Revolutions in the way UK government operates are few and far between, but 20 years ago one spearheaded by Tony Blair was gathering a real head of steam. After his first term in office, Blair became frustrated by the extent to which being prime minister didn’t necessarily provide levers to drive the delivery of policy goals – and demonstrate success to the public. His answer was to create the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit to push progress against Public Service Agreements – targets that had been introduced in 1998, aligned to New Labour pre-election pledges.
Michael Barber, previously chief adviser to education secretary David Blunkett, was drafted in to head up the PMDU in 2001. It was tasked with aiding the delivery of government “priority” objectives across 17 PSAs in four departments: the Home Office, the Department of Health, the Department for Education and Skills, and the Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions.
Blair took a direct interest in the delivery of priority PSAs and the unit provided a support-and-challenge function for departments. According to the Institute for Government, while departments remained responsible for achieving their PSA targets, the PMDU deployed a range of tools and processes to help.
Blair is said to have spent up to half a day every week focused on stocktake meetings related to the 17 priority PSAs. “Over time, senior officials and ministers came to see the stocktake process as an opportunity to discuss specific issues and delivery challenges directly with the prime minister,” the IfG said.
Under Gordon Brown, the PMDU evolved to focus on performance policy, capability-building, performance monitoring and unblocking obstacles to delivery. Brown moved the delivery unit into HM Treasury and was less personally engaged.
An autumn 2007 refresh saw the announcement of a new framework featuring 30 PSAs that were government priorities underpinned by 153 measures. The priority areas were cross-cutting and most departments were involved. A specific cabinet committee was responsible for each cross-cutting PSA and for holding the lead secretary of state to account for delivery.
Adrian Brown was part of the PMDU for two years from 2002, before moving to the Prime Minister’s Office. Until recently, he was executive director of the Centre for Public Impact.
He tells CSW that while the unit benefited from some helpful tailwinds in its heyday, such as government spending increasing at historic rates and “pretty competent people in relevant ministries”, its methods clearly delivered results.
“Blair was an unusually powerful and influential prime minister,” he says. “The approach of really focusing on getting things like waiting-list numbers down undoubtedly led to those results being achieved in a way that they wouldn’t have been otherwise.”
Equally, he acknowledges that the focus on PSAs had the potential to be gamed – such as by manipulating the way measures like individual A&E waiting times are calculated. Brown adds that by the end of the New Labour period, targets had gone “way beyond” the “useful narrow focus of the beginning”.
David Halpern, who was chief analyst in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit under Blair, is more direct in his criticism of the continual expansion of the number of PSAs, likening it to the sorcerer’s apprentice scene in the Disney classic Fantasia. “You get the multiplication of these targets – you keep chopping the thing in two and there’s more and more and more of them,” he says.
Halpern, who went on to become founding research director of the IfG and then founder of the Behavioural Insights Team, says the system “just got completely out of control”.
The coalition government of 2010 made a great show of “scrapping” the PMDU and PSAs as soon as it took office. In fact, the PMDU’s talent was retained in the Treasury while a very small Prime Minister’s Implementation Unit was created in No.10. Two years later the PMIU was relocated to the Cabinet Office and expanded. Current cabinet secretary Simon Case led it at one stage.
In 2020, coalition-era chancellor George Osborne admitted to the Commission for Good Government that he and PM David Cameron had “spent years” trying to recreate the delivery system that operated under Blair and Brown.
The coalition replaced PSAs with Structural Reform Plans that were part of what the IfG describes as a “broader suite of documents” known as Departmental Business Plans. These plans were action-focused rather than target-focused, designed to explain how individual departments would contribute to meeting the coalition’s programme for government.
“The Cameron style was, broadly: ‘I’m not going to micro-manage you, but are you getting the job done?’” David Halpern
Halpern, who worked in Downing Street during the coalition years, said the Conservatives had been “fascinated but appalled” by the delivery unit. He explains: “The Cameron style was, broadly: ‘I’m not going to micro-manage you, but are you getting the job done?’”
Damningly, a National Audit Office report noted in 2016 that by the end of the 2010-15 parliament there was “no functioning cross-government approach to business planning, no clear set of objectives, no coherent set of performance measures and serious concerns about the quality of data that was available”.
It added that members of the Public Accounts Committee felt departmental accounting officers across government “lacked the data on cost and performance they need for effective oversight of government spending, and to provide accountability to parliament”.
The NAO said business plans had “fallen into disuse”, resulting in “no upto-date, consistent information across government on what departments were doing and what they were achieving”.
Brown says the “freshness and edge” of Blair’s original approach was never going to be maintained for the long haul and that looking for a new approach to performance and targets made sense.
“You don’t necessarily need to have the PMDU equivalent chasing everybody all the time – it should be something that happens naturally within government,” he says. “What was learned from the Blair years was incorporated into the business of government, be it through the departmental plans or the way Treasury relates to departments or through other conversations across government.
