javier Milei in Argentina, or other populists talk of “draining the swamp”, they are tuning in to something real and powerful. People are used to having smartphones with a bewildering capacity in their hands. At the same time, they too often see the state finding even the simplest of tasks difficult to accomplish. The right’s answer is to take a chainsaw to the state, because its adherents don’t really believe it should achieve the aims we on the left want it to.
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In contrast, the left must be the reformers, because none of the causes we believe in will be achieved without it. This will require the government to change the culture and operating manual of the state that has too many echoes of its past.
The answer is for the state to become more agile and dynamic, and for communities and regions to do more. To inject pace, we have to cull veto points. To improve performance, we have to overhaul recruitment, incentivise civil servants to develop expertise and ensure they have a record of achievement and high performance before being promoted. The state should borrow from Netflix’s performance culture, where the reward for “adequate performance is a generous severance package”.
Most of all, it needs a missions mindset, focused on solving big problems for working people – with the resource, power and political backing to achieve bold goals.
The growth in Reform UK’s support since the election has been among people who have lost faith in the two main parties to “get the job done”. Reform is waiting in the wings if Labour does not get a move on. Root-and-branch reform of the state is Labour’s best chance of heading them off.