It really makes no sense to cite Net Zero as an example of successful mission-driven government. In fact it is a perfect warning of the risks of taking giant risks in the pursuit of adopting huge goals without really thinking it through. The single-minded focus on decarbonizing the power sector has come at a painful economic cost, with cripplingly high electricity prices for household and industry largely due to the subsidies paid for generation plus a huge increase in transmission costs over the last decade. The results are gradual deindustrialization and offshored emissions. Now the government is scrambling to save what's left of power-intensive industry by offering those consumers large discounts on electricity prices, with households making up the difference.
But just as importantly, the high electricity prices actually undermine decarbonization itself. The only way you get to a somewhat decarbonized society is mass electrification. High electricity prices turn electricity into a boutique product that no one wants to use. We already see this dynamic playing out with heat pumps. Heat pumps are a fine technology that the government is forced to pay households £7500 each to install mostly because electricity prices are so high that households are generally better off sticking with gas. From 2025 to 2028 the state is in theory going to spend well over a billion on heat pump subsidies alone.
NB it could very have been different. Chinese policymakers I think realized that mass electrification if anything makes more sense as a first priority, because decarbonizing the grid is very very difficult and will take a long time, particularly in an industrialized society where you have a very large block of inelastic demand that has to be met 24/7.
The whole thing is such a disaster that it makes old-school British mission failures like Concorde and the AGR nuclear reactor series look like huge successes. Concorde at least produced a plane that flew. BA even made some modest operating profits, once all the capital costs of building the planes had been written off. The AGR reactors were built, produced electricity, eventually worked tolerably well, and indeed some are still operating today. Net Zero has just straightforwardly made Britain worse off without making even a dent in global emissions, which are the thing that actually matters for the climate. Nor is Britain even showcasing what economically viable deep decarbonization looks like: decarbonization here is both shallow and expensive.
On a separate note, I think the assumptions here about healthcare are somewhat lazy. It is not obviously true that the UK needs to spend more prevention or that today's biggest healthcare challenges relate to diet or chronic conditions. A&E waiting times are quite plausibly the single biggest cause of avoidable mortality out there (https://policyskeptic.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-waits-might-be-biggest-cause-of.html), and we have known for many many years that A&E performance is largely uncorrelated with A&E demand, although NHSE management has for years stuck its collective head in the sand and tried endless failed schemes aimed at reducing A&E demand rather than actually trying to improve performance.
tl;dr you can't do mission government without a real analytic function in government that actually picks apart the problems you're trying to solve. Instead governments very often act as though ends and means have already been decided and so all the subsequent analysis they do get is completely warped by this. I've been to a few Electricity System Operator stakeholder events and they are fairly upfront about the consequences of the state's chosen policy pathway, but just regard it as something unavoidable that they have to deal with.
Net Zero is, I agree, a poor example of a successful mission. The root problem lies in the way the goal was defined—focusing narrowly on achieving Net Zero emissions, while disregarding the essential technological, financial, and social enablers needed to make it viable. Since the UK and EU declared Net Zero targets, I’ve often wondered how such capable bureaucracies allowed themselves to be locked into such a rigid and one-dimensional framework.
By contrast, the Chinese approach has been far more pragmatic. They recognize that while Net Zero is an important aspiration, it must be pursued within the constraints of existing technology and economic realities. Rapidly scaling up the transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs)—even if the electricity is not yet fully green—offers a faster, more affordable, and more scalable pathway. This approach delivers tangible environmental benefits far more quickly than relying on artificially inflated electricity prices in the hope of triggering “market-driven” decarbonization.
What’s particularly clever about the Chinese strategy is that it keeps electricity prices low through continued use of coal and other fossil fuels, while simultaneously investing heavily in renewables like solar. It’s a dual-track approach: pragmatic in the short term, strategic in the long term.
Ironically, Europe once knew how to pursue such mission-driven transformation. Projects like the rollout of TGV in France or the expansion of nuclear power in the 1960s–80s weren’t market-driven—they were state-led strategic missions, designed to achieve long-term national objectives. Unfortunately, we’ve since forgotten how we used to succeed.
