The pros and cons of missions

There are clear advantages to a ‘mission-led’ approach. It aims to move from a sector-based approach to a focus on solving key societal challenges that require many different sectors to invest and deliver. Quantified milestones can be used to drive the delivery of key elements of a mission.

Most fundamentally a clear and committed statement of the Government’s missions should help get united political leadership behind these objectives, and help ensure government’s time and money is directed to consistent long-term priorities.

In principle a clear mission, like the classic example of ‘putting a man on the moon’, can stimulate more ambitious coordinated delivery. For example the clean energy mission aims to drive the necessary planning permissions, and to boost local renewable energy production. Within departments, overarching targets and plans can also get staff working in a more focused and effective way.

That said, missions are great in theory, but the benefits above are only achieved if the stated missions are expected to be sustained over time and therefore worth all parties investing in for the long term. Working in government one sees new high-level targets come and go as Ministers move on – will this time really be different?

Targets should be challenging, but targets that are clearly not realistic can be demotivating. And whilst some missions give you half the benefits if you get halfway there, others don’t – for example we wouldn’t want electricity pylons crossing our countryside if they weren’t going to be carrying significant quantities of energy.

The five missions

Keir Starmer has established five missions and six associated milestones, as articulated in the ‘Plan for Change’.

·       Kickstart economic growth, with two core milestones: raising living standards in every part of the UK, and building 1.5 million homes in England and fast-tracking major planning decisions.

·       Make Britain a clean energy superpower, with a milestone of having 95% clean power by 2030.

·       An NHS fit for the future, with the milestone of 92% of elective patients waiting no more than 18 weeks.

·       Safer streets, by putting police back on the beat.

·       Break down barriers to opportunity, with the milestone of 75% of 5 year olds being ready to learn when they start school.

This collection of missions and milestones is quite diverse, in visibility, feasibility and value for money, and also in the coherence between the mission and its milestone.

The growth mission is serving its purpose as a clear rallying motivator for the government. Many announcements have been associated with the growth mission, although some have other rationales,  notably the changes to labour market regulation and tax. It is also important for decisions to be coherent where possible. The increase in the minimum wage should help encourage into work those whose welfare payments are being reduced, so these policies are complementary. However the increase in employer national insurance contributions may reduce the supply of jobs for them to take. And if reductions in regulation strengthen monopoly power, that can harm growth. Trade-offs can be tough, but growth certainly seems to be a prime factor in the Chancellor’s current thinking.

The milestone of building 1.5 million homes this Parliament has been widely seen as ambitious given low historic build rates and skill shortages. However the government has acted quickly to change planning policy, including increasing targets for local government and opening up part of the green belt for building, and has stepped in to approve high profile projects that had been blocked by local authorities.

The clean energy superpower mission and milestone is also extremely challenging, but this too is being taken forward with vigour. There was already a well-established mechanism for identifying and driving carbon reductions across departments, based on the Climate Change Committee recommendations. The new Clean Power 2030 Action Plan has boosted this by laying out a clear plan for the many changes needed to achieve the clean power goal in just six years. This, with a passionate and knowledgeable Secretary of State, has given the department a new focus to drive forward the change.

The mission to build an NHS fit for the future talks about three reform shifts: from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention. However the milestone is very different, focusing on hospital waiting times. The three reform shifts have been core government objectives for a long time – they make a lot of sense, but have proved hard to deliver. The 10 year plan should articulate how the government plans to take all this forward.  

The safer streets mission and the opportunity mission have had less profile. The safer streets mission has the milestone of putting police back on the beat. This is politically popular, and could well reduce fear of crime, but it is less clear whether this is the most cost-effective way of reducing crime.  

The mission of breaking down barriers to opportunity is a broad and logical objective. The milestone is much narrower than the overarching target – getting 75% of five-year-olds ready to learn when they start school. This is a worthy aim. £2 billion additional funding is being provided for high quality nursery places; the impact of the mission on Government’s health related services for young children is less evident.

It is usual for government departments to be asked to justify any particular project according to how it contributes to all the government’s top objectives. This set of missions, if they are interpreted very broadly, works pretty well for that purpose – growth, environment, safety, opportunity and health together span the key benefits that analysts aim to quantify, appraise and evaluate.

The economics of missions

Proponents of missions can criticise economic cost benefit analysis, saying that it is too conservative. But cost benefit analysis does need to be an essential part of understanding whether to go ahead with a mission and its component parts – the benefits to the population should be compared with the costs, just as a business would compare the financial returns to the costs it incurs. And this should include all the benefits that contribute to people’s wellbeing (essentially ‘utility’ in economics terminology).

It is though important that the cost benefit analysis is done thoughtfully to acknowledge and test the potential strategic benefits of a mission-based approach. This can use different scenarios, including a positive scenario incorporating strong synergies and momentum. Where the mission is challenging it can be helpful to look carefully at what would need to be true to achieve the objectives. And alongside these, one needs careful consideration of the risks and uncertainties around the plans.

One limitation of project cost benefit analysis is that it doesn’t allow for linkages between that project and other programmes being rolled out – you won’t get the benefit of additional police officers making more arrests unless you have sufficient capacity in the criminal justice system to deal with those arrested. Strategic missions can allow better cost benefit analysis of the elements of the mission as part of an integrated strategy.

