Radical How in 100 days

To empower a team to start testing and learning at pace, it’s essential to have a unifying ‘north star’ statement from the responsible Secretary of State.

Political leaders need to make those statements, then stand aside and let the team work. Getting this right sets the cultural tone for a shift to thinking in terms of outcomes that contribute to the overall mission, not outputs.

For decarbonising domestic buildings, that outcome might be:

We will help households replace X million domestic boilers with zero-carbon alternatives by 2030.

Crucially, this team should include people with a deep understanding of the frontline. In this case, people with extensive direct experience of installing heat pumps, who should be there to provide an insight into practical realities that would otherwise be easily missed. 

Team members may be drawn from several departments; they are there to represent their expertise, not departmental allegiance. This first team—of no more than 12-15 people—should also have excellent and regular access to ministers, potentially through a paired special adviser. Daily access would be ideal. Weekly would probably be sufficient.

This team must have a mandate to reshape relevant policies. In this case, planning regulations will be especially important. In order to formalise this mandate, the team might be led by a small group of senior officials who collectively cover aspects of policy, operations, service development, and delivery, working together to achieve the shared outcome. 

Alternatively, the team could be led by a single service owner who is explicitly accountable for decisions related to both policies and delivery mechanisms; they will likely be supported by a senior official who supports them by unlocking the policy changes needed to establish an enabling legislative environment; one that allows for flexibility and change in the face of new information.

What matters most is the genuine integration and alignment between policy and delivery at the heart of the team. Tensions and disagreements are reconciled within the team, not through the mechanism of programme boards and Whitehall write-rounds

There’s already plenty of evidence available about the likely points of friction in installing zero-carbon heat sources. The Electrification of Heat Demonstration Project will have uncovered several pain points; we are aware of ongoing work into assessing the barriers presented by existing planning permission rules.

The newly formed multidisciplinary team can draw on this evidence to pinpoint the gaps in frontline-tested knowledge—such as around subsidy levels, or scalable simple home surveying—and select a series of hypotheses that would need to be true in order for the core idea to work.