100% agree with all of this. I actually think the problem is a kind of bizarro market fundamentalism that exists within British institutions, and especially the Treasury. I don't want to point the finger just at Tim Leunig, because I'm sure there are many other more influential culprits, but I do think his worldview is an extremely good example of the phenomenon.
The dogma basically goes something like this: "so long as some market mechanisms are at work somewhere, we can do whatever we like and the market will find a way around the constraints we've imposed as firms innovate in a context we control, so actually the policy will work out to be costless (at least in the long run)". So we can jack up electricity prices as much we like in the pursuit of Net Zero and compensatory technological innovation somewhere will bail us out, we can impose ZEV sales mandates on car manufacturers with no downsides, we can endlessly ramp up auto safety requirements or impose aggressive sin taxes everywhere, etc etc".
The problems are obvious: markets are not magical tools for working around the laws of physics, and fairly often you just wind up poorer, particularly when the option exists for affected firms to just move their operations abroad. The cumulative effect is generally a growth in consumer costs, which apart from anything else makes people very grumpy and may well limit your ability to generate revenue more directly. Fuel duty is an excellent example. Why have successive governments proven unable to raise this tax at least in with inflation? I fairly strongly suggest that a big part of the problem is the overall rise in the total cost of car ownership: apart from fuel, every other aspect of car ownership is now a lot pricier than it used to be (maintenance, insurance, the costs of cars themselves, and now of course financing costs with higher interest rates). At least some of this is down to global regulatory burden creep.
tl;dr markets are many things but they are also information discovery mechanisms about preferences and possibilities, and it is rarely free just for governments to impose policy costs on firms, either via higher regulatory burdens or more expensive basic inputs like energy.
A Mission based approach requires people from different departments to work together to achieve outcomes to solve issues that run across many different disciplines; i.e. it is totally antithetical to the way the UK Civil Service currently operates. It would requires forceful and insightful leadership from the top of any organisation to make it work. This is why you rarely come across it other than in a war situation.
Labour's Five Missions are, so far, little more than pre-election spin. I have seen no evidence so far that Starmer really understands what levers he needs to pull to get the Service to deliver. Indeed there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he is comfortable with the current Civil Service set up. The only problem is that it wont deliver on what the Country needs.
Fine words and the best of intentions but..........! In France, despite all his generalized failings, Macron has had one mission success.....he rebuilt Notre Dame in 5 years. How did he do it when it took 200 years to build it in the first place? He put an excellent General in charge, protected him from political pressure, freed him from regulations and bureaucratic obstacles, let him hire whom he needed, used private funding.......and let him get on with it.
Stuart’s point (above) meshes with a key observation in the piece itself: that there needs to be sufficient authority (power?) invested in the person or collective charged with delivering the mission to overcome the forces of inertia and antagonism that will be encountered.
Ps A personal thank you to the Freedmans for this excellent substack and their choices when inviting guest contributions such as this one
UK security policy development and implementation has also seen to have suffered from an apparent inability to effectively coordinate and control the inputs and outputs from all of the different Depts involved. The establishment of the National Security Council in 2010 was supposed to overcome these problems and yet on issues like support for Ukraine prior to Feb 2022 there were on-going divisions between Depts on a range of issues. Co-locating all those involved, giving them a management structure that was clear (maybe one Director who served in post for at least 5 years?) and making sure they had a 10 or even 20 year planning horizon might have delivered more effective policies. Whether those policies that involved spending would meet Green Book definitions of efficiency should have been a secondary consideration. We are now told that HMT take account of "unmonetisable" benefits, for example those that result in "reducing security risks".
There is scope for change, possibly significant change, within Whitehall structures and procedures. Involving civil society in the various missions that the Govt are pursuing is something that Ministers presumably are keen to pursue. One method that hasn't been mentioned is providing limited budgetary powers to Select Committees. After all this happens in Germany and other legislatures. Would such a move be too difficult?
Thanks for this excellent article. The points you make about HMT barriers to missions (business case, department-based spending) resonate deeply (I spent c2 decades in UK Civil Service). I am cheered by your reasons to stay cheerful. Do you think HMT's recent announcement of a new approach to cross-govt financial management will help?
One thing glossed over in the post is that UK society is top to bottom a vetocracy. Because of that people don't have to engage with change (since all the Missions are fundamentally about significant change to society). If the veto ability is removed (top to bottom) then all parties will have to engage with the change rather than just resisting change.
