Pat McFadden vows to make the state "more like a start up" as he deploys reform teams across country
£100 million fund will see teams use “test and learn culture” pioneered by digital companies to tackle some of public sector’s biggest challenges.
- Tech firm workers encouraged to join government for six to twelve month “Tours of Duty” to work on national missions.
- Frontline public service workers including prison governors and social work heads to take up secondments in central government to deliver the Plan for Change.
- Pat McFadden instructs departments to simplify “mind bogglingly bureaucratic and off-putting” application processes for civil service jobs.
Pat McFadden will pledge to make the state “more like a start up” as he launches a £100 million fund to pioneer public service reform and deliver the Government’s Plan for Change. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster will warn: “If we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve”.
The speech about reform of the state comes after the Prime Minister unveiled his plan that will put more money in people’s pockets, get the NHS back on its feet and rebuild Britain.
Speaking at University College London’s East Campus in Stratford on Monday, Mr McFadden will call for more of Whitehall to adopt the “test and learn culture” of the best digital companies and first-class government projects.
Test it. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again. Tweak it again. And so on, and so on, for as long as you provide the service. Suddenly, the most important question isn’t, ‘How do we get this right the first time?’. It’s ‘How do we make this better by next Friday?
That’s the test and learn mindset, and I’m keen to see where we can deploy it in government. Where we can make the state a little bit more like a start-up.
He will launch a new £100 million Innovation Fund to deploy new test-and-learn teams around the country who will apply this mindset to the public sector’s biggest challenges.
‘Crack’ teams of problem solvers will be deployed to improve public services and support delivery of the Plan for Change. Made up of a mix of people working in partnership to drive change - with data and digital skills, policy officials, and frontline workers, they will be given the freedom to experiment and adapt - adopting the ‘test and learn’ mindset of Silicon Valley.
Instead of writing more complicated policy papers and long strategy documents, the government will set the teams a challenge and empower them to experiment, innovate and try new things.
He will compare this plan for reform to what he describes as the “pointless distractions” and “headline grabbing gimmicks” of the previous government.
He will reveal the teams will begin by focusing on two projects across Manchester, Sheffield, Essex and Liverpool from January 2025.
First, they’ll be tasked with tackling two challenges: family support and temporary accommodation. On temporary accommodation, we want them to begin by looking at how we can reduce costs. And on family support, they’ll be looking at how family hubs can increase the number of disadvantaged families that they reach.
We’re not going to dictate how they do that. The central point of these test-and-learns is that we set them a problem and then leave them to get on with it. They’ll be empowered to experiment and find new and innovative ways to fix problems.
These “test-and-learns” represent a new, innovative way of working, in partnership with councils, businesses and local organisations. They will be focused on initiatives that seek to restore our crumbling public services, and they will demonstrate a new way of doing government, as set out in the Plan for Change.
After that first wave, we’ll expand the test-and-learns to other parts of the country, and start setting them bigger challenges, like reducing the need for temporary accommodation in the first place, or finding new and effective ways into work.
While Mr McFadden will acknowledge “each of these projects is small”, he will say “they could rewire the state one test at a time.”
Mr McFadden will also encourage people from startups and tech companies to enter government for six to twelve month “Tours of Duty”, putting their skills to use tackling big challenges such as criminal justice or healthcare reform in the next phase of the No 10 Innovation Fellows Programme:
For the next phase, I can announce that these innovators will spend their Tours of Duty working on our five missions for government.
He will say the country needs more people with direct “front line” public service experience to take up secondments in central government and deliver the Plan for Change:
Prison governors, social work heads, directors of children’s services - they are the ones on the ground who can see how things are working, where the obstacles are, and where a policy won’t survive contact with reality. They have stared the issues and the people that depend on us in the eye, seen how the system has been broken – they have taken the frustrations home with them each week. Now we want them to be part of the solution.
To attract the best people to come and work for government, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster will say, it’s time to “fundamentally overhaul how recruitment is carried out across the civil service.”
Right now, if you’re an outsider, the process can be mind bogglingly bureaucratic and off-putting. Applications can take days to fill in, and if you don’t understand the civil service process, good external candidates can find it near impossible to jump through the hoops.
We need to go further and faster. And so I will be asking departments across government to roll out simpler processes in their recruitment, using what we know works.
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