What is the state of the State? That’s the question we have asked the public and public sector leaders every year for the past 13. In 2025, after years of growing pessimism, we are seeing green shoots of optimism.
To be clear, the people who use public services and those who deliver them remain deeply concerned about funding challenges and rising demand. The public still think that many services are more likely to get worse than better in the next few years. Leaders remain clear that prioritisation will be key, and that means making choices on what to stop doing: “We need to decide where to put the laser-like focus that will make a tangible difference in five years,” one senior civil servant told us.
But, perhaps captured best by one senior civil servant interviewed for the report, “there’s a mix of optimism and trepidation”. The public are hopeful that the new government can deliver change, and leaders are energised by the promise of a mission-led approach.
When we asked leaders to sum up the state of the state in three words, the most common included: potential, ambitious, optimistic and opportunities.
The key, however, will be translating plans and reviews and ambition into on-the-ground delivery. 2025 is a formative year, “but the proof”, according to another civil servant, “will be after those reviews report back. It will be in the…implementation”.
One NHS chief exec expressed a common concern: “The leadership dilemma is how we manage day-to-day pressures versus finding the time for innovation”. A police chief argued their sector has “decades of police reform to do because we’re still operating on a 60-year-old design”. While one leading official said “Whitehall needs to rethink our entire organisational design instead of tinkering around the edges.”
As these quotes show, no one leading public services is underestimating the scale of the transformation challenge. But it is clear that there is ample appetite to face those challenges head-on. Its all, in short, about the ‘how’.
What is also clear is that both the public and public sector leaders see public service reform as fundamental to kickstarting growth. When asked to pick from a list of options that might improve economic growth, respondents to our exclusive Ipsos survey chose ‘improving the nation’s health and wellbeing’ (47%) and ‘improving the nation’s education and skills’ (42%) as their top stimulators. Trade (39%) and infrastructure (38%) came third and fourth.
Similarly, leaders reflected on the importance of skills to the government’s missions, and expressed concern that some were in short supply. As one leader put it: “You won’t have the people to build a million and a half houses, turn around the NHS or retrofit homes without investment in further education.”
Leaders also see the government’s ambitious devolution agenda as a key building block to growth. From delivering infrastructure to leveraging investment to integrating public services.
Delivery, delivery, delivery needs to be the mantra for the next few years. After ‘budget cuts/lack of funding’, the public think the “biggest challenge(s) for public services as a whole over the next five years” will be ‘losing public trust to deliver’. Public sector leaders know this.
We asked leaders what their vision was for public services in 2035. In a decades time, they want to see a frictionless model of government in which citizens and frontline workers interact seamlessly, underpinned with technology. They envisage a public sector in which devolution has fully matured and place-based thinking and delivery is the norm – with preventative approaches embedded. And their vision is for a more long-termist approach to government decision-making, with a smaller Whitehall but stronger partnerships across sectors.
If that vision can be realised, Britain will have got its mojo back, and public trust won’t be in question.
You can read the full report, published by Reform Think Tank and Deloitte here.