Economics can value all the elements of the missions – though this does need to be done carefully. For example, public announcements frequently put a lot of weight on jobs created, but this often just moves a job from one industry to another, in which case one needs to compare the value of the work in the first industry to the value in the new one and there may not be much difference. Some stated benefits of the missions, like reducing the uncertainty around energy bills, require novel techniques.

It is also worth noting that some actions benefit more than one mission at the same time – for example better educated young people should improve growth as well as opportunity – so if we wanted to add up the benefits to each of the missions, we would need to take out double counting.

Evaluating the mechanisms for change 

Alongside valuing the benefits it is also critical to understand how the desired change is likely to happen, and then whether it is on track and, in due course, how far it has achieved its strategic objectives – to enable amendments whilst action is in progress and learning throughout. These are all key elements of a good evaluation framework, just as important for a high level mission as for a project.

A good starting point is a theory of change which sets out the intended objectives of the mission, the relevant policy initiatives, and the intermediate outcomes that contribute to the objectives. This can help manage any tensions when the mission and its milestones are materially different. This also provides a framework to identify metrics to measure progress, and consider what would have happened without the mission. Initial baseline data should be collected before the mission actions have started.  

The drivers of change in the missions can have complex interactions, whether considering growth or safer streets. A systems thinking approach could help by analysing how the drivers of change act together, and identifying the most important levers and constraints.

It will be valuable to understand how far the mission based approach in itself has led to a stronger drive for change. A process evaluation, examining the mechanisms through which an intervention generates outcomes, would help assess that; stakeholder feedback would again be a valuable element.

Cross-departmental working

Mission-led approaches aim to increase collaboration across government, but there are logical structural reasons why government departments can find it hard to work closely together. Each department has a clear and broad set of accountabilities, and a Secretary of State who wants to make an impact in their space. Departments are large organisations that already have many interlocuters within their subject area, and on any particular subject different departments often have differing interests that need to be reconciled.

The Government has set up ministerial Mission Boards alongside Cabinet committees, each chaired by the relevant Secretary of State, which aim to drive cross-departmental action. However the missions vary in how closely departments actually need to work together to achieve the goals of the mission.

The growth mission is essentially aiming to change government’s decision criteria to focus more on growth. Much of this involves many individual decisions across government which are not necessarily cross departmental in their nature. There have been productive discussions in the economists cross-departmental growth group, but that has been largely because it stimulated strategic analysis and got professional feedback.

In contrast, the house building milestone clearly requires cross-departmental coordination. New houses don’t just need utilities and transport links – they also need new schools and medical facilities, and can help get workers in the places they are needed to stimulate growth. Coordination mechanisms are in place within government, but it has proved hard to sustain long term strategic regional planning.

The clean power milestone is central to meeting the net zero target, as articulated in the Climate Change Committee’s cross-government plan The most critical cross-departmental element of the mission is the reforms to the spatial planning process to achieve the required infrastructure changes – these are progressing well.

The missions on health, safer streets and opportunity all involve joint working within local areas. All three focus on issues that have been a Government priority for many years, so there have been ongoing cross-departmental discussions and efforts to work jointly at local level. The missions have reallocated funding, and may provide a useful new impetus which helps drive forward coordinated change at local level – but it is hard to deliver change when finance is tight, and for some initiatives the messages thus far could feel more like exhortations to innovate rather than a coherent strategy. There is strategic thinking going on, so it is too early to take a view on this.

Cross departmental working needn’t rest on ministerial direction – cross departmental teams can work well for specific issues. The Joint Air Quality Unit is a joint DEFRA/DfT team focused on delivering the Government’s air quality objectives – this has helped get both departments aligned on policies and it represents both departments’ objectives when engaging with local authorities.

Perhaps more ambitiously, the Child Poverty Unit was a joint DfT/DWP team, with an HM Treasury director also part of its leadership team. It got decent engagement from government departments, which recognised the value of its work and pushed forward the more deliverable elements of the plan, and was seen as a helpful initiative. However achieving the child poverty targets would have required either big changes to the earnings distribution or massive public subsidies and neither was realistic.

An approach for the long run

In principle there can be significant benefits of a cross-government missions based approach: the missions provide a quantified articulation of the government’s priorities, which focuses efforts and provides accountability, and they also aim to drive cross-departmental collaboration. However these will only work if the focus on this set of missions is maintained over time, which has not generally been the case in the past.

It is really important that the potential benefits of mission-based decisions are compared with the costs, but this should be done thoughtfully, acknowledging the potential synergies of a mission-based approach. The chain of causality should also be assessed, both to understand how best to deliver change and to monitor and evaluate impact.

Unsurprisingly, this set of missions is largely focusing on objectives that have been Government priorities for many years. Many of the levers for change sit within individual departments, but there are also clear synergies, particularly for spatial planning and in the socially orientated missions.

The missions vary in their feasibility, visibility, and the progress made so far. The growth mission has been particularly evident in public rhetoric, and the energy mission and the push for new homes seem to have most clearly changed practices so far. It is too early to say how far the missions-based approach will stimulate deeper change than was achieved before.