Tech employees will be seconded to work in Whitehall for year-long stints to help the UK government function “more like a startup” under plans to rewire the state.
Ministers will spend £100m on public sector reform as part of a shake-up of the workings of government to achieve Keir Starmer’s targets.
In a speech on Monday, Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of cross-government coordination, will urge Whitehall to become more like Silicon Valley and warn: “If we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve.”
McFadden will call for departments to adopt the tech industry’s “test-and-learn culture” so that the government operates “a little bit more like a startup”.
Startups and tech workers will join government for six- to-12-month “tours of duty” and work on policy areas including criminal justice and healthcare. The secondments are part of the No 10 innovation fellowship, which is entering its third round.
Frontline public service workers, such as prison governors and heads of social services, will also be seconded to work in central government.
McFadden will say: “Test it. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again. Tweak it again. And so on, and so on, for as long as you provide the service. Suddenly, the most important question isn’t: ‘How do we get this right the first time?’ It’s: ‘How do we make this better by next Friday?
“That’s the test-and-learn mindset, and I’m keen to see where we can deploy it in government. Where we can make the state a little bit more like a startup.”
McFadden will argue that prison governors and children’s services directors are the ones who “have stared the issues and the people that depend on us in the eye, seen how the system has been broken – they have taken the frustrations home with them each week. Now we want them to be part of the solution.”
The intervention comes amid concerns about Labour’s plummeting poll ratings. The prime minister made a speech last week in which he set out six targets – or “milestones” – including slashing hospital waiting lists and improving living standards.
McFadden, speaking at University College London’s East campus in Stratford, will set out plans to send “test-and-learn” teams across the country to apply a Silicon Valley mindset to key challenges.
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The scheme will start in January, with teams asked to improve the reach of family hubs in Manchester and Sheffield and reduce the cost of temporary accommodation in Liverpool and Essex. They will be given until late spring.
“We’re not going to dictate how they do that. The central point of these test-and-learns is that we set them a problem and then leave them to get on with it. They’ll be empowered to experiment and find new and innovative ways to fix problems,” McFadden will say.
Afterwards, more test-and-learn teams will be deployed in other parts of the country to work on further problems, such as getting more people into work, using the £100m fund, which will become available from April.
McFadden will also announce plans to simplify Whitehall’s “mind-bogglingly bureaucratic and off-putting” recruitment process to make it more accessible to external candidates.