All the ways of operating and thinking which the author says are difficult or impossible for the UK Civil Service to achieve are routine for a market. And in the case of Net Zero the government could do one thing, set a carbon price.
James, the piece nails the core problem: the UK keeps setting missions but doesn’t build the machinery to deliver them. It’s not an ambition or vision gap, it’s an institutional one.
Announcing another mission won’t solve anything unless there’s a delivery engine behind it. In product terms, you don’t just publish a roadmap and hope. Real progress comes from building dedicated teams, giving them the authority, assets, and financial tools to actually execute.
That’s why I’d argue for five “mission-specific” agencies, five pillars of national renewal: one each for infrastructure corridors, NHS estate, schools, innovation clusters, and public estate renewal. Give them statutory planning power, land, and value-capture, so delivery becomes systemic instead of a not a heroic exception.
It fits the government’s stated growth ambitions, and more to the point, it matches the PM’s disposition: plan over policy, delivery over noise.
Is there any realistic path to get this kind of institutional muscle built, or does something even more radical need to happen to finally break the cycle?
Scared kawtowing pseudo tory rabbits have no hope against weasels and wolves. Labour needs an assertive leader with real courage. Mebbe Corrie Angela could step in and save democratic socialism in disUK?
It really makes no sense to cite Net Zero as an example of successful mission-driven government. In fact it is a perfect warning of the risks of taking giant risks in the pursuit of adopting huge goals without really thinking it through. The single-minded focus on decarbonizing the power sector has come at a painful economic cost, with cripplingly high electricity prices for household and industry largely due to the subsidies paid for generation plus a huge increase in transmission costs over the last decade. The results are gradual deindustrialization and offshored emissions. Now the government is scrambling to save what's left of power-intensive industry by offering those consumers large discounts on electricity prices, with households making up the difference.
But just as importantly, the high electricity prices actually undermine decarbonization itself. The only way you get to a somewhat decarbonized society is mass electrification. High electricity prices turn electricity into a boutique product that no one wants to use. We already see this dynamic playing out with heat pumps. Heat pumps are a fine technology that the government is forced to pay households £7500 each to install mostly because electricity prices are so high that households are generally better off sticking with gas. From 2025 to 2028 the state is in theory going to spend well over a billion on heat pump subsidies alone.
NB it could very have been different. Chinese policymakers I think realized that mass electrification if anything makes more sense as a first priority, because decarbonizing the grid is very very difficult and will take a long time, particularly in an industrialized society where you have a very large block of inelastic demand that has to be met 24/7.
The whole thing is such a disaster that it makes old-school British mission failures like Concorde and the AGR nuclear reactor series look like huge successes. Concorde at least produced a plane that flew. BA even made some modest operating profits, once all the capital costs of building the planes had been written off. The AGR reactors were built, produced electricity, eventually worked tolerably well, and indeed some are still operating today. Net Zero has just straightforwardly made Britain worse off without making even a dent in global emissions, which are the thing that actually matters for the climate. Nor is Britain even showcasing what economically viable deep decarbonization looks like: decarbonization here is both shallow and expensive.
On a separate note, I think the assumptions here about healthcare are somewhat lazy. It is not obviously true that the UK needs to spend more prevention or that today's biggest healthcare challenges relate to diet or chronic conditions. A&E waiting times are quite plausibly the single biggest cause of avoidable mortality out there (https://policyskeptic.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-waits-might-be-biggest-cause-of.html), and we have known for many many years that A&E performance is largely uncorrelated with A&E demand, although NHSE management has for years stuck its collective head in the sand and tried endless failed schemes aimed at reducing A&E demand rather than actually trying to improve performance.
tl;dr you can't do mission government without a real analytic function in government that actually picks apart the problems you're trying to solve. Instead governments very often act as though ends and means have already been decided and so all the subsequent analysis they do get is completely warped by this. I've been to a few Electricity System Operator stakeholder events and they are fairly upfront about the consequences of the state's chosen policy pathway, but just regard it as something unavoidable that they have to deal with.
