Oral evidence: Mission Government, HC 116

Oral evidence, 20 October 2026.

Witness

Rt Hon. Darren Jones MP.

Chair

Good morning, colleagues. I am very pleased that the right hon. Darren Jones, Member of Parliament, has kindly agreed to join us voluntarily under no compulsion whatsoever. Mr Jones, having served as the Prime Minister’s Chief Secretary and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, we thought it useful to hear your fresh thoughts, reflections and suggestions on your time—the good, the bad and the ugly as it were—in the Cabinet Office. It would be remiss of me not to put on record in public this Committee’s thanks for how you engaged with us, the time you spent with us and indeed what you did within the Department when you were a Minister. Sometimes politics is not terribly good at saying thank you, so on behalf of the Committee, thank you. I want to take us back to the heady days—before the gilt came off the gingerbread—of mission government. You will remember there was a great fanfare. Pat McFadden was your predecessor and there were issues that you inherited. Not a day went by without us hearing at least four times from Ministers about mission-led government and how it would shake everything up, the silos would be broken and the way of doing government would be recast. When did mission government get its death certificate? Nobody talks about it anymore and it does not seem to be the underpinning mindset of, “Let’s change things around and make things better.”

Darren Jones

The missions for the incoming Labour Government were a set of political priorities that came through the manifesto process in opposition coming into government, which were then attempted to be translated into changing the way Government worked in order to focus on delivering those outcomes. It was essentially an exercise of prioritisation and trying to get the system to tackle some big challenges that maybe it had not for a long time. Certainly in the first year or so when I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury we were trying to embed mission structures into Government. We had these mission boards that brought Departments together. In the spending review that I led I asked mission boards to submit their own spending bids alongside the Departments so we could see how we could pool budgets to come together. In practice it did not work for a number of reasons. First, the money we assigned to missions ended up going to Departments anyway because we were told mission boards could not be constitutionally accountable to Parliament in the same way Departments are. Once the Departments got the money, the Departments decided how to spend the money and so collaboration was not as easy as it maybe should have been if it had gone to the mission board. Cross-departmental working is also just very hard. Constitutional norms and a tendency to protect the way the system works eventually stopped it from being effective. With Andy Burnham’s team, he has a different set of priorities and has clearly set those out. He has decided that the missions will continue and still be delivered under the bonnet by the Government—NHS waiting lists coming down, more police officers in our community, the clean energy mission going for economic growth at the top of the league table—but the political focus has changed with a new administration.

Chair

Let us just pause there for a moment because there was a growing sense that the orthodox high priests of the Treasury suddenly saw mission boards as being effectively a challenge to their total authority. No longer would Treasury be able to play one Department off against the other because of a cross-departmental approach to policy delivery. What you seem to be saying now is it was just accountability. At that time did any Minister say, “We want to try and do something new here so let’s create a way for mission boards to have that line of democratic accountability through Parliament,” or was it just a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders and simply going, “Oh, okay, well, it was a good idea but it’s fallen at the first fence”?

Darren Jones

Other current and former Ministers might think differently, but my sense of it is it was a classic example of the system saying, “Well, you can’t do that because of constitutional norms.” Therefore the mission boards continued as technically Cabinet Sub-Committees in their status, which have decision-making power but the money still sat with the Departments in their normal structure. As we all know if you do not have money in the spending review to do something you are probably not going to get around to doing it.

Chair

That is an understandable answer but I am sure you understand that it is also a disappointing one. Here are a fresh-faced Government coming in, after 14 years in opposition, master of all they surveyed in terms of a parliamentary majority, and the working presumption at that time was a belief that Keir Starmer would be Prime Minister for at least two terms. Does that just speak to a surprising lack of small-r radicalism within the early days of that Government and to the wider assessment of Keir Starmer? I am not asking anybody to speak ill of the metaphorical dead but of a rather unambitious, non-creative technocrat who just tried to make the status quo work rather than create anything new.

Darren Jones

I would not personally pin it on Keir Starmer or quite frankly any Minister. When I was in the Cabinet Office I spent a lot of my time trying to get the system to focus less on process and more on delivery of outcomes because there is a lot of process: meetings, slide decks, groups. You just think, “What is actually changing in the real world as a consequence of all this activity?” I had to do a lot of work in terms of the incentive and accountability structure for senior civil servants but also seek absolute clarity on what they were being measured against in terms of real-world change. I have two observations. First, what happened initially in response to mission boards was a lot of process. A lot of people worked very hard; there were mission boards and lots of data, slide decks and people talking but it did not actually deal with the fundamental constitutional barriers to radical change of the state. My second point is that the civil service is reluctant to change. Ministers who have an average lifespan of maybe two years or so can only achieve so much in that time period. The incentives and accountability structures to make sure that senior civil service is delivering the political priorities of the Government of the day is an area where we have to do much more work. I started some in Government but I know that there is much more to be done.

Chair

We will all take the point about the rapidity of ministerial churn. I just want to go back to the assertion of some basic points. There was massive parliamentary majority, decimated serried ranks of Opposition in Parliament and the belief that Keir Starmer would be Prime Minister for 10 years. It was a personal goal of the Prime Minister to deliver change, do things differently and so on. How surprised or worried should this Committee be? Against that backdrop the civil service was still reticent to pick up that ball and run with it to help Ministers deliver a fundamental resculpting of how the state delivers service, monitors progress and makes things better for Mr and Mrs Smith of 32 Acacia Avenue.

Darren Jones

The Committee should be worried about it; I am worried about it. In practice, a Minister sets a political direction but then relies on the civil service to implement and deliver it. The trouble is, especially when you are very busy as a Minister—the Prime Minister’s diary is obviously the busiest of all—there is not sufficient pressure on the detail or accountability elsewhere for how this is being performed. If there is a reluctance to deliver change you have to push really hard for it to happen. I remember when I was Chief Secretary of the Treasury and it was my construct to get the mission boards to submit their own spending bids and bring the mission boards together in a meeting chaired by myself as Chief Secretary of the Treasury and Pat McFadden as CDL for them to explain what their bids were. The Treasury would have been quite happy not to do any of those things and just do the departmental approach that it has always done. This is why I say accountability for performance of the senior civil service matters so much because there are too many opportunities for the system to not deliver what Ministers have asked for. You can only have so many things where you call them in every single week to say, “How are you going?” There is a whole load of other stuff that just does not happen. Certainly in the senior civil service—particularly Cabinet Secretary level—there is very little accountability. There is a big debate for us in Parliament about how the Government can improve accountability within government. I had started some work and they were making some progress, which is good. Also in Parliament I do not think the current set-up for holding senior civil servants to account in Parliament is sufficient, especially because they have become very political as a group.

Chair

Finally from me before I bring in Mr Lamb, we saw the appointment of Sir Chris Wormald and many were surprised that he achieved the senior role of Cabinet Secretary. We had the destabilisation of Sue—now Baroness—Gray. Those are two people who arguably were there to help or shoulder some burden for the Prime Minister in terms of driving forward that implementation. Hindsight being a wonderful thing, what is your assessment of the either singular or cumulative impact of those two characters in post and the manner of their leaving in terms of helping the Government get up to speed as quickly as it needed to?

Darren Jones

I am going to be conscious not to provide comment on individuals, certainly where there have been employment tribunals and others involved.

Chair

I do not think there have been tribunals.

Darren Jones

There were settlements, and as a consequence of settlements I suspect there was a commitment not to bring anything to a tribunal. I am just not going to go into that space with your permission but thank you for the invitation.

