UK politics live: McFadden says Labour will ‘rewire state’ with new culture for civil servants

Last week Keir Starmer was criticised for suggesting, in his Plan for Change speech, that some civil servants are happy indulging in the “tepid bath of managed decline”.

In an interview with Sky News this morning, asked why the government was picking a fight with the civil service, Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, insisted that this was not the case. He said:

I’m praising the civil service today. I think we’ve got a lot of good people caught in bad systems.

Explaining why he wants the civil service to adopt a tech startup approach to delivering services, he said:

And the point I’m making today is that we’ve got huge change in the private sphere. If we think about all the companies we use and rely on, Airbnb or Spotify or WhatsApp – [they] didn’t even exist 20 years ago. They’ve changed our lives.

Has the government changed, the way it thinks about delivering services changed at the speed of the private sphere? It hasn’t. So we’ve got to take the learning from what’s happening in the private [sector].

Asked to give an example, McFadden replied:

When they started developing the universal credit system, they spent hundreds of millions of pounds doing it in the old Whitehall way. You issue a policy paper, you have lots of committees, lots of meetings, and they got nowhere.

What they did after that was they took the process out of the department, put together a small team of about 30 people, policy people, tech people, frontline workers, said, ‘Let’s do this small, we don’t have to do it for the whole country at once, let’s test this in a really small way and see if it works.’

They did that in Sutton. Then they rolled it out a bit more, and a bit more.

It’s what we call the test and learn approach where you don’t have to design everything from scratch. You test, you learn. You allow for some failure in the system. You don’t get panicked by that. You learn from that.

I want to see that approach adopted more in policy in the the future.

Some of McFadden’s colleagues may not find this example encouraging. While the decision to roll out universal credit gradually, in the way McFadden describes, not as a single ‘big bang’ reform, was generally seen as sensible, the project (an enormous reform undertaking) was nevertheless beset by problems, and rollout has taken more than a decade.

Good morning. Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have both spoken about their desire to completely “rewire” the way the British state operates. Badenoch has not said much about how this might happen (although she has spoken about wanting the state to do less, implying not so much a rewiring of the state as a complete removal of some of the wiring instead). And Starmer has not given a detailed vision of what rewiring might involve either, but this morning Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, will give a speech providing the answer, or at least one answer.

As Eleni Courea reports in her overnight story, McFadden will say the government will ask officials managing public service delivery to operate as if they are running a tech startup.

If the overnight press briefing is anything to go by, this will be bad news for civil servants who enjoy writing erudite policy documents. The Cabinet Office says:

‘Crack’ teams of problem solvers will be deployed to improve public services and support delivery of the Plan for Change. Made up of a mix of people working in partnership to drive change – with data and digital skills, policy officials, and frontline workers, they 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.

In his speech McFadden will say he wants civil servants to adopt a “test and learn culture”. Explaining what this means, McFadden will say:

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. 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 will say the government will start this approach with two smallish projects, before rolling it out more widely. He will say that, while “each of these projects is small”, they could ‘rewire the state one test at a time”.

McFadden has been doing an interview round this morning, and I will post more from what he has been saying about this in those exchanges shortly. But inevitably the interviews have been dominated by Syria. McFadden confirmed that the government is considering whether Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist group which has taken over Syria, should remain proscribed in the UK as a terrorist organisation. HTS says it has changed since it emerged some years ago as an al-Qaida offshoot. There will be some discussion of Syria here on the blog, but most of our coverage will be on our Middle East crisis live blog.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, gives a speech on the civil service and public sector reform.

Late morning (UK) time: Keir Starmer arrives in Riyadh for a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. Earlier he was in the United Arab Emirates for a meeting with its president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Afternoon: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is in Brussels for a meeting with EU finance ministers. As Mark Sweney and Phillip Inman report, she will say she wants a “mature, business-like relationship [with the EU] where we can put behind us the low ambitions of the past and move forward, focused instead on all that we have in common”.

2.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

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