Taking test and learn into government

Back in February, we published The Radical How. That report set out the ways of working we thought needed to be at the heart of a mission-driven government - based on examples of where government has delivered brilliantly before.

There were three ideas at the core of the Radical How: multidisciplinary teams, being outcome-led, and adopting test-and-learn approaches to delivery. None of these are new to government. But they are still exceptional; techniques adopted despite incentives within the system, rather than because of them.

So it’s genuinely exciting to see a senior Cabinet minister, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden, give a speech today that placed those ideas at the centre of the new government’s approach to public service reform. And acknowledge that if this administration is to achieve its ambitions, it must lean into reforming the state itself.

Of course, giving a speech on public service reform is the easy bit. Many ministers have done so over the last few decades. There should be no illusions any more about how difficult this is, or the huge amount of work there is to do.

But there are reasons to be optimistic, and to see this speech as a serious contribution. The Government has already committed £100m to actually trying out this new approach with real teams, rather than just talking about it. It recognises that the root causes typically lie in poor systems thwarting good people. It connects the cause of reform explicitly to the next spending review, showing an appreciation that the flow of money - and the Treasury’s hands - are crucial in making this possible. And it looks beyond Whitehall, inviting both local government and new talent to join the effort, in the knowledge this can’t be done without both.

Perhaps most importantly though, the speech has something politically unusual: a note of humility. It doesn’t say slashing the state’s cost base in half is easy, desirable or otherwise. It doesn’t claim to have it all figured out at the beginning. It talks about a need for an appetite for risk, teams working in the open, and rewiring the state ‘one test at a time’.

For now, words and ideas. But if followed through, we will see for real whether it really does make a difference in family support, temporary accommodation, helping more people into work, and far quicker than the usual mega-programme announcement ever would. And if it does deliver, that really would be a radical how.