Chair

Damn.

Darren Jones

At the centre of Government there are the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, the Prime Minister’s PPS, the Cabinet Secretary and the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister or the First Secretary, whichever title you want to give them, plus probably the Chancellor, although they are always slightly separate. That is basically the key team for driving things forward. This is probably a reflection of the fact that my role was new as Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister but I found that there were often conflicting views about who had what authority to do what. It was not just political disagreement but constitutional disagreement. For example, I had to explain to the new Cabinet Secretary how my role worked, why it was constructed in that way and why being a Minister specifically inside the No. 10 business unit—not just being CDL in the Cabinet Office—was different and important. I had to explain why it meant that officials from the Cabinet Secretary downwards were accountable to me as a Minister in No. 10 as well as to the Prime Minister. The Cabinet Secretary did not really like that, but that is how it had been constructed.

Chair

Our understanding was that effectively when you spoke, it was as if the Prime Minister had spoken.

Darren Jones

Yes. I would deputise for him predominantly on domestic policy. We had David Lammy as Deputy Prime Minister who did a lot of the foreign policy interactions with him alongside the Foreign Secretary. The Cabinet handbook has not been updated since David Cameron and there was nothing written down as to how these roles should operate and interact with each other.

Chair

Do not forget, Mr McFadden told us that the Cabinet manual was totally irrelevant and we did not even need to worry our pretty little heads about it.

Darren Jones

You should write down how some things work because if you do not write it down people have different interpretations.

Chair

Exactly. It is open to interpretation.

Peter Lamb

Just in the spirit of freestyling, the accountability—

Chair

We are annoying the Clerks today. We have torn up the script, Darren. We are riffing; we are like an acapella group.

Peter Lamb

The accountability point is an incredibly important one that a lot of members here are probably going to want to explore. Just as the conversation around constitutional norms is sailing off into the distance and having brought it up again, something that this Committee is increasingly concerned about—at the very least I am increasingly concerned about—is that the more that we look at the systems of accountability of Government the more clear it is that we are still very reliant on the good chaps principle and that there would not be a lot of protection were a Government to come in that did not honour a lot of those principles. That being the case, I guess the question is how far the constitution should really have inhibited a Government that came in. At what level were you finding that people were saying that constitutional norms would be breached and that you could not do things in the structure? As far as we can see really, if the Government just wants to get on with it the only person who could really intervene would be the Cabinet Secretary saying, “We’re just not going to do that.” Within the current system it is entirely feasible to remove a Cabinet Secretary who does not do those things in order to progress those areas.

Darren Jones

I would be told all the time that there were things I could not do because of the constitution and I would often reply with, “The constitution is unwritten so if I decide to do something, it changes; therefore why can’t I do it?” I am a fan of an unwritten constitution because in theory it provides flexibility, albeit within the norms of how we should expect Government to work, their accountability to Parliament, the role of civil servants and how that differs from Ministers. To give you one example, when I was at the Treasury I realised that the Treasury acts more like a bank than a finance department. It negotiates with each Department how much money it is going to give it for what particular things and then it says, “Now you, Department, are broadly accountable to Parliament for the money I’ve given you.” I wanted to know how they are spending the money, how that aligns with their KPIs and whether we can spot problems earlier before they become multi-billion-pound problems. The Treasury has this system called OSCAR—Online System for Central Accounting and Reporting—where each month a Department uploads an Excel spreadsheet. Basically it shows how much they are spending against how much they were given to try to manage overall spending levels. The quality of the data around how much is being spent on the primary care system, the SEND system or whatever it might be just was not there. I said, “Well, can’t we just integrate the finance systems? Let’s plug them together so that we can see how the money’s being spent against the priorities that are set by the Government.” I was told, “Well, you can’t do that because constitutionally the Departments are accountable to Parliament, not to the Treasury.” I had to push and push and push in order to get a pilot to look at how you might integrate the technology. When I left the Treasury I was suddenly told it had become deprioritised so I had to go back and say, “No, you need to reprioritise it.” Heaven knows where it is now; I do not have the foggiest idea. The idea that civil servants can say to you, “Well, we interpret the constitution and we are telling you, the democratically elected Ministers, that this is not possible,” is not sufficient. It is important to have that check and balance because you cannot have Ministers who also just ignore what Parliament expects of them in terms of how they should behave. You need that internal check and balance but if officials are going to play that role—certainly at the senior civil service and Cabinet Secretary level—they must be more accountable to Parliament than they already are.

Peter Lamb

When you said to them, “The constitution is an evolving document, change it,” what was the response?

Darren Jones

They did not really have an answer because I do not think anyone has said that to them before. In practice how did I do it? I had to get the Cabinet Secretary to write a letter to every other Permanent Secretary to say that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor and I had said this was going to happen. I had to make sure the money was in the spending review for it to happen and I tabled a written ministerial statement here so that it was on the public record and no one could get rid of it. That was my greatest hope: that it meant that constitutionally, I was allowed to have integrated financial reporting across Government. It is just barmy. Of course we should see how money is being spent across Government in a more granular way and use technology to better spot problems. We spend enormous amounts of money; we cannot rely on a monthly Excel spreadsheet being uploaded to an IT system. I hope that project continues; I need to check with new Treasury Ministers but the fact it was so difficult for something that is really not very controversial paints an example of the problem that needs to be fixed.

Peter Lamb

If they did not have a counter answer and you still had to do all these other things, presumably the default position was to ignore you if they did not want to do anything.

Darren Jones

Yes.

Peter Lamb

Coming back to the Cabinet manual, of course that was first drafted in the run-up to the 2010 general election. Speaking to people involved in the drafting it was always intended to be a living document that belonged to the Prime Minister rather than the civil service. You have alluded to this already but do you feel it would have been easier to enable some changes to have happened if an updated version of the Cabinet manual had been produced that set out that these were the things that were going to happen?

Darren Jones

Yes. There is quite a lot in it and a lot probably would not change very much to be honest. For the role of the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, the way the system knew how to interact with me and what authority I had or did not have from the Prime Minister was based on an email. We would ask the Prime Minister’s principal Private Secretary to write an email to people. The trouble with that is that when new people come in, they do not have the email in their inbox so you have to try to find it and resend it. It would be much better just to put it in the Cabinet manual and say, “You have to read that when you are coming into your role.” That is really important because when a document is owned by the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister is so busy and what that actually means is it is owned by the Cabinet Secretary. The Cabinet Secretary and his or her team do all the detailed work around that. It might go to the Prime Minister for final approval in the box. The idea that the Prime Minister is going to be able to get into the weeds of the Cabinet manual or the pay bands for the senior civil service in the context of civil service reform is for the birds. That is why again there is an accountability gap. If officials are leading that work—albeit with oversight from the Prime Minister—who is doing the detailed accountability of what is going in it and how it works? There are gaps there that need to be filled.

Peter Lamb

If this is the document that is essentially going to set out how civil servants are going to try to deliver on the Government’s own commitments, perhaps in the run-up to taking control or change of administration, people will be spending more time thinking about what type of Cabinet manual they want to produce in order to ensure the outcomes from the process they are trying to put into place.

Darren Jones

At the end of the day, if the Prime Minister tells the system that something is happening, they will do it. Getting to that point can often be quite difficult for the rest of us, essentially. If you can come in with an update to the Cabinet manual changing the structure or the ministerial roles and the Prime Minister just says to the system, “This is how it’s going to work,” they will do that. More often than not you do not have that very clear agreed direction at the start; it tends to bumble a bit as you try to figure it out.

