GovWire

Thank you for joining me today.

As youll have seen, on Thursday we set out our Plan for Change: key milestones that we want to reach over the next few years.

They are about what we want to do. But just as important is how we do it, and thats what I want to talk about today.

This question of how is important because for Government to deliver what it wants there has to be reform of the state itself.

We have to be relentlessly curious about how the world is changing and constantly asking how that change can be applied in the public sphere.

And if we dont display that curiosity and just keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve.

Im going to begin by saying something that politicians dont say very often (though they probably should) which is that I havent got all this figured out from beginning to end.

And of course its hard to make a speech like this without some echoes of the past.

Too often the debate falls into a distorted debate about whether or not someone is attacking civil servants.

I work with hard working and diligent civil servants every day. They want to do well for their country and for the public.

The people are good but the systems and structures they work in are too often outdated and make it hard for them to deliver.

And no one will welcome changing that more than civil servants themselves.

Do we think people like the fact that theyve gone to a lot of meetings and feel like they are banging their head against a brick wall?

Of course they dont. They want to achieve and we have to help them do it. It is right that we expect people to focus on delivery and right that we drive the system towards that goal.

So Im not here today to talk about what lanyards people wear or to open up another chapter in a culture war.

Those are just pointless distractions. Gimmicks from politicians who dont have serious answers to serious questions.

Im more interested in an answer rather than a grievance.

Because reform of the state is about delivering for people.

The opportunities are huge. Faster decision making. Cutting waste. The elimination or at least speeding up of repetitive tasks. Use of data to make sure services are more suited to individual circumstances. Better value for money for taxpayers and better services for citizens.

But right now, it often doesnt feel like that. We know a lot about the problem because people can see it every day.

To state the obvious, some things just dont work properly. Will your train arrive on time, or at all? How long will have you have to wait for a knee or hip replacement? Can you drive your car down a road without bouncing through potholes?

SEND, childrens social care, temporary accommodation: none are currently serving people the way they should, while at the same time, costs are going up.

Rising costs and bad outcomes is a bad equation all round.

Add in a backdrop of too much political chaos in recent years and too many broken promises and something more insidious takes hold.

And that something is not an opinion about whether or not a Government is doing well but a doubt that politics and government can deliver much at all.

That is a loss of faith to which we should all pay heed.

And it comes against a backdrop where taxpayers have been paying more in, but often feel they are not getting more out.

The old debate was focussed almost entirely on the size of the budget. The only announcement that mattered was the spending attached to it.

Any money that wasnt new was thought not to count. And the beginning and the end of analysis was how much the budget was growing.

We need to ask more from ourselves than that. Of course resources matter. You cant pay people for free and you cant buy equipment or buildings for free.

But the size of the budget is not the only question. Its what are you using it for, what will the outcome be, how will you organise people to make sure it happens.

At the Budget the Chancellor demanded efficiency and productivity savings of 2% across departments - and there will be more to come.

As we launch the next phase of the spending review at its heart must be reform of the state in order to do a better job for the public.

Twenty years ago, when Tony Blair made a speech about public service reform, Blockbuster Video and Toys R Us were still around.

AirBnB, WhatsApp and Spotify were not.

Ive picked on those three new companies deliberately. All three are now used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

All three disrupted the industry they were in, profoundly changing how we think about travel, messaging and music.

All three harnessed the potential of new technology to shape and respond to peoples growing expectations.

And all three worked in radically different ways to the firms they were competing against. By doing so, they created services many people would now find hard to imagine living without.

What these companies did - along with others who have thrived in the internet era - was recognise a fundamentally different way to address complex problems.

In the digital age, you dont have to work out precisely what you need to build at the start, and then start building it.

You can start with something small and try it out. Test it on people. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again. Throw it away and start again cheaply, if it doesnt work. Tweak it again. And so on, and on, for as long as you provide the service.

Suddenly the most important question isnt How do we get this right the first time? Its How do we make this better by next Friday?

Public services are complex. They involve many different interactions between many different actors within a system.

They involve people who dont always behave the way the economists tell you, and have an infinite variety of needs which change over time.

Their needs often dont finish. They are highly unpredictable, to the point when you cant figure out how to do it upfront, even if you wanted to.

Now public servants are often very clever people. They can see around corners, spot and anticipate problems. But they are not all-knowing. And you cannot kill complexity with cleverness when it comes to improving public services.

We cant figure it all out at the start, and then set the delivery train running. And the good news is we dont have to.

Lets take some encouragement from some things that have gone right.

You might remember that a few years ago the passport system was in a mess.

My constituency office, like many others, was inundated with requests from desperate families who could not get the system to respond to what should be a simple and basic request - to renew a passport in time to go on holiday.

But the state turned things around in three ways. First, by using the power of tech to modernise the system.

Second, by putting the user at the heart of that new digital service.

And third, after rolling out that system, by looking to improve and improve and improve. Not just implementing the system and saying, job done, mission accomplished.

But testing it, and adapting it, and continually improving it, until it does what the public needs it to do.

The roll-out of Universal Credit was, in the end, a similar story.

And it was very much a story of two halves.

In the early years it burned through hundreds of millions of pounds without achieving much.

The process was a familiar Whitehall one of a plan of how the system should work, asking officials to build it and then demanding those officials grip delivery by writing lots and lots of reports about its progress.

That didnt work and then came the reset, and the second half of the story.

They took Universal Credit out of the department and its one-size-fits-all culture, and set up a small team of around 30 people from mixed backgrounds.

Policy makers, digital people and those in charge of operational delivery, all in one team.

The priority was to get something that would work, start small and start learning.

So they started rolling out Universal Credit to a small number of people in Sutton, identifying where the issues were, and then improving the service as they went along.

It was a test and learn culture, and it freed up the team to be more honest about delivery, to make mistakes, but ultimately to roll out a service that actually worked.

And this is what we should be doing more of, and it is the approach that the DWP will take now as they set about changing how Job Centres work.

In the digital age, you dont have to work out precisely what you need to build at the start, and then start building it.

These experiences show we can make the state think a little bit more like a start-up.

The question is why has this kind of thinking not been applied more widely? Why does it feel like the exception rather than the rule?

Well, to push it forward, at the Budget, the Chancellor allocated a 100 million Innovation Fund to deploy new test-and-learn teams around the country.

And today I can tell you more about what the next steps will be.

The first wave will begin in January.

It will be made up of small groups working in Manchester, Sheffield, Essex and Liverpool, in partnership with local authorities, mayors and their teams.

Those t

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