Why are "missions" proving so difficult?

We have a guest post today from James Plunkett. He has worked in a range of roles in and around the UK government, from Number 10 and the Cabinet Office, to leadership roles at the Resolution Foundation, Citizens Advice, and Nesta. Before that, he was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. His first book “End State”, published in 2021, is excellent, and I’ve recommended it before. He is currently working on a second book and advising organisations in the public sector on the adoption of more contemporary ways of working.

This post shares insights from research James has been leading for his former colleagues at Nesta. The research will be published in coming weeks, describing what good mission working looks like; lessons from previous government reform initiatives; and tools for mission-driven working. James also recently co-authored a maturity framework for missions, developed with Georgetown Better Government Lab and Nesta.

---

A year ago today, when Labour won the general election, they promised to deliver five missions. Some rolled their eyes at the language, sensing another political neologism, but few disagreed with the idea of making government more focused and long‑term. They just didn’t believe this government would be any different.

Unlike many political soundbites, however, missions have a strong academic heritage, drawing on years of work from Mariana Mazzucato and others. They gained support as a way for governments to be less agnostic about the direction of economic growth and its social implications, most obviously on issues like climate change, while still avoiding old-school statism. The idea is to pursue big goals not with top-down planning but with what Mazzucato calls ‘orchestration’, using the power of the state to drive innovation and shape markets to an outcome.

For these reasons, missions have proven increasingly popular with governments. They have been used by administrations from the EU to South Korea and Finland, and even in Britain under Theresa May, although she didn’t have time to make them stick.

Despite these good intentions and heritage, however, missions are proving difficult. Some say the UK government is “mission-washing” - using the word, but not really adopting the ways of working. And although missions were mentioned in the spending review, their role was notably muted when compared with the central position they had in Labour’s manifesto.

Still, it would seem a shame to let missions falter without interrogating the reasons. So why are missions so difficult? And what, if anything, could be done to strengthen them as Labour moves into year two? I’ll touch on four characteristics of missions that jar with Whitehall’s natural instincts, and in each case I'll ask how it’s going, and how Labour could be bolder.

1. Joining up vs. silos

The first distinctive quality of missions is that they try to join up action across departmental silos, and even across economic sectors.

Mazzucato and others argue that missions work best when they achieve a multiplier effect - simultaneous efforts across departments and sectors magnify each other, tipping the system into progress. The idea isn’t just that this is more effective, but that it’s the only way to make progress on challenges like growth or climate change, where the economy needs to be shocked out of a sticky equilibrium.

At first, Labour seemed to share this vision. The five missions were presented as goals for the whole of government, not just for one department. An early innovation—creating cross‑cutting Mission Boards—was intended to follow through on this. The idea was to elevate missions above departments, allowing for coordinated action.

It wasn’t long before missions snapped back to the lines of departments. Each mission is owned by a lead department: Net Zero sits in DECC, growth in HMT, opportunity in DfE, health in DHSC, and crime in the Home Office. The variously-named Mission Directors sit in the lead department, as does almost all of the relevant delivery capacity and budget. And while there are cross‑cutting structures—a central Mission Delivery Unit, supporting the Mission Boards—these act more as coordinating mechanisms than as pooled resources. Mission Boards act essentially as Cabinet committees, triangulating departmental views. There are certainly examples of collaboration - child poverty is one, bringing together DWP and DfE - but missions are not quite the shared endeavour that was intended.

How could Labour be bolder? The root issue is that the bones of Whitehall are departments, so the body moves to this structure. Spending reviews and budgets run on departmental submissions which are negotiated bilaterally with HMT; ministers are accountable to Parliament for their departments. Whitehall culture also runs to departmental lines - think of Whitehall buildings with name plaques, which forge the identity of civil servants. Ministers and senior officials looking to build reputations are naturally territorial, not wanting others to claim their successes or budgets.

This leaves missions caught in the same trap as previous cross-cutting initiatives: a world of favours and exceptions. In the run up to the spending review, for example, although Ministers came together to talk about missions, the process itself ran to departmental lines. There were examples of mission lead departments asking other departments if they would seek budget for initiatives to support the mission, and struggling.

What could Labour learn from previous efforts to join up government? Over the years, many attempts have been made to combat Whitehall silos, with some success. One example was the PM Delivery Unit's shared targets in the 2000s; another was the brief emphasis on Outcome Delivery Plans under Boris Johnson. Perhaps the most effective, however, made deeper changes to Whitehall structures. This happened when a shared, co‑located team was setup around a social problem or outcome, with a pooled budget. An often-quoted success was the Social Exclusion Unit.