Peter Lamb

We are already moving in this direction but do we need to delegate more power from the Prime Minister to Ministers for oversight of the civil service within their Departments?

Darren Jones

Yes.

Peter Lamb

How would you see that working?

Darren Jones

My successor—the First Secretary of State—is the obvious person to whom the Prime Minister would delegate a lot of detailed policy work; that happens already. Because the Prime Minister is the Minister for the Civil Service and the Cabinet Secretary is very clear that she reports only to the Prime Minister and that she is in charge of civil service reform, you need much more ministerial buy-in. It would make sense for the First Secretary of State—with and on behalf of the Prime Minister—to be the Minister who is accountable for that. Take the example recently in the news—it is for the Government to confirm whether this is the case or not—where it was reported that the Cabinet Secretary was asking for legislation to be drafted for the next session to give her the statutory authority to direct other Permanent Secretaries. I do not necessarily disagree with the principle of that but I do not think the person who receives all that power should be drafting their own Bill. They are not going to be able to come to the House of Commons and present the bill, nor is the Prime Minister

Chair

The Cabinet Secretary’s ends are welcome. My view is she does not need legislation to do it. What needs to be done is a proper restoration of Cabinet committees that take decisions, have the full effect of Cabinet responsibility, become government policy and Permanent Secretaries have to discharge it. That does not require legislation; that is just the ordinary operation of things on the proviso that Cabinet committees have their recognised status. Am I wrong in that?

Darren Jones

No, that is an answer to the question. As an extension of that, some work that I had started was to introduce—for the first time, amazingly—performance-related pay for the whole senior civil service. When I came into the Cabinet Office, there were some Departments that did not have KPIs at all. It is remarkable really. You need to have proper KPIs, incentives and accountability, and then when that flows through the system it will work. This is perfectly common in lots of businesses and other organisations. It is the case in some Departments, but from the centre of Government downwards this is new so it is important that we get it right. To finish answering your question, if there is legislation a Minister has to be responsible for that legislation; who is that Minister? If you say the Prime Minister is the lead Minister for civil service reform, does that mean the Prime Minister is going to come and answer questions at this Committee on civil service reform or present a Bill for second reading in the floor of the House? No. You have to have someone such as the First Secretary of State who has oversight of the detail and you do not just leave it to officials who put papers in front of the Prime Minister who says, “Well, that looks okay. Thanks so much.”

Peter Lamb

I will relinquish time to enable other people to come back in, but I would like to remain on the list if possible.

Chair

Of course. Do you think that system is created by evolutionary accident or engineered design?

Darren Jones

Both.

Chair

That suggests that I would agree with both serendipity and Machiavellian planning.

Darren Jones

I find it remarkable—as I said just now—that there were no clear KPIs.

Chair

Which Departments did not have the KPIs?

Darren Jones

I cannot remember the complete list now but there were Departments that did not have them. Some did and they sorted it out themselves. When I had to recreate the No. 10 Delivery Unit—a fantastic team of direct ministerial appointments and civil servants—I tasked the team with building a dashboard that translated Prime Minister’s priorities into key data and metric points that were shared across everybody. We would give Permanent Secretaries a RAG rating—green, amber or red—and they would have to report every month. When it got to the point that I was told Permanent Secretaries were coming over to 70 Whitehall to ask, “Why is it that I’ve been given an amber-green as opposed to a green?” I thought, “Hurrah, we’re making some progress because actually they really care about this accountability framework.” I do not know whether it existed in the past and then just got dropped between Administrations, but that needs to be a permanent function with clear lines of accountability to Parliament.

Chair

A yes or no answer if you can: will the creation of the office of the Prime Minister make a difference?

Darren Jones

Will it make a difference to what?

Chair

Will it make a difference to doing stuff and driving change?

Darren Jones

Yes, if it is done properly. These were plans that I started to pull together when I was in government. I have said to you before I tried to abolish the Cabinet Office three times but failed. My main frustration was that there was too much in the Cabinet Office but also No. 10 as a business unit was a sealed unit; it did not work with Cabinet Office people. You would have political appointees and some civil servants in No. 10 doing communications but not meeting with the Government Communications Service, or policy people not meeting with the secretariats to try to think what we are going to drive forward. I was not allowed to abolish the Cabinet Office; instead I just said, “Well, you must meet with each other every week and have a shared work plan.” That helped but there was still a sense that No. 10 is different to the Cabinet Office. In my world the idea of the office of Prime Minister and Cabinet was to basically try to abolish those barriers and walls and make them just one integrated team, focusing on the same things and really supporting each other to move it forward.

Lauren Edwards

We have a huge number of consultants and people with a business background who were brought into Government to whip it into shape and that has been going on for decades. What you have described there is how some very basic business feedback accountability measures have not been implemented in vast swathes of Whitehall. Why do you think that is? When various parties have been in government we have made a conscious effort to bring in basic business expertise and it has not filtered through.

Darren Jones

I do not know is the short answer but I am amazed that it was not. If I had to try to guess what the answer is it would be that Ministers are more focused on their political priorities than basic management and leadership within the civil service. I understand that really. As a political Minister I did not really feel I should be involved in performance management and civil service bonus changes and KPIs; I should be focused on delivering other things. If you do not have a politician pushing it and no one else is calling for it, I suppose it is easier just not to have it. This is my point on accountability of senior civil servants to Parliament and within the whole civil service: you need to reward people for doing brilliant work. You also need to hold people to account if they are not performing. Who is doing that? If you are not doing it to each other in the civil service and there is no real hard wire into Parliament, is it not just comfortable to come to work every day? No doubt you do good work and provide the public service that you have come into the civil service to provide but there is just not enough drive and performance culture in that.

Lauren Edwards

What you have described is understandable in one way; people do not get into politics to make sure the civil service runs effectively. What you have described there is that if somebody is not taking that role on in the way that they should and maybe does not have the resources and the backing that they need throughout Whitehall, it actually has a really adverse impact on a Government’s ability to be able to achieve what it wants from a policy point of view because nobody is driving that through. Would you agree?

Darren Jones

Yes. That is important not just in terms of public service delivery or the political priorities of the Government of the day but also bread-and-butter functions such as the Government Communication Service. I spent a fair amount of my time working with David Dinsmore, the former Permanent Secretary for Government comms, because we realised that the state was failing to interact with the public. There are apparently 7,000 officials—a remarkable number—across Government in the Government comms service spending hundreds of millions of pounds a year, if not more. Our assessment was that we were engaging with roughly 2% of the public. Government have so many different brands, Departments, campaigns or functions that the public do not really know whether the Government are doing something good or not because they are confused by the branding and we do not put it in front of their face because we are not using the system very well. That is a problem for our democracy. It is not even a party political issue; it is just something that needs to work more effectively. If you do not have someone driving that change through, you just carry on doing what you have always been doing and do not rise to the challenge.

Lauren Edwards

Just going back to the concept of mission government, it has been a concept in public administration circles for some decades. As somebody a little outside at the time, given what we know about Whitehall around siloed working and the dominance of the Treasury, it seems that there was maybe an underestimation in opposition about the scale of the challenge. Would you agree with that assessment? With the benefit of hindsight, what would you do differently to try to address those constitutional barriers and siloed ways of working so that you could be more effective as an incoming Government?

