The government will deploy “crack” teams of “problem solvers” around the country to work on the government’s priorities, Pat McFadden has said.
Announcing his plans for reform at University College London’s East Campus in Stratford this morning, the senior Cabinet Office minister said he wants to make the state work “more like a start-up” by getting more civil servants to adopt the “test-and-learn culture” used in first-class government projects and by the best digital companies.
“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,” he said.
“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.
McFadden said the government will also aim to bring in more people with direct “front line” public service experience into departments on secondments to work on the Plan for Change, as well as tech talent to work on Labour's five missions. He has also instructed departments to simplify “mind bogglingly bureaucratic and off-putting” civil service job application processes.
“If we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve," McFadden warned.
The chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said a £100m innovation fund provided for in October's Budget will be used to deploy the new “test-and-learn” teams around the country, who will be asked to apply this mindset to the public sector’s biggest challenges.
The teams will be a mix of policy officials, people with data and digital skills and staff from local and public services, who 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,” the Cabinet Office said.
The first teams will focus on two projects across Manchester, Sheffield, Essex and Liverpool from January: family support and temporary accommodation.
On temporary accommodation, they will begin by looking at how to reduce costs. And on family support, they will look at how family hubs can increase the number of disadvantaged families that they reach.
“We’re not going to dictate how they do that,” McFadden said. “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.”
The government will then expand the test-and-learn teams to other parts of the country “and start setting them bigger challenges, like reducing the need for temporary accommodation, or finding new and effective ways to help people into work”, McFadden said.
McFadden admitted that "each of these projects in the early stages are small” and won't "reshape the state by themselves" but "could help improve the way we that we work across the whole of government and start to rewire the state one test at a time”.
He added that there will also need to be "an appetite for risk, because some things won't work properly the first time, but if we're terrified of failure we'll never innovate and we'll carry on doing what we've always done". He says the government will have to be "flexible enough to spot when things don't work, stop and try something different".
The minister said the move to Universal Credit was a good example of what the government wants to do.
He said the UC programme burned through hundreds of millions of pounds in its early years "without achieving much" through a "familiar Whitehall process" where a plan for the system is devised, officials are asked to build it, grip the delivery and write "lots and lots of reports about the progress".
McFadden said the government then took UC out of the department and "that one-size-fits-all culture" and set up a team of around 30 people from mixed backgrounds, and asked them to "start small with a small number of people in Sutton, identifying issues and improving the service as they went along. He said this "test-and-learn culture" freed up the team to be more honest about delivery and "ultimately roll out a service that actually worked".
"This is what we should be doing more of," McFadden said. "It's the approach that the DWP will take now as they set about changing how Job Centres work. These experiences show we can make the state think a little bit more like a start-up. The question is: why has this kind of thinking not been applied more widely and why does it feel more like the exception than the rule?"
As part of the "test-and-learn" plans, McFadden said the government will be aim to employ more people with direct “front line” public service experience to take up secondments in central government.
“Prison governors, social work heads, directors of children’s services – they are the ones on the ground who can see how things are working, and how they're not, where the obstacles are, and where a policy won’t survive contact with reality,” he said. “They look people that depend on us in the eye, they see how the system has sometimes been broken – and they take their frustrations home with them each week. Now we want them to be part of the solution.”
McFadden also urged "innovators" to apply for the third round of the government's No.10 Innovation Fellows Programme, which brings in leading digital and tech talent into government on six-to-12 month “tours of duty”.
McFadden said he will also be asking the civil service to need to overhaul its recruitment practices to attract the best people from outside government.
“Right now, if you’re an outsider, the process can seem mind-bogglingly bureaucratic and off-putting,” he said. “Applications can take days to fill in. If you don’t understand the civil service process, external candidates can find it near impossible to jump through the hoops of behaviours and competencies and success profiles. If you're a coder, being asked to code is the critical question, not some of the things that are currently being asked. So let's scrub the jargon and focus on what's needed for the job."
In response to McFadden's announcements, Richard Holden, who is shadow paymaster general, said the government should instead focus on reducing the size of the civil service.
"The bureaucracy of the British state urgently needs cutting back, which is why at the general election we had a plan to reduce it to pre-Covid levels, plans Labour opposed," the Conservative MP said.
"Everything Labour has done so far has been to swell the size and cost of the state, on the backs of workers, pensioners, farmers and family businesses across the country."
Asked in a Q&A session following his speech if he wants to cut jobs, McFadden said: "We don’t have a plan to cut jobs, and I’ll tell you what happened before. Our predecessors would announce a plan to cut jobs and then just hire lots of consultants. And that actually doesn’t make the state anymore efficiency and arguably drives up costs because you’re paying consultants wages rather than normal salaries which is often more expensive."
He was also asked if he wants to stop the civil service headcount from rising. McFadden said: "We don’t have a target for headcount. My focus is on making the people who work for us into being as productive as they possibly can. That’s why those efficiencies that the chancellor announced in the budget are important and there will be more to come. And technology should help us become more productive in the future."