In theory, the same could be done for missions: establish a core team of 50-100 civil servants seconded to each mission to drive critical initiatives, and pool money for the highest priority initiatives into a Mission Budget. There could even be accompanying accountability mechanisms at the level of the Mission; think of something similar to the regular, outcome-based Covid-era press conferences, reporting on the mission's critical outcome measures. Short of changes like these, mission teams could at minimum ape these ways of working - co-locating, convening regularly as a single team to discuss progress towards the mission outcome. Missions will have the best chance of success if, through a mix of structures, incentives and team rituals, the mission can be made more salient than the department.

2. Short-term vs. long‑term

A second key quality of Missions is ambition. The most famous missions—the moon landings, the “war on cancer,” the UN Development Goals—were set to be 'almost impossible'.

Ambition is not just about sounding good; it serves a function. An inspiring target draws people's attention away from short-term pressures. The inspiring nature of missions is also a way for government to justify trade‑offs—we make tough choices now on planning, or investment in renewables, because the growth or net zero missions will be worth it.

Have the government’s missions been ambitious and long-term? The clearest success is probably Net Zero, although this may be more down to a combination of an experienced ministerial team and a range of pre‑existing mechanisms, from the legally binding 2050 target to the carbon budgets that track the implications of nearer-term policy commitments.

On growth, you could likewise argue that the government is doing a decent job of taking short‑term pain for long‑term gain - for example, by putting limited available money for investment into infrastructure, although the fiscal position leaves less space than desired, and there are global headwinds. Growth would have been a priority regardless, but perhaps the framing and architecture of the growth mission has helped the Treasury team establish its agenda more quickly, and provided a narrative to justify difficult choices.

The toughest test for long‑termism was always going to be the health mission, which presents more binding trade‑offs. Health faces the classic catch‑22: we need to spend more on prevention, but the money can only come from budgets for acute services, which, in the short-term at least, would hinder efforts to reduce GP and hospital waiting lists.

Again, there are promising signs. This week we saw the 10 Year Health Plan, with a push to set up neighbourhood health centres integrating smoking cessation, weight management, and even employment support, and the government is grasping the nettle on obesity with bold steps to drive healthier eating through supermarkets. Still, if missions are to prove their worth, the test will come on spending decisions. Can the health mission create the incentive and political cover that is needed to invest meaningfully in prevention?

3. Inputs vs. outcomes and iteration

A third distinctive quality of missions is that they focus on outcomes while being open about how those outcomes will be achieved. This is core to the whole delivery philosophy of missions. Remember Kennedy’s famous pledge: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” You embark on a mission in order to work out how to achieve it.

The emphasis on outcomes, over inputs, means much of the craft of missions is about creating a learning environment. A good mission acts as a discovery mechanism, using a mix of clear outcomes, aligned funding, and rolling experiments.

By instinct, Whitehall finds iterative working difficult. People have long complained about how the Whitehall business‑case process, for example, requires teams to specify their final deliverables upfront, rather than learning by doing, as has long been standard in digital work.

Politicians also find not knowing difficult. Ministers feel intense pressure to announce answers to social problems, and civil servants are in turn pushed to present them with answers to choose from. This encourages a politics of announcements—a pledge of more teachers, or a new programme, or at best a pilot. And it means the whole delivery system spends much of its time delivering previous announcements; indeed many Whitehall teams are structured around and named after such deliverables.

To be serious about missions would mean focusing more on outcomes, and creating space to learn. Part of the challenge is that Labour has always treated missions as both a political device for campaigning and a way of delivering (something Sam flagged as a major issue when they were first announced). As soon as missions became a campaign tool they required input pledges—more teachers, more doctors. This has muddied missions as a delivery approach; each mission combines input pledges that must be delivered regardless, and outcomes that are genuinely mission‑like.

In truth, no government can separate policy from politics. But still there might be value in a clearer distinction - using more traditional methods to deliver simple commitments, and building truly outcome-based teams for the more challenging aspects of missions, from preventative healthcare to school readiness. These teams can apply the outcome-based delivery model that has been used successullly elsewhere in Whitehall, as described in The Radical How, a report by Public Digital commissioned by Nesta. Indeed, one of the most promising aspects of Labour’s missions is the work happening in the Cabinet Office Test, Learn and Grow programme, which takes exactly this approach. It is supporting mixed‑discipline teams to work iteratively in local areas on mission outcomes. Beyond this, missions could make more use of innovation mechanisms - challenge prizes, sandboxes, and so on - to foster innovation beyond the walls of government.

As ever, this would all require a more open mind from the Treasury, since outmoded business case and budget-approval processes remain one of the biggest blockers to a ‘test and learn’ way of working.