Darren Jones

The theory of missions feels fine to me because it is essentially a framing of priorities, which any Government have to do. From the Treasury perspective, in the first year we had gone through annual budget setting so Departments did not have long-term budget settlement; the Treasury’s mechanisms for holding Departments to account had not really been used properly for a number of years; the delivery unit did not exist as I was saying just now and KPIs and performance were not in place. The architecture to deliver priorities had basically fallen away and there was a repair job really to be done to rebuild the machine in order to then deliver priorities. I suppose we would not have known that in opposition; you only know it really once you get to the inside and see how it works.

Lauren Edwards

Is there anything that you would have done differently with hindsight?

Darren Jones

The work that is already happening will mean that for this and future Governments it should be easier. If they want to call their priorities missions, I am totally fine with that and Governments should not say that cross-departmental working is so difficult therefore they are not going to tackle a particular problem. I do not mind Governments using that framing or taking it forward in that way but you just have to keep your foot on the pedal about making sure the machine is able to deliver it.

Lauren Edwards

Just a final question from me. Something that we have found as a Committee is that the willingness of Departments to share data is often an obstacle to the Government being able to achieve their goals. Is that something that you would also recognise and how do you think we can approach tackling that challenge?

Darren Jones

Yes. Quite frankly, it is maddening. When I did the first spending review, which was just to carry us over a year until we did the multi-year spending review, I spent far too much of my time as Chief Secretary of the Treasury talking to Cabinet colleagues on the other side of the table about whose data was right. They would present data; I would have data from my officials; the Treasury would say, “Well, our data is right, obviously, Minister,” and then you would end up talking about the interpretation of the data. I said to them, “Look, before we do the next spending review, I do not want to do that again. We have to have an agreed set of data. If we do not know something, that’s fine, but just be clear with us that we don’t know something.” In the Cabinet Office, in the main multi-year spending review, we use the joint data analytics teams to do a lot of Sherpa or prepping work before the ministerial meetings to say, “Well, actually, okay, Department, this is your data; Treasury, this is your data; let us independently look at it in the Cabinet Office and say whether we think that is right and what the gaps are and present it in a unified way,” and that helped quite a lot. There is a tendency not to want to share data across Governments but I do not really understand why because we are all trying to achieve the same thing. Actually, with the dashboards that the team built for me in the delivery unit—where we had agreed what the data was, what the data source was and how we would interpret it—we shared that across Government and everybody was okay with it. Maybe there is just a cultural reluctance to do it but actually in practice when it happens it seems fine, so I would encourage them to do it more.

Chair

Can I just raise a bugbear question? I would really value your thoughts on this. The Prime Minister or the Chief Whip picks up the phone to some hopeful Backbencher and says, “I want you to go and be the junior Minister in the Department of Paperclips.” “Oh, thank you, Prime Minister; what a great honour,” and off they go. Nobody ever thinks to ask what that new Minister’s skill set is, their experience of managing people, identifying routes to deliver change, monitoring the staging posts going forward and that they know how to handle and where the boundaries are, apart from reading the ministerial code with regard to civil servants. They are terrified that their rise up the greasy pole might be temporary because they may be accused of bullying if they are too bombastic, that gets them a black mark and their name becomes too hot to handle and so on. In essence the question is that politicians often default to a criticism of the system and/or the civil servants, but we do not do enough training of politicians on how to be good and effective, monitoring change and delivering dynamics, do we? There is work to be done there, is there not?

Darren Jones

There are two areas where I would agree and they are slightly different. For Ministers in particular, I find it very odd that there is no mentoring, training or anything really. In opposition, we had some sessions from the Institute for Government, which were very useful. In government it does not exist. One reason I announced the recreation of the national school of government was that I thought civil servants needed better access to training than the outsourced contracts that we had inherited were providing. I also said I wanted the national school of government to have a track for Ministers where you can bring Ministers together and think about how Government and the system works and things such as project management skills.

Chair

It is not bringing Ministers in because they are busy being Ministers in that half-hour diary slot—8.30 am through to whenever—it is identifying people who are going to be Ministers early and getting them trained up so they can hit the ground running.

Darren Jones

Training at work is important. I do not disagree with the idea that you give Members of Parliament access to more insights and support about what it is like to be in Government. I still find it slightly mad that one minute I was Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, which essentially just required me to be good in the TV studios, and the next I was given paperwork and having to make billion-pound decisions and you just get asked, “Well, which one do you think is the right answer?” “Well, that one?” It is remarkable really.

Chair

Close your eyes and say, “Oh, that one.”

Darren Jones

Exactly. “What do you think?” It is remarkable. When I was at the Cabinet Office I used to do what I called delivery lunches, when I would bring junior Ministers in from across different Departments at different levels just to give them 45 minutes or an hour to ask them, “How are you doing? How is it going? What are the problems?” Actually what was interesting was that a lot of the feedback from those conversations was quite similar across Departments. It was still mostly about prioritisation, KPIs and accountability. Private office staff are the most wonderful civil servants. They work extremely hard for their Ministers, so I do not want this to sound like a criticism of them but many Ministers would say, “I do not have people in the private office who do project management for me. These are my priorities. These are the people responsible for delivering them. I am going to get them in every week. I am going to keep track of it and we are going to let you know how it’s going.” Some Ministers would be setting up their own project management tools and just doing it themselves. There is definitely much more that can be done on training, mentoring and support for Ministers. In the United States, the JFK School of Government will put on a session for newly elected members of Congress for a couple of days when they will say, “This is what we think the latest thinking is in terms of geopolitics or the financial position of Government or public services.” It just brings everybody up to a level that then means they can go off having thought about it in a consistent way. In our system we do not have very much of that at all, either in Parliament or Government, and it is an easy win for us to do more of that.

Richard Baker

Only about a year before you came into office, the Independent Review of Governance and Accountability in the Civil Service led by Lord Maude had been published. That found that the arrangements for governance and accountability of the civil service are unclear, opaque and incomplete, as you have described. It described an avoidable level of tension and frustration between Ministers and civil servants and made some quite poor recommendations. Was that still on the agenda when you came into office or has that quietly disappeared?

Darren Jones

I do not know is the answer. When I was at the Treasury, no. When I was at the Cabinet Office I got on with what I thought needed to be done but it certainly was not with reference to that report. I could not tell you who—at an official level—is responsible for implementing the findings of that report. Presumably it is the Cabinet Secretary as the head of the civil service but I never saw anything come through my box that made reference to the report or changes being made to accountability and governance of the civil service.

Richard Baker

Does that describe to you an institutional resistance to reform within the civil service, certainly at a senior leadership level?

Darren Jones

Maybe. I do not know. The fact that it was not something that we were given as an ongoing set of reforms that we needed to be cited on suggests to me that it may not have been completed and therefore just maybe dropped between administrations.

Richard Baker

How can that be resolved? Lord Maude clearly found general agreement that these issues need to be addressed. How are we going to break the logjam in terms of ensuring there is actual proper reform and accountability in the civil service?

Darren Jones

One problem is that you are not allowed to see the advice that is given to previous Ministers; it is all boxed off. If you ask the same question, officials have to write it up again; they are not allowed to just show you what they advised last time, which was an issue not just in this space but in other areas of policy. For example, for illegal migrants on small boats, you might ask the question, “Well, what advice did you give to former Ministers about the range of options that were available?” “We can’t show you that because constitutionally we are not allowed to and therefore we have to write it all up again and it is going to take us some time to work it through.” There must be a better answer to that.

Richard Baker

What does, “We are not allowed to do that,” mean constitutionally to the lay person? That just does not make any sense.

Darren Jones

I actually do not know. There is a rule somewhere—although I do not know where it is; maybe the Committee could help me find it—that says you are not allowed to see the advice given to former Ministers. I can see that you would not be allowed to see the thoughts or answers of former Ministers, the ministerial readout box; that is fine. Surely if an official has written up a factual assessment of a policy area you should just be able to access that and give it to new Ministers.