Net Zero is, I agree, a poor example of a successful mission. The root problem lies in the way the goal was defined—focusing narrowly on achieving Net Zero emissions, while disregarding the essential technological, financial, and social enablers needed to make it viable. Since the UK and EU declared Net Zero targets, I’ve often wondered how such capable bureaucracies allowed themselves to be locked into such a rigid and one-dimensional framework.
By contrast, the Chinese approach has been far more pragmatic. They recognize that while Net Zero is an important aspiration, it must be pursued within the constraints of existing technology and economic realities. Rapidly scaling up the transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs)—even if the electricity is not yet fully green—offers a faster, more affordable, and more scalable pathway. This approach delivers tangible environmental benefits far more quickly than relying on artificially inflated electricity prices in the hope of triggering “market-driven” decarbonization.
What’s particularly clever about the Chinese strategy is that it keeps electricity prices low through continued use of coal and other fossil fuels, while simultaneously investing heavily in renewables like solar. It’s a dual-track approach: pragmatic in the short term, strategic in the long term.
Ironically, Europe once knew how to pursue such mission-driven transformation. Projects like the rollout of TGV in France or the expansion of nuclear power in the 1960s–80s weren’t market-driven—they were state-led strategic missions, designed to achieve long-term national objectives. Unfortunately, we’ve since forgotten how we used to succeed.
100% agree with all of this. I actually think the problem is a kind of bizarro market fundamentalism that exists within British institutions, and especially the Treasury. I don't want to point the finger just at Tim Leunig, because I'm sure there are many other more influential culprits, but I do think his worldview is an extremely good example of the phenomenon.
The dogma basically goes something like this: "so long as some market mechanisms are at work somewhere, we can do whatever we like and the market will find a way around the constraints we've imposed as firms innovate in a context we control, so actually the policy will work out to be costless (at least in the long run)". So we can jack up electricity prices as much we like in the pursuit of Net Zero and compensatory technological innovation somewhere will bail us out, we can impose ZEV sales mandates on car manufacturers with no downsides, we can endlessly ramp up auto safety requirements or impose aggressive sin taxes everywhere, etc etc".
The problems are obvious: markets are not magical tools for working around the laws of physics, and fairly often you just wind up poorer, particularly when the option exists for affected firms to just move their operations abroad. The cumulative effect is generally a growth in consumer costs, which apart from anything else makes people very grumpy and may well limit your ability to generate revenue more directly. Fuel duty is an excellent example. Why have successive governments proven unable to raise this tax at least in with inflation? I fairly strongly suggest that a big part of the problem is the overall rise in the total cost of car ownership: apart from fuel, every other aspect of car ownership is now a lot pricier than it used to be (maintenance, insurance, the costs of cars themselves, and now of course financing costs with higher interest rates). At least some of this is down to global regulatory burden creep.
tl;dr markets are many things but they are also information discovery mechanisms about preferences and possibilities, and it is rarely free just for governments to impose policy costs on firms, either via higher regulatory burdens or more expensive basic inputs like energy.
A Mission based approach requires people from different departments to work together to achieve outcomes to solve issues that run across many different disciplines; i.e. it is totally antithetical to the way the UK Civil Service currently operates. It would requires forceful and insightful leadership from the top of any organisation to make it work. This is why you rarely come across it other than in a war situation.
Labour's Five Missions are, so far, little more than pre-election spin. I have seen no evidence so far that Starmer really understands what levers he needs to pull to get the Service to deliver. Indeed there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he is comfortable with the current Civil Service set up. The only problem is that it wont deliver on what the Country needs.
Fine words and the best of intentions but..........! In France, despite all his generalized failings, Macron has had one mission success.....he rebuilt Notre Dame in 5 years. How did he do it when it took 200 years to build it in the first place? He put an excellent General in charge, protected him from political pressure, freed him from regulations and bureaucratic obstacles, let him hire whom he needed, used private funding.......and let him get on with it.
Stuart’s point (above) meshes with a key observation in the piece itself: that there needs to be sufficient authority (power?) invested in the person or collective charged with delivering the mission to overcome the forces of inertia and antagonism that will be encountered.
Ps A personal thank you to the Freedmans for this excellent substack and their choices when inviting guest contributions such as this one
UK security policy development and implementation has also seen to have suffered from an apparent inability to effectively coordinate and control the inputs and outputs from all of the different Depts involved. The establishment of the National Security Council in 2010 was supposