Welcome back to your first Leapwise blog of 2025! We hope you had a good break – especially readers who were working hard in public services where Christmas often means higher demand, rather than a quieter few weeks.
As we reflect on 2024, it’s worth recognising how much change we saw across the public sector. We had a brand-new government, new secretaries of state, a pretty contentious Budget, and even the launch of Starmer’s ‘Plan for Change’ (1) as an early Christmas present for us all…
And yet, we were almost left with more questions than answers last year. There’s clearly a new political direction under Labour and a sense of growing radicalism, but that hasn’t yet turned into a full agenda for reforming the UK’s core public services.
Two visions for reform
So, as we head into 2025, those questions will only become more timely. What does that vision for reformed public services actually look like? How much will Labour’s five missions (and six milestones) really define the work of government over the next Parliament? And how committed are No.10 and the new Cabinet Secretary to the ‘rewiring’ of the state that the PM promised? (2)
As we see it, Labour’s ultimately been stuck between two competing visions for Whitehall and public sector reform. And this year will expose which of them is going to win out.
One of those visions is ultimately incremental – it’s about statis and safety. From this perspective, the new government will – through hard work and focused effort – get the existing systems to deliver more effectively. There will be some new priorities (see the six milestones) and perhaps those goals will be deliberately more stable and long-term. But the fundamentals of how the system delivers will be unchanged, with more contentious reforms that would really upset the apple cart being avoided. It might even, to put it in the same provocative terms as the Prime Minister has, be about sticking with the “the tepid bath of managed decline.”
The other vision is much more ambitious – it’s about radicalism and system reform. It recognises that Labour’s ten-year missions and five-year milestones are extremely challenging to achieve. In fact, they’re undeliverable without simultaneously changing how the existing systems of delivery have long worked. It would see No.10 really committing to ‘rewiring’ the state, a Cabinet Secretary that takes Whitehall reform seriously, a robust devolution agenda, and much more concerted action to defeat the departmental siloes that prevent effective cross-sector collaboration. The vision is just as much about new structures and ways of working, as it is about new priorities.
What should public sector leaders do?
If you want to know which of these visions is likely to win out, the honest answer is that we’re not sure! In health, Wes Streeting has consistently challenged those he views as institutional blockers to radical thinking. In policing, Leapwise has played its part (3) in influencing the Home Secretary’s system reform plans: introducing a new National Centre of Policing. In other areas, like civil service reform, a more cautious approach has been the model so far – even if the PM’s Plan for Change was much punchier (some might say, unnecessarily alienating!) than many anticipated.
If all this is sounding a very Westminster-focused, it’s because national decisions on policy and funding inevitably affect local public services. But it’s also to illustrate that the very same competing visions exist at the service level too. You, as public sector leaders, might be tempted by a modest vision of reform– but in many circumstances a more ambitious, radically reforming approach may be needed.
This doesn’t mean throwing everything up in the air for the sake of it: we tend to be cautious and evidence-based radicals at Leapwise… But it might not be a bad idea to make it your New Year’s Resolution to embrace radicalism and system reform wholeheartedly. By aligning with those in government who want to shift to new ways of delivering, there is an opportunity to transform your organisation and help the wider public sector to embrace the level of change required to meet today’s vast challenges.
How can this be done, while managing the very near-term and practical challenges leaders are facing after a long period of spending constraints? We have four ideas – and set out resolutions for each which we hope you will join us in!
4 resolutions for radicalism and system reform mindset
- Efficiencies: we will avoid salami-slicing at all costs
- Collaboration: we will think about whether we can achieve goals better together than alone
- Innovation and AI: we will follow fast, not wait for ubiquity
- Strategic leadership: we will be optimistic about what great leadership can achieve
Efficiencies
A theme we’ve focused on a lot over the last year has been that public services are facing ‘Austerity 2.0’ under the new government. A slightly more ambitious Budget than expected – especially around health – hasn’t really dented our opinion there. Police forces and local government bodies will have to continue to find efficiencies, even as some public services have been given extra money to cover the national insurance rises.
We’ve been clear that the highly reactive salami slicing model – making small cuts everywhere rather than thinking and acting strategically – isn’t going to work. That kind of approach is exactly what we mean by the safety and statis mindset. It’s about trying to survive the current challenge, rather than taking a more holistic view that thinks long term. This way of finding efficiencies might mean you encounter less resistance from within your organisation – after all, across the board cuts do look fairer – but it’s a poor choice for a leader trying to protect services that the public rely on.
So, what’s the radicalism and system reform approach instead? Well, it’s much more ambitious upfront, but pays dividends in the long-run. It looks explicitly beyond today’s budget settlement and commits instead to pursuing a cyclical model of driving constant efficiencies, whether through long-term prevention, focused demand reduction work or process redesign and automation to remove waste. It’s about modernising your organisation and targeting the deeper drivers of service overload.