Chair

You are such a revolutionary, Darren.

Richard Baker

How does that interact with freedom of information?

Darren Jones

It is ministerial advice-exempt.

Richard Baker

It would seem to me interesting, Chair, to find out all these rules, which are often pointed to—

Chair

Are they conventions?

Richard Baker

Or conventions, and find out what the justification is.

Chair

They are not written down; that is the problem.

Darren Jones

You will have to stop me from going down a rabbit hole here. If you are going to try to transform the way the civil service works using technology, for example, for policy advice, using AI you would be able to do a very quick and efficient job of pulling together information from a knowledge management system quite quickly and then the civil servant would check whether it meets the political considerations and speed the whole thing up. If the AI is not allowed to access documents from the past, how on earth are you going to use it in order to be able to provide policy advice? You will not have a knowledge management system for it to be able to access.

Richard Baker

This would be an interesting question to put to civil service at a future session actually in terms of how AI and its use in terms of driving efficiency will work.

Chair

We have both the First Secretary and the Cabinet Secretary due to be before us.

Richard Baker

We can pursue that there. Just a final question from me in terms of how this context related to delivery of the missions. We did a question around the Mission Delivery Unit, which was created in the Cabinet Office and had a substantial staff including a Permanent Secretary-level appointment leader, but it only lasted a year. Why was that? Was that because of some issues we have talked about today in terms of effectively driving the missions with other considerations as well?

Darren Jones

The Mission Delivery Unit has essentially become the No. 10 Delivery Unit. There is a delivery unit that exists. My reflection of the No. 10 Delivery Unit is that the prioritisation, metrics and integration with other Departments are much better. Under the Mission Delivery Unit you would have lots of meetings, slide decks and data presentations but it was not hardwired to the cultural incentives for officials to move more quickly. It is not that the Mission Delivery Unit was a failure; it is just that in many ways we have upgraded it and named it the No. 10 Delivery Unit instead.

Richard Baker

Was that more effective?

Darren Jones

Yes. I am a huge advocate for the delivery unit team. They are still fairly small. We only really got around to doing it in the second year once I had come in. They are very good at not just doing the data analytics and accountability but going out and trying to really understand the supply chain. I was always very conscious of, “Okay, if this data is true, show me which schools in different constituencies across the country are now experiencing something different that is more positive. How do we know that?” They would be very good at working their way through all the way through to the end user and reflecting that back. Let us take one example of NHS performance. We had a metric for reducing waiting lists, which is obviously important. The delivery unit did some work and realised that the biggest frustration for patients across the country in terms of their appointments was getting a letter in the post after the appointment happened. We were spending enormous amounts of money sending out letters for no purpose whatsoever. It is actually quite an easy thing to fix. You would suddenly improve the sentiment of patients very effectively but you would not have known that had the delivery unit not really dived into the actual customer order journey and what the customer experience of the public service was.

Sam Carling

Just on some of those points you made, Darren, about civil service resistance to change in general terms and having to constantly chase and prod to make sure things are happening from the Minister’s side, project management skills is a really helpful point. Where do you think that best fits, bearing in mind Minister’s capacity? Is it something that spads or private offices should do more of?

Darren Jones

My hope for the national school of government is that it provides training to everyone because I would not want to make a false distinction between roles. Ministers should have a particular set of training opportunities, and No. 10 should make it clear that Ministers are expected to do it. Sometimes Ministers might decide that actually other things are more important than going to training; they need to be told it is almost mandatory training, such as you would have in the real world. Equally for special advisers. One of the things we have tried to improve is the HR system for special advisers; I did not think they got treated very well. They should get the opportunities for training and support because their jobs are very intense and they only really have their own community to support each other. Then, of course, for officials, especially in private offices where they are supporting Ministers to deliver on their priorities.

Sam Carling

In terms of actually operating that and doing the project management, are you telling civil servants to please get on with priority X and then having to constantly ask every week, “Oh, how is that going?” If Ministers do not have the time who should be doing more of that? Should it be the private office, the special adviser, or someone else?

Darren Jones

If there are clear priorities, either prime ministerial priority or Secretary of State priority, that should be integrated into the team supporting Ministers, so the private offices. You will often be attached to a director general or if you are a Secretary of State to a permanent secretary, so they should also be a part of it and, of course, special advisers as well. I was always trying to encourage Whitehall to use technology more effectively. I just desperately did not want printed out slide decks, so that if I wanted a change or I had to ask a question I had to wait a week for it to come back. Using interactive data and dashboards is a really useful way to make sure that you make that process much easier. The No. 10 Delivery Unit dashboard is a great example of that. Anyone can just log in and see. You can interpret the data and see the feedback from different parts of government; you can see where you are in terms of your target delivery. In many ways it feels just a routine part of checking how things are going as opposed to it being too rigid or too process driven.

Sam Carling

On a separate note I also want to ask about arm’s length bodies. I am reminded of that statement from Keir when he went to the Liaison Committee—I think it was—where he described them as sometimes a thicket of reasons you cannot do something. Are Ministers and Government generally finding that arm’s length bodies have too much responsibility and that is getting in the way of them doing things? If so, would you say there is a general attitude of trying to resolve that, or is that becoming a bit insurmountable?

Darren Jones

I never really experienced arm’s length bodies getting in the way of my work, but that is because I did not really have many of them at the Treasury, in the Cabinet Office or No. 10; it might feel different to different Departments. My direct experience of arm’s length bodies is how difficult it is to get rid of them, often because they are established in primary legislation. Then there are often issues about them getting paid better than civil service equivalents who work in Departments, and if you start trying to restructure the teams it becomes quite complicated and expensive from an HR perspective. They are very hard to get rid of. You would have to check but I am pretty sure every Government have done a review of ALBs and tried to reduce the number, but the outcome has been more of them, not less.

Chair

Could we then have the arm’s length body for the removal of arm’s length bodies?

Darren Jones

There you are. I am not against them in principle, but I find it odd that where we did want to get rid of some, apparently it was so difficult to do.

Sam Carling

I am trying to get at the levers Ministers have available to them to implement priorities more generally, and whether that is one of the avenues by which there is institutional resistance. As a Committee we have found significant accountability problems with some arm’s length bodies that we have looked at, going back to that again. There was the inquiry into the ONS, of course, which hopefully is now on the right track but took a while, and more recently the Charity Commission as well. I am just trying to get at how we deal with the accountability problem there in terms of being able to deliver ministerial priorities?

Darren Jones

It is the right question. If I was still being a Minister, the way I would hold an arm’s length body to account is I would have to physically bring it in and tell it I wanted something to happen and then say, “I am going to see you in two weeks.” The trouble with that is there are only so many days in the week; you cannot do that for everything. The drive to want to reintegrate arm’s length bodies into the Department so that you are attached to the civil service performance management framework and have direct lines into Ministers is the right answer. There has obviously been a tendency to create arm’s length bodies for lots of things. I believe the view is right when people say that you should not create them unless it is absolutely essential, and that there are more that could be integrated.

Chair

Should they all have the ability to take ministerial direction?

Darren Jones

Yes, although I am trying to think of an example. I suppose the OBR, for example, would not necessarily agree with what the Chancellor of the day was saying to it.

Chair

The OBR and the statistics authority exempted.

Darren Jones

Yes.

Chair

But Natural England, the Environment Agency, Homes England, Highways England?