“What didn’t change, and arguably still hasn’t changed, is this reliance on what you might describe as a very top-down, hierarchical, managerial, metric-driven way of understanding the world and discussing performance and driving performance.”
After the Conservative Party won a majority in the 2015 general election, a new business-planning and performancemanagement regime was created, with departments asked to put together Single Departmental Plans for the whole term of the parliament. SDPs were supposed to cover day-to-day business, formal reporting on key government priorities and cross-cutting goals that stretched beyond individual departments.
The NAO subsequently observed that although SDPs were intended to be developed alongside the 2015 Spending Review, detailed planning actually took place after the review was finalised and the plans “continued to be refined well into the 2016-17 financial year”.
A key element of SDPs was a crosscutting set of 10-15 government priorities, delivered by multiple departments; reporting to the centre of government on indicators for finance, performance, people and operations; and clear links to more detailed departmental plans.
The IfG later noted that SDPs were “overly focused” on inputs like budgets and staff numbers, and outputs such as appointment numbers and waiting times – rather than “real-world outcomes” like pupil achievement or life expectancy. It said SDPs did not do enough to enable cross-departmental working and also failed to integrate financial management in HM Treasury with No.10 and the Cabinet Office’s oversight of government performance.
The think tank described them as falling short of being a tool that departments used for day-to-day planning. “Instead they tended to be written and forgotten”, it concluded.
SDPs morphed into Outcome Delivery Plans following a 2017 review by Michael Barber that called for the implementation of a new “Public Value Framework” to maximise social value achieved through public spending. After pilots, provisional “priority outcomes” were agreed for each department at the 2020 Spending Review.
The IfG describes ODPs as both a recognition of the shortcomings of SDPs and a response to Barber’s Public Value Framework. The first ODPs were agreed by departments in 2021. They were supposed to include measures that could demonstrate impact, with quarterly reporting between departments and the centre of government over plans’ four-year lifespan.
In the spring of 2021 then-PM Boris Johnson announced that he was bringing back the PMDU in the wake of a “rapid review” led by Barber that looked at ways government could be more focused, effective and efficient.
IfG deputy director Emma Norris says the idea of trying to create a set of outcomes that departmental performance is managed against represented a “step forward” that the new government of Keir Starmer could build upon.
Less than 48 hours after moving into No.10, Starmer confirmed that he would personally chair five delivery boards for his five ‘missions’. They are: ramping up economic development; making the UK a cleanenergy ‘superpower’; halving serious violent crime and boosting public confidence in the police; breaking down barriers to opportunity; and making the NHS ‘fit for the future’.
He said his presence on the boards would “make sure that it’s clear to everyone that they are my priority in government”.
Norris expects to see a “mission delivery unit” created in the centre of government to keep track of progress, as well as to identify emerging problems and try to overcome them.
“Unlike some previous versions of delivery units, this is likely to have some really good data capability in it,” she says. “A focus on iteration, rather than just setting a goal and doggedly pulling the same lever to try and get there.”
Halpern says Starmer’s missions have a great strength in that they don’t overspecify the target, making them “strikingly different” from the pledges of 2001-5.
“The bit we should keep an eye on is: have you got the machinery to deliver it? As well as to avoid the traps that we’ve seen previously around gaming and so on,” he says. “It’s a much bigger enterprise than it first looks.
“It took until the end of the first term with Tony Blair to realise that we needed more of those mechanics to be built. I think that there are enough people in play to realise that you can’t wait five years. Let’s bring that forward to get the machinery in place early in the administration.”
Halpern observes that the route to delivering the missions is uncertain, and will likely require testing on the part of officials to make sure that the centre of government is pushing for the right things.
“It’s that depth that sits underneath that really delivers it,” he says. “You’ve got to keep pressing on the ‘how’. Have you built a machine, a civil service, which is fit for purpose to answer those questions? We haven’t had one to date, but of course we could build one.”
Brown argues that it would be a mistake for Team Starmer to wholly revert to the Blair approach, not least because public services and the government coffers are in a markedly different place to 2001.
“If you want to transform these systems; if you want to reimagine the national healthcare system to be fit for purpose for the next generation – rather than just making it marginally more efficient than it is today, you need a different way of doing it,” he says. “And that’s the trick a government has to be able to pull off.”
Brown says the Barber/Blair approach, known as ‘Deliverology’, is best used for systems that are functioning, but need to do so better, faster and cheaper. He says a crisis-management approach is currently required for many public services.
“If they want to make an impact on some of these public services, they’re going to have to do it with worse-than-1997-era levels of austerity and no real prospect of that changing in the parliament,” he says.
The IfG’s Norris believes it will not be long before the next incarnation of the PMDU emerges, as the past two decades have shown that the centre of government needs a group of people charged with supporting the delivery of core priorities.
“Every time a prime minister has decided it is unnecessary, they have almost instantly brought it back,” she says.
“There is pretty much agreement that across almost any government you need that form of capability in place. The difference is how big is it? How tight is its focus? What kind of methods does it use for working? Does it directly report to the prime minister or not? Those are all things that change.”