A note for Ministers

As other commentaries on civil service reform have referenced, lasting institutional change will require ministers to adapt their roles and norms too.

The prescription often points towards better training—vocational education on how to be more effective in a job many new ministers have no professional parallel for. This is important, but not enough.

A central idea in the Radical How is reducing two forms of distance:

- Between bureaucratic tribes, by bringing them together in multidisciplinary teams.
- Between Westminster and the frontline, by creating rapid feedback loops driven by testing assumptions against reality.

The same logic applies to ministers leading missions for a couple of days per week—the closer they are to the team and to the realities of how ideas play out in practice, the more effective they are likely to be at delivering the political aims they seek.

There are some intensely practical ways to help create that closeness. Ministers usually spend most of their time ensconced in their own Whitehall department buildings. The physical geography of power is important. Co-locating ministers responsible for delivering missions for a couple of days per week—possibly alongside decanting Number 10 for a long-overdue refurbishment—would cost nothing and help literally bring down the walls between departmental silos.