Darren Jones

Yes, you are right, there are clearly some where you would want the independent check and balance, although even those can sometimes be infuriating; best not to get me started on those ones either. That might be the exception as opposed to the norm.

Peter Lamb

I turn back to the general issue on accountability. Thinking about structures, where I have seen things go very badly wrong has tended to be where the people who are ultimately held account for a decision are not the same people who are involved in making that decision or seeing it through, which very much seems to be the current arrangement with Ministers, civil servants and policies. One thing that would, of course, empower Ministers would be if they were to have more direct control. We have talked about that briefly on instructing people but ultimately, when someone fails, the powers around hiring or firing, pay and progression lay with the civil service. My question is, where do you feel that should end? Particularly, where you have Ministers potentially only being around for a short bit of time, how do we ensure that in that window they still have the ability to leave a mark on someone’s career path if they fail to deliver?

Darren Jones

It is a tricky question; I buy the argument that you have to be careful not to politicise the civil service and, at senior levels of the civil service, it is actually quite political so I should use my definitions carefully. If Ministers can just say, “I’m firing all of you and I’m bringing in my own people,” I am not sure that is a system that I would support in this country. If Ministers set out their political priorities for which they have a democratic mandate and there is clear accountability for the civil service for delivering it, if they are not good enough they either need to go somewhere else or get more training or leave. I am not sure anybody really leaves the civil service ever for performance reasons. I once asked how many people had been fired for performance issues and was told it was one person. Maybe everybody is doing a brilliant job, but just in any organisation that percentage does not feel quite right. I would still fall into the much stronger lines of accountability, including to Parliament, as opposed to politicians having the right to just fire or hire officials at a whim; that would be the wrong direction.

Peter Lamb

Accountability means coming in and answering questions, it does not mean there is an actual end consequence. What negative impact is there for failure to deliver as a civil servant?

Darren Jones

Very little, at the moment; I once referred to it as the sideways shuffle. If someone is deemed to not be very good they just get found a job somewhere else in the civil service. If that is a more appropriate job for them in their skill set, then that is totally fine. Actually it seemed to me that often you were just moving people around and no one ever leaves. In theory you want accountability through the civil service, but also ultimate accountability in the Cabinet Secretary and the permanent secretary group. If your senior leaders are on the hook to Parliament for their performance they will drive a culture of incentives, but also of accountability through the system. If they are not on the hook because they say, “Oh well, the Minister’s responsible and he’s going to be off in a bit anyway,” there is no incentive to drive because you do not have any skin in the game. That is why you need performance management much more widely through the civil service, but for the Permanent Secretaries and the Cabinet Secretary in particular, much stronger accountability in Parliament.

Peter Lamb

It still requires some consequence. In this case, is it reputational damage by virtue of being made to look silly in front of Parliament?

Darren Jones

It is ultimately for Ministers. It will be for the Prime Minister to say whether he or she has confidence in the Cabinet Secretary of the day and for Secretaries of State and their permanent secretaries. One of the things I had to change is that where Departments had KPIs, the Secretary of State had not been involved in setting them, which I thought was odd. There were lots of KPIs about good financial management and running the Department well and those types of things, which was totally fine, but they did not have the political priorities of the Secretary of State in their KPIs. I have changed that now. Interestingly, the way that was implemented was that we had to tell the Cabinet Secretary what our political priorities were, and the Cabinet Secretary then dealt with the KPI setting for the permanent secretaries. It was still slightly distanced from the Ministers. So you are right, once you have set out what the priorities are and how you are going to measure them, there ought to be incentives for doing a good job. I am totally fine with using the bonus pot that we have for rewarding and promoting people who show effective delivery and giving them more responsibility. You are right, there also need to be consequences for poor performance, but linked to that a proper system that supports people, such as you would expect in any workplace. If someone is not able to do the job very well you do not immediately fire them, you try to figure out why and give them training or support. If that still does not work tell them, “Well look, I am sorry, this role is not for you.” That just does not exist in the civil service right now.

Peter Lamb

It is interesting that in local government, failure to undertake the direct instruction of council could constitute gross misconduct, which would be immediate dismissal. We have noticed that local government in general seems to be a bit better at delivery than central Government do these days. Moving on, we briefly touched on questions around Treasury. One question that came up from one of your predecessors when he was at this Committee, Lord Maud, and was discussed by various different groups of people at the time, was that he previously talked about splitting the Treasury as a means of having a body that is capable of doing the economic end of things but does not necessarily have control over what Departments do in quite the same way. His proposal was you would actually move the payroll financing Department side out of the Treasury and put it somewhere else. What are your views on Treasury influences across the wider civil service?

Darren Jones

The Treasury gets quite a lot of flak, and a lot of the time it is probably not fair. The Treasury could operate differently in Government, as I said earlier; more like a finance department than a bank. It could use the levers it has more effectively on holding Departments to account for their own performance, but that should be integrated with No. 10 and the Cabinet Office, which currently it is not, very effectively. Should the Treasury be split? I tend to say no. I can see an argument for moving the public spending teams together with the Cabinet Office teams on delivery and performance so that you are looking at money as well as outcomes and outputs. As a former Chief Secretary to the Treasury I worry about that, though. There is always a demand for more spending across Government. Prime Ministers and No. 10 staff would often quite like it if there was just more money to solve a problem. The Treasury gets flak because it is the only Department that has to say no to everybody, but that role is really important. That is why I tend to land on not agreeing with splitting the Treasury. If you put public spending control outside of the Treasury you might just start to see, “Oh okay, well we can re-profile this, or we can find you a bit more money here or there.” That might happen a bit more, and the way the Treasury works in controlling public spending is a really important way for the system to work.

Peter Lamb

Sometimes the objections are less about the overall amount of money and more about the processes involved. For instance, Departments that are able to make significant savings or wish to re-prioritise money that has already been allocated to them—I accept that some movements have already been made to approve this—would benefit from having greater control over the money that was already allocated to them as to what they do with it.

Darren Jones

Yes, that is right. We did something called Project Reset, which I started at the Treasury and completed when I was at the Cabinet Office, which was trying to take out unnecessary approval points. I was amazed when I was at the Treasury how many committees you needed to get through to get approval to spend money. To take the health example, you might have a hospital, an integrated care board, NHS England, the Department for Health, then the Treasury and the Cabinet Office and, if it was politically important enough, No. 10. They would often have to keep going through this process time after time. It is no wonder nothing happens. In Project Reset we basically went through the stack of approvals and said, “Well, which ones can we take out and give Departments more authority for their own decisions in return for more accountability for what was happening?” That has been and is being implemented, and we have seen much more efficient delivery as a consequence of it, where months and months have been saved in the process. The bit that has not quite flown through yet is the extra accountability that I would want in return for the extra delegation, and that goes back to the integrated finance system point that I was making earlier.

Peter Lamb

Turning back to missions, do you feel some of the success is around how they are developed? It feels as though a lot of the missions that were developed for this Government came out of a process that was in part about trying to win an election, naturally, and what the Labour party thought the biggest issues in defining the subsequent election may well end up being if they could deliver on them. That might not necessarily be the best approach for getting buy-in from civil servants, whereas some of the things that we look at, such as the moonshot and covid, you could very easily see civil servant buy-in to those processes. Do you feel that a clearer process of involving the whole system in developing those priorities would deliver a better outcome?

