Britain is trying to run its government like a startup – here’s how it’s going

The British government has spent the past two years borrowing the tools of the private sector. This includes introducing KPIs, performance dashboards, merit pay, and embedded engineers in an attempt to make Whitehall move at something closer to startup speed.

On Wednesday (1 July), the minister behind the experiment delivered what amounted to an unusually candid progress report.

Darren Jones, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, used a keynote at the Re:State annual conference in London to set out what he had learned trying to rewire the machinery of the state, a project he described as a fight against institutional “sludge”.

Jones told the audience he was “potentially redundant in a couple of weeks” (it really is just like a startup) and had been barred from making policy announcements, framing the speech as advice to whoever inherits the job.

What he left behind is an attempt to run the British state like a tech company – with understandably mixed results so far.

The government discovers the KPI

The most revealing passages of the speech concerned things any mid-sized business would consider table stakes.

When Jones arrived at the Cabinet Office, some departments had no key performance indicators for the previous year. This meant there was no agreed way to measure whether they were performing at all.

Where KPIs did exist, many had been set not by elected Secretaries of State but by Permanent Secretaries, the civil servants nominally being measured.

“I’m still slightly amazed I have to say this out loud, that this is new for the civil service, but it is,” Jones said.

To address this, each department now carries only two or three top-tier Prime Ministerial priorities, tracked against agreed metrics on an “integrated delivery dashboard”. This includes debates over why a rating sat at amber-green rather than green.

Senior civil servants must now hold KPIs reflecting ministers’ political priorities, and the bar for cash bonuses has been raised, with fewer, larger awards for exceptional performers.

The biggest change came in May, when the government introduced performance-based pay progression across the entire Senior Civil Service for the first time – a shift Jones called one of the largest changes to senior pay in decades, and which the Cabinet Office billed as rewarding “the doers not the talkers”.

Killing the checkpoint

Jones also talked about how the government improved the approvals process, internally known as ‘checkpoints’.

Under the old model, a “commercial checkpoint” reviewed roughly 120 cases every quarter, around half of which needed sign-off from a Cabinet Office Minister.

Following Project RESET, Jones’s programme to strip out cross-departmental approval layers and raise departments’ delegated spending authority, that number has fallen to zero.

The new system simply stopped making everyone review everything, and concentrate scarce senior attention on the highest-risk, highest-value decisions.

Jones admitted he had wondered whether the civil service would simply rebuild the deleted checks inside departments, the institutional equivalent of scar tissue, but said the freedom had largely been seized, “albeit after some nudging for some departments that I will not name”.

The 0.9% club

Arguably the biggest change which captures the ‘Silicon Valley’ nature of Jones’s project was the expansion of the No10 Innovation Fellowship earlier this year.

The scheme recruits data scientists, coders and AI specialists through a selection process with a 0.9% success rate, more selective than most elite universities, drawing candidates from CERN, NASA and Y Combinator, and embedding them across 19 departments.

Jones noted that these fellows were then embedded on the frontline across 19 departments to create digital solutions tailored to how people actually work, rather than attempting to dictate set ways of digitisation from up high.

“One Fellow, Will, was previously at Harvard and founded his own start-up in California had quite a dramatic change of scene when we sent him on his arrival to HMP Wandsworth on his first mission,” Jones said.

“He was given total freedom to embed with the prison staff and, within months, built bespoke AI tools to automate parts of prison officers’ jobs, freeing up hours of their time to focus instead on what only they can do, helping to make our prisons and prison officers safe.”

“On a recent visit to the prison I was told this is the quickest technology project the Governor had ever seen in his experience of working in the Civil Service, and some of these tools have been so successful they are now being rolled out to other prisons across the country.”

Another instance saw a fellow build a single website letting parents check free childcare entitlements, estimate costs and compare local providers by distance, hours and Ofsted rating.

“This is how we need to rebuild the state,” Jones said. “Nimble technology-led experiences, with a clear understanding of the customer experience.”

Despite the success of the programme, Jones noted that the Fellowship remains “largely the exception, rather than the rule”, weighed down by the “deadweight of legacy IT”. Again much like many other startups, the idea and the pilot work – the platform it is built on does not.

A state that cannot get anyone to listen

Perhaps the most striking number of Jones’s speech had nothing to do with delivery at all but in how the government communicates with the public.

Government analysis estimates that just 2% of the public engage with government communications – a figure Jones connected to Whitehall’s sprawl of competing departmental brands, campaigns and arm’s-length bodies. “We have been losing the modern information war,” he said, on mis- and disinformation.

The response, developed with David Dinsmore, Permanent Secretary for Government Communications, is a new Government Media Unit at the centre of government.

This will act an in-house creative agency intended to produce content on the channels the public actually uses. It is, in essence, the state concluding it needs a content strategy – again something that many startups will be familiar with.

You can build a good product but it means nought if nobody knows about it and you have nobody to sell it to.

What happens if the founder leaves?

Jones’s forward agenda – a National School of Government and Public Services opening in the autumn, AI training for all civil servants, formal training for ministers, delivery units in every department, and a warning to Whitehall that “devolution must mean devolution, not duplication” – now depends on a successor carrying it.

This is somewhat predictable and not unique to Jones’s project. The Institute for Government noted in January that most ministers who set out bold visions for reforming the state have seen their efforts dissolve under political churn, and argued Jones needed reforms radical enough to outlast him.

Six months on, that observation appears to have been proven correct, and there is no guarantee that the KPIs, programmes and other changes that Jones implemented will stick around after he leaves.

Startups have a name for this too. It is called key person risk – and the British state is about to test how much of its two-year sprint survives the departure of its product manager.

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