Over the next 12 months, voters in 60 countries around the world will be heading to the polls. Whatever else 2024 will be, it will be a year of change.
Some UK civil servants, weary of the turmoil and psychodrama that has characterised the governing party over the last few years, might be looking forward to the change an election could bring. But even if we find ourselves with a stable, majority government by the end of this year, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a sudden end to the other challenges which have been consistently battering public services and their leaders.
Rising demand, constrained funding, skills shortages, infrastructure headaches, the promise and pitfalls of new technology – all of these will remain.
Recent analysis from the Institute for Public Policy Research suggests that even if the next government could match previous levels of high performance in, say, schools and hospitals, it would still take seven years to reverse a recent widening of the education attainment gap between rich and poor and around a decade to recover levels of access in the NHS.
Those are daunting timelines. The good news is that the civil service is full of people who want to drive change and who – as former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara put it in her evidence to the Covid Inquiry – “run towards broken things” to help fix them.
The bad news is that MacNamara also noted that a team made up of people “who all think individually they are going to save the day” does not make for a happy organisation or culture.
This type of hero leadership is prevalent across the civil service, incentivised and rewarded by a system that promotes people who do highprofile, minister-adjacent roles). It means that despite the many fine words in blogs and leadership statements, there is rarely enough emphasis put on building teams which work together to deliver long-term goals or on supporting the resilience of individuals to keep working on difficult challenges as the crisis moves on. In a year of change, with many years of hard reforming and recovery work ahead, it is not enough to rely on hero leaders and crisis teams.
The IPPR’s analysis formed part of a report arguing for a new model of public service reform, one that moves away from the targets, regulations and competition-driven methods of New Public Management, which underpinned New Labour thinking and lingered into the coalition years. Instead, the think tank makes the case for a “public service playbook” in which governments focus on prevention, personalisation and productivity in public services and use five drivers of improvement to achieve those goals.
The drivers – which include devolving power and building workforce capability – all seek to create an environment which supports the intrinsic motivation of public servants to bring about change. This is in contrast to the NPM model which used extrinsic factors such as targets and league tables, and which – the IPPR argues – is inadequate for the kind of wicked, systemic problems that public services face.
Embracing a new way of creating change might seem like a tall order for leaders when there is already so much flux, but now is an ideal time to explore new ways of working. When everything’s up in the air anyway, why not take the chance to think about how things could be better once they settle back down?
This interview first appeared in the winter 2024 issue of CSW. Read the digital magazine here