Darren Jones

Maybe; I was not really involved in setting them up so I cannot speak with much authority. If you can get Pat McFadden to come, for example, I am sure he would have views, having started that whole process as CDL in the first year. You are right, they were a political construct of prioritisation. Some were not really cross-Departmental: health just needs to get on with the elective waiting list in health; there is a little cross-Departmental working on planning and financing on the clean power mission, but really DESNZ just needs to get on with it; the Home Office really just needs to get on with getting more police officers in the community. Where the mission structures worked quite well was on things such as violence against women and girls, which really was a cross-Departmental problem and you needed different Ministers who were brought into the same mission as a team to really push stuff through Government. It was still hard in many ways, but in those instances that kind of mission structure worked quite well. In many ways the missions continue, they are just called different things. Andy Burnham’s team have set up taskforces on some of their priorities; we obviously have Cabinet subcommittees, although I do not know whether they have changed actually, I have not looked, but it is basically just a vehicle for getting people to work together across Government on the priorities of the day.

Peter Lamb

It was very much billed as being the way in which the whole of Government would operate post-election. Was that the wrong approach, to view it as a totality thing, as opposed to a tool that is available to try to resolve key areas of a problem?

Darren Jones

I do not think it was wrong, necessarily. As I say, it was a way of saying, “These are our five priorities, and that is what we are going to put our energy behind delivering,” which was then reflected in the spending review process, and ultimately what Departments are being asked to do. The challenge with missions coming into Government after an election is that in theory they are constant, but we all know from being in Government that things change and move a lot. Your priorities or your key deliverables might change within and between elections, and so you probably ought to be careful to not exclude responding to other things by just being so resolutely focused on the priorities that you set at election time.

Peter Lamb

Is that where the plan for change came in? Of course you already had your five missions, and then an additional list of things—that interacted with those missions somewhat—was brought in as short-term targets.

Darren Jones

Again, I was only involved in the plan for change in terms of what it meant fiscally, but my understanding of it was that it was trying to translate the political missions into an operational plan for Whitehall. Again, I am fine with that, so long as they are embedded in clear KPIs and performance-related pay and accountability from the system.

Markus Campbell-Savours

Just to scoop up some of the things that I am not sure if we have covered in much detail; how were the mission boards themselves constituted? Could you take me through the life cycle of one of these mission boards? How frequently did it meet, and who decided who sat on it, for example?

Darren Jones

They were set up from No. 10 and the Cabinet Office, and Pat McFadden, the CDL, was the lead Minister and sat as deputy chair on each of them. The chair, of course, being the lead Department for the mission. The Cabinet Office then hosted the secretariat function to drive the work that those mission boards decided to take forward. I do not know how often they met; I do not know whether the Government have published any information about that.

Markus Campbell-Savours

What was the role of the Secretary of State for the relevant Departments that the mission covered?

Darren Jones

When Yvette Cooper was Home Secretary for example, she would chair the mission board and Pat, as CDL, would be the deputy chair. Then the committee would have Secretaries or Ministers of State from other Departments who had to sign up to the plan for delivering against the objective.

Markus Campbell-Savours

It would meet at the point where the budgets were being distributed. Did it meet again at periods after that?

Darren Jones

Yes, they definitely met around the spending process, so they would meet quite frequently in the first year. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I was not a standing member of them, for which I am partly grateful.

Markus Campbell-Savours

Did you have any influence over their operation or who sat on them?

Darren Jones

No, I did not when I was at the Treasury. It would have been a time challenge for me to be able to go to all five of them all the time, so that is why I say I was grateful to not be asked. I wanted to make sure that the spending process was mission-led as that was the direction we had from the Prime Minister. That is why I asked them to meet specifically around their bid into the spending review. That drove some good work; it got them to think on a cross-Departmental basis: what does each Department have to contribute to deliver this outcome, how would we measure that, and what do we think the cost of that is? There was some hope that the mission boards would just get extra money on top of the money the Departments also wanted. Obviously there is only so much money to go around, so that is why it did not quite work in that way.

Markus Campbell-Savours

Did it just meet at the point where the money was being distributed and that decision was being made? Did the mission boards not see the mission through?

Darren Jones

No, they met frequently, but they had additional meetings to think about their bid into the spending process.

Markus Campbell-Savours

You have described how, once the money made its way into the Departments, the mission itself maybe became less of the motivator, but many of the missions you have described were Department-specific. I appreciate you did not want to mention any names earlier on and point blame at anybody, but were there any Departments that were particularly good at the mission approach? Any that you think were worthy of acknowledging that the culture of a Department maybe got on board with the mission approach?

Darren Jones

I do not know is the answer; that is not because I am trying to dodge the question, but certainly from my perspective they all just seemed to operate as you would expect them to operate. Culturally, for it to be optimal you needed a team approach. If you were in a scenario where the lead Department that chaired the board used it as a mechanism for wagging its finger at other Departments and telling them, “You need to do what I want you to do,” that culturally leads to a low performance atmosphere. What you really want from them, and this is the same for other forms whether they are taskforces or otherwise, is a shared sense of purpose and collective responsibility, as opposed to another hierarchy.

Markus Campbell-Savours

I remember reading the stories about the fights during the Blair and Brown years between No. 10 and the Treasury. Some people will just view this as another story in that history of Departments fighting with each other over power: the recreation of a delivery unit, the centralisation of power around the Cabinet Office and No. 10. Some may even have viewed this as the undermining of individual Departments. How would you respond to anybody who pushed that charge at you?

Darren Jones

I do not recognise that at all. Departments have a million things that they also need to get on with every day. There is lots of business-as-usual operational work that they need to get on with. The structure in the centre should only really be focused on the kind of top-tier political priorities of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet of the day. Departments need to be allowed to get on with doing the rest of their business-as-usual job without the centre trying to run the Departments for them. You just would not have the capacity to do that. That is why prioritisation is so important, both in the centre but also for the Departments to know that these are the four or five things that they are going to be held to account for.

Markus Campbell-Savours

Is that easy to reconcile? Is this not one of the criticisms of the old No. 10 Delivery Unit model? People wrote books about centralisation, that KPI model. There is one called “The Whitehall Effect” by John Seddon, which is quite critical of that approach; that it does not necessarily deliver the outputs. Is that easy to reconcile?

Darren Jones

I would ask the author what the alternative is. I am not wedded to it at the exclusion of all other ideas, but the centre needs to know whether the political priorities of the Cabinet are being delivered or not. You cannot just send a letter to a permanent secretary and Secretary of State and come back in five years and hope for the best. The system of incentives and accountability around prioritised KPIs feels to me to be a sensible thing to do. If there are better options, I am all ears, really.

Markus Campbell-Savours

It is interesting that the work you have done is now developing further with the strengthening of the No. 10 operation and the creation of No. 10 North as well. Thinking about how we reconcile missions for central Government, how do you think it sits with the new plans for devolution, where we are actually trying to push some of this decision making to regional Government, even if some of the objectives sound as if they are national. Do you think that is compatible with the approach that was taken through mission government?

Darren Jones

It can be compatible; you just need to be clear about what it is you are asking a combined authority to deliver. My two observations on that are I do not really mind whether the decision is taken in Whitehall or in a combined authority, so long as it is a good decision. If you have bad decisions being taken, in the centre or elsewhere, they are still bad decisions. I want to be assured that the policy analysis and effective delivery is being done in a combined authority. Then there is a question for combined authorities about what skillset workforce capabilities they have. I am totally fine with the idea of devolution.

Markus Campbell-Savours

If you delegate them, those bad decisions are their bad decisions, they are not the centre’s.

Darren Jones

Yes, but that is not good enough, really. They are still bad decisions.

Markus Campbell-Savours

It is not devolution, is it?

