How to Fix No. 10

Lawrence updated his last post on the Israel/Iran attacks on Saturday, you can read the full version here. He will be writing more on the issue as it develops. Today’s post is on British politics. (If you're a new subscriber you can read more about this substack here).

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There is much frustration across government with the state of the No. 10 operation. Including within the building itself. It is not providing clear direction to departments, or helping coordinate between them. This lack of clarity over policy leads to the common criticism that the government isn’t telling a coherent story about what it’s doing. Political messaging is often at odds with the reality of policy announcements. As a result Keir Starmer is struggling to gain traction with voters.

The good news is this is understood and there is a desire to improve things. Starmer’s original set up, with Sue Gray as chief of staff and a team that was far too small, didn’t work at all. Since then No. 10 has been bolstered with some Blair-era veterans, including Jonathan Powell as National Security Adviser and Liz Lloyd as Director of Policy Delivery. The policy unit has also been strengthened with new hires for health and education. A new economic adviser is being appointed.

But having more people, even talented ones, isn’t enough. They also have to be doing the right jobs, and ones that align with each other. The structure really matters, and is a perennial problem for Prime Ministers, who can never get No. 10 functioning as they want. Like many of his predecessors Starmer is now considering more radical reform of the centre.

Tony Blair’s time in government shows why structures matter so much. In the first term he had a strong and close knit team of advisers and conditions far better than now – with a growing economy and no Reform to worry about. But after four years he was immensely frustrated with his inability to make anything happen across government. Indeed many of his complaints were the same as now: the lack of an overarching public sector reform plan, seemingly endless NHS crises, and voters increasingly grumpy that promised change wasn’t happening.

In January 1999 one of Blair’s advisers, Peter Hyman, wrote a memo, listing reasons why delivery was so hard. It could easily be written today. He noted the media weren’t interested in delivery, that bureaucracies took much longer to turn around than voters realised, that the public had ever higher expectations and assumed a big majority meant things could happen quickly, plus there wasn’t enough money to go round.

“The basic problem, which is not new for prime ministers, is control. How do we drive our will down through the system, monitor progress and then achieve delivery?”

This is taken from a new book – “The Art of Delivery” – in which Michelle Clement sets out how Blair’s No. 10 was transformed in the second term to answer this question. Their solutions weren’t perfect, and aren’t entirely applicable today. To some degree structures have to be built around people and Starmer is very different from Blair. But there is still a lot to learn. In the rest of this post I’m going to look at how this Number 10 is set-up, the key lessons from that Blair second term, as well as its failings, and then at what a new approach, taking today’s context into account, could look like.