4. Top down programmes vs. national endeavours

The final distinguishing feature of missions is that they’re supposed to be national endeavours, not top‑down programmes delivered by government. This is one way missions have evolved since the 1960s and the moon landings. Contemporary missions—most obviously Net Zero—more often relate to wicked challenges. The idea is to galvanise society—entrepreneurs, big businesses, charities, communities—to achieve a complex outcome through a mass effort, or wartime spirit.

This might sound wishful, but this kind of decentralised orchestration is all-but essential in areas like the government’s Opportunity mission, where the systems involved - early years settings, or parenting environments - are highly fragmented or beyond the reach of government. The same is now true in healthcare, since so many of today’s health challenges relate to behaviours like healthy eating, or to the management of chronic conditions, where the best solutions lie in communities. Even on Net Zero, where much of the work is technocratic, the mission will fail if people feel the transition is being done to them, rather than with them, so communities matter. In all these areas, the government cannot simply legislate or intervene its way to the mission outcome. It must orchestrate behaviour change from millions of people—teachers, early‑years educators, parents, businesses.

Of all the qualities of missions, this is probably the one where Whitehall has the furthest to travel. Bureaucracies have a strong instinct to control, running initiatives like a project or programme. This is exacerbated when politicians feel under pressure, which often sees the system snap back to control and compliance mechanisms and top-down leadership styles.

To the extent that there has been public engagement on the missions so far, this has mostly stayed near the middle of Sherry Arnstein’s helpful ‘ladder of citizen participation’. Arnstein describes eight levels of civil society engagement, from the disingenuous ('manipulation'), up through more transactional and sometimes tokenistic mechanisms ('consultation'), to partnership, delegation, and ultimately community control.

So far I think it's fair to say civil society has been consulted, but has rarely been a full partner on missions. Perhaps the strongest examples come in the crime mission, where the Home Office can see that civil society is essential to move the dial on an issue like knife crime. It’s also been positive to see a big push to make government more porous, with a growing number of secondments and fellowships to work on missions, and on the wider digital agenda and the Cabinet Office’s Test, Learn & Grow initiative.

Still, to climb higher on Arnstein’s ladder, missions would need to foster a genuine sense of shared ownership over the mission outcome with communities, charities, or businesses. That would require a shift of tone—working in the open (as opposed to stopping civil servants from speaking in public), and sharing credit. It would also need new capabilities and types of institutional capacity; sharing power and investing the time it takes to galvanise people. That, in turn, would only work if engagement was authentic; people know when they are being ‘handled’, so there would need to be genuine listening, and even power-sharing.

My own view is that this investment would be worth it. It was, after all, partly this idea of missions as national endeavours that first made them attractive to Labour. Missions were seen as a chance to break away from an unsatisfyingly technocratic mode of governing, in favour of something more open, inspiring, and human. This reminds us that if missions were done well, they could still be part of the answer to the government’s wider struggles to find an inspiring vision and way of governing.

Conclusion

That might all sound a bit dispiriting, and if the question is ‘Has Labour nailed missions so far?’, you’d have to say ‘Not yet’. Really, though, that’s not a fair question, and nor would it be grounds to dismiss missions. So maybe it’s fairer to end by naming three reasons I feel hopeful.

First, missions are clearly onto something. It is abundantly clear that in areas like health, Net Zero, and growth, the preceding statecraft - a fairly laissez-faire version of New Public Management - is not up to the task. And, this time around, Labour will have no way around that via higher spending. So in a sense the choice is: be serious about missions, or fail.

Second, although missions are difficult, we do know how to do this. Missions are not a dark art; they consist of a range of mature approaches - operating models, purpose‑driven management practices, empowering leadership styles, outcome-based accountability-mechanisms, ways to pool budgets, innovation mechanisms, and so on - all of which could be adopted. The question is whether Labour has the political will and capability to drive the wider use of these approaches in the face of the inevitable inertia.

Third, we need to be fair about the scale of the challenge. It would be unrealistic to expect any new administration to enter power, and deal with everything this entails, and adopt a new form of statecraft in a year, all while facing a dire inheritance. The saving grace here is that the craft of missions is itself iterative - you try it, learn, and adapt.

The thing to look out for is whether, as the mission outcomes inevitably come to seem harder, Labour and the civil service responds by doubling down, or baulks and resorts to old-school methods. We’ll get a much better sense of that in the course of year two, and a lot rests on the answer.

This post draws lessons from three upcoming reports that will be published by Nesta, exploring the craft of mission-driven government, around the one year anniversary of Labour’s missions. You can stay in touch with this work by following Nesta on Blue Sky and LinkedIn; and you can follow James’s writing on Blue Sky, Medium, or Substack.