Darren Jones

It depends on how you set the question. What I mean by a bad decision is, for example, are you spending a lot of money and not achieving any real outcomes for people? What the Government mean by devolution—I think— is, “We will give you more authority to deliver your local transport projects.” I am not sure if where you decide to put your train stations in your city region is what is meant by a good or a bad decision. It is totally fine that that is decided locally, but I do not want mini HS2s in lots of combined authorities across the country; that is a poor performance around delivery and accountability. To go to my point on accountability for combined authorities, I question whether the current accountability of the mayors is sufficient if we are going to give them much more money and power. They are currently held to account by the local authorities, and maybe that is fine, but do they have the same support and resource that committees of the House of Commons or the National Audit Office have? I do not think so. Then, what role is there for Parliament in holding mayors to account? Much like my point on the Cabinet Secretary and senior civil servants, if we are going to put much more public money and decision-making authority into mayors, the question that Parliament and the Government need to answer is, how do you have sufficient accountability around that?

Markus Campbell-Savours

Are you saying not just accountability to No. 10, but accountability to Members of Parliament as well?

Darren Jones

Yes, absolutely.

John Lamont

Good morning, Darren. I appreciate your honesty and candour this morning. You paint a very bleak picture of how the civil service works and how powerless we are, perhaps. I was smiling when you talked earlier about when you were sometimes asked to do things you were told were against the constitution. I remember my time as a Minister asking to do something and the official telling me it was against the law for me to try to do what I was going to do. I asked them to tell me which bit of the law I was going to be breaching, they went away and came back and they could not actually tell me which bit of the law I was going to be breaking. It shows the sort of culture that is there to push back whenever anything outside the ordinary was being suggested. One of my biggest frustrations was coming across fellow Ministers who were just too accepting of what officials said. I know we discussed earlier about whether the way you rectify that is by providing better training, but surely it is actually about making sure the people who are appointed in the first place have the skills. I know from my previous work life, people who did not have the skills did not get promoted and were not given the job. Surely the job of the Prime Minister or the Chief Whip, whoever it is and whatever party that is making these appointments, need to make sure in the first instance that the Minister actually has the skill set, albeit with some training, to ensure Government are delivering?

Darren Jones

I agree. If all the political parties and maybe Parliament can come to some consensus about what support, training, insight and mentorship we provide to Members of Parliament, that can only be a good thing. We have brilliant universities and think tanks, and lots of people who have been in Government and experienced these things. At the moment, none of that is really channelled to help the next generation of political leaders. Surely there is an answer there that we can come up with that is better than what we have now?

John Lamont

Going back to the mission-led Government in particular, the Government appointed 27 Labour MPs as mission champions. Can you explain what their role was supposed to be, and is that continuing, or has that been stopped?

Darren Jones

No, that has stopped. Mission champions were a function of the parliamentary Labour party, I think, as opposed to Government, and essentially their job was to, similar to a PPS, be a voice within the PLP on that particular policy area for Members of Parliament who were interested and wanted to engage with what was happening.

John Lamont

Was it more, as you say, a PPS type role, the link between the mission board and the parliamentary party, as opposed to anything more formal than that?

Darren Jones

As I understand it, yes.

John Lamont

With No. 10 North being established, how is that going to fit in with ensuring the civil service is moving in the same direction and delivering Government objectives? Is it going to help, hinder, or just dilute the whole accountability even further?

Darren Jones

I do not know. No. 10 North, as I understand it, is its own business unit within the Cabinet Office. No. 10 is obviously its own business unit, No. 10 North is its own business unit, and then you have the wider Cabinet Office around it. I would be interested to see how the Government continue to roll out the creation of the Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. I want it to be more than just a name change; how are you integrating those teams so that you have political appointees and civil servants, whether they are in No. 10 Downing Street, Manchester, 70 Whitehall or elsewhere, all focused around delivering the same set of objectives? If that results in a more integrated team serving the Prime Minister and Cabinet, then that is a great thing.

Chair

I have two quick questions—whether they will be quick answers, I do not know. What is your assessment of the test, learn, and grow initiative?

Darren Jones

As a set of pilots they were doing some important work. The next question is, how is that evidence integrated into the mainstream delivery of services in Departments? That is a question for the current Government to answer.

Chair

In terms of the underpinning ethos of them, which is do not be risk averse and learn from failure, do you think that still has a useful role to play in delivering change?

Darren Jones

Yes. Innovative approaches to delivering public services differently, with a very customer-centric view, is the way in which we should be building public services in the future.

Chair

Drawing on your Treasury and Cabinet Office experience, I just wondered what your assessment, evaluation, might be on the future of outsourcing. In relatively recent memory we obviously had the collapse of Carillion. We have Capita failing lamentably, vis-à-vis civil service and other agents. If we look back, the underpinning principle was that suddenly a very dynamic marketplace of lots of people trying to compete for a share of the government cake would be created. That has not happened; we have a concentration of a few large players. Where do you think it goes? Are we on the cusp of a dramatic insourcing agenda?

Darren Jones

I would distinguish between core services and where it is useful to bring in the private sector as a partner. By core services I mean such things as running a pension scheme, or front-of-house staff, where we made a commitment in our final few weeks in Government to bring our front-of-house staff back in-house as part of the Cabinet Office. The national school of government was the largest insourcing announcement that the Government made in the last two years, where outsourced contracts were not delivering the type of outcomes we really wanted. For those functions I am a supporter of insourcing them as you get better outcomes for your money. I would distinguish that though in relation to technology adoption in the civil service, for example. The Government digital service is excellent and has led really well, but Government really do need a better approach to digital transformation because at the moment it is incremental. We can only really do that if we continue to reform our procurement rules to make it easier for particularly British technology companies to help us deliver better public services for the public. I do not think it is an end to outsourcing in the context of working in partnership with the private sector, but for core services the idea that the market is providing better options than actually just treating our people better has been shown to not be the case.

Chair

In answer to a number of questions you have mentioned time pressures, really: the ability to draw breath, think and reflect. I am sure it is something we will return to when the First Secretary of State appears before us, and indeed the Cabinet Secretary, but just fill in a little gap in certainly my knowledge, colleagues are probably much better briefed than I am on this. Let us say, for example, meteorologists are currently predicting a very significant El Niño, both wintertime and summer. That is going to present challenges in terms of food security, energy security, transport resilience, operation of the health service, kids sitting exams in schools in extreme heat, care for the elderly and so on and so forth. What, if any, processes exist within the Cabinet Office to say, “Look, this is looming, how can we be proactive rather than just react to events?” How can we better prepare our resilience, our staffing, and so on? Or is it a case of it is happening, and when it is happening, how do we respond?

Darren Jones

On these issues, the COBRA team and the National Security team really are very excellent. In all my experience with those two teams, they have always been ahead of the curve, and they have always been extremely helpful in helping Ministers to understand the risk and what you might do about it. COBRA and the National Security team are obviously in the Cabinet office, and you can use COBRA meetings or other Cabinet meeting formats to bring the right people together to look at the projection. I would be teased a bit for giving Cabinet weather updates when I was CDL, but it was really important because for example in the extreme heat this summer, thousands of people died who would not have died had it not been for the heat. We saw the impact on economic infrastructure and public services. I actually feel that that part of the system is really strong and very competent, and it is therefore more about what Government do in response to the information that they are being provided with.

Chair

Thank you very much, Darren. Thank you for availing yourself of the opportunity to come and talk to us. You have provided us with a lot of food for thought, and we are very grateful to you for finding the time so to do. Thank you.