Successive governments have promised to reform the British state. Most have left it harder to navigate than they found it. So what would genuinely fixing the way government works actually look like?

In this episode of The Policy Fix, Jill Rutter (Senior Fellow, Institute for Government) and Andrew Greenway (founder of A Bit Digital and former senior civil servant) join host Joe Owen to examine why Whitehall struggles to deliver: the civil service’s misaligned incentives, the gap between policy and delivery, and why Labour’s mission-driven government ran out of steam.

They also explore what the rare successes GDS, the vaccine taskforce, Brexit, Covid actually have in common, and what it would take to replicate that more broadly.

They end with a quickfire question: if Keir Starmer called you tomorrow and said he wanted to move fast and break things, what’s the one thing you’d tell him to break?

Frank, expert and full of practical insight, this is the state reform conversation that Whitehall needs to be having.

The Policy Fix is produced by Nesta.

Timecodes:

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:53 Do we have a government delivery problem?

00:06:18 What happened to Labour's mission-driven government?

00:12:07 Why do politicians struggle to get things done?

00:15:52 Has governing fundamentally changed?

00:22:12 What the Government Digital Service (GDS) got right

00:27:24 The “project” model: lessons from the Olympics

00:30:23 The policy vs delivery divide in Whitehall

00:34:06 Brexit and Covid: what government can do well

00:39:41 Do we need a wholesale review of the British state?

00:43:15 Structural reform: does No. 10 need more power?

00:48:31 What would you break? The final question