Collaboration
Delivering on Labour’s five missions and six milestones will mean the state doing something it’s famously bad at: breaking through departmental and sector siloes to make progress on much broader goals. To halve the rate of violence against women and girls – taking the Safer Streets mission as an example – will require police intervention, but also some educational and healthcare initiatives too. That means the Home Office, Department for Education, NHS, and Department of Health and Social Care will all need to collaborate to deliver the reforms needed.
And of course, all of this flows right down to the service level and the frontline. How can police forces work more effectively with NHS partners, or even just their fellow forces on shared priorities? It’s something we’ve worked on a lot at Leapwise, for example with Hertfordshire’s criminal justice board (4) and Norfolk and Suffolk police forces, (5) who collaborate widely around their back-office work and other functions. There are also many regional models that operate effectively, such as the Borderlands Partnership (6) that’s attracted significant investment through councils working together. Even Right Care, Right Person – though borne of tension between the NHS and policing – is ultimately about a shared agreement around respective roles.
Collaboration often proves to be an easy buzzword, but building genuinely effective partnership is usually extremely difficult. It takes considerable investment to build the relationships and processes to work effectively with other organisations, especially where complex legal duties are at play. So, the easy option – the safety and stasis model – is to adopt collaborative rhetoric, but avoid meaningful partnerships for fear of friction or loss of control.
The best leaders can and should do better than that – though central government does need to lead by example here, given the sheer number of barriers to local collaboration created by mechanisms such as ‘ring-fenced’ departmental grants that prescribe money is spent by specific agencies, in very specific ways
Innovation and AI
2024 also saw the continued growth and development of game-changing AI tools. And the public sector has, of course, already had considerable success in making the most of new technology. Local government bodies such as Brent Council have used Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in effective ways, (7) automating manual processes to unlock substantial savings. More advanced examples – such as the AI tools developed in healthcare settings like Moorfields Eye Hospital – have long showed considerable benefit (8) as well.
AI can obviously offer so much more potential than its use today provides, even ignoring the new developments we’re certain to see in the years ahead. But the public sector still hasn’t gripped those existing opportunities rapidly enough. We shouldn’t be surprised that parts of the private sector havemoved more quickly than large state bureaucracies, but the best of our competitors – perhaps most obviously in Singapore – have done much more to leverage these solutions to improve public services.
For public sector leaders, there’s an understandable wariness about some of the AI hype and it’s true that many applications are less mature than providers claim. But again, a passive approach – waiting for things to be adopted widely elsewhere in the public sector, then simply following behind, just isn’t good enough. More forward-thinking leaders should be working hard to make sure their organisations can horizon-scan well, act as intelligent clients, and identify areas of sluggish performance where AI could be useful. Radical adoption of AI should be the increasing norm, and while the private sector will often be the first mover on innovation, the public sector should at the very least ‘follow fast’
Strategic Leadership
For understandable reasons, the narrative around public services can seem fairly gloomy currently. Funding has been and will continue to be tight. Demographic pressures are significant and won’t go away anytime soon. And if we look across things like NHS waiting lists, social care, court backlogs, and overflowing prisons, it can seem difficult to construct a positive vision of how things will evolve in the future.
And yet, there are examples of remarkably successful public sector transformations, even in these tough circumstances. The Passport Office is one great case study (9) of this. A combination of a new digital system – developed, by the way, largely in-house rather than by a major external provider – and a range of organisational improvements has transformed its performance. From a body that was roundly criticised (10) by the Home Affairs Committee in 2022 (amid widespread public complaints), it has since become a remarkable picture of efficiency. Other examples – from the Vaccine Taskforce to Humberside Police’s transformation (11) from failing to outstanding in just five years – show that the state can deliver effectively when set up to succeed.
We completely accept that a public sector leadership job can seem harder than ever. With years of compounding financial pressures and a new government that’s set to keep the purse strings tight, motivating the workforce for the next wave of transformation isn’t going to be easy. But setting a positive, radical vision – one that openly commits to breaking the safety and statis approach that may have come before – can work. We’re confident that there’s a growing number of people willing to embrace that vision.
A New Year’s Resolution
So, as we start the New Year, our view is that – whichever vision the Government eventually settles on – leaders in the public sector should commit to radicalism and system reform. It’s the only way to really deliver better services that can improve life for citizens all across the UK.
If you’re convinced, then all we can do is wish you the best of luck as you take forward that vision through the rest of 2025. Please do reach out to a member of our team if you want to work together on that exciting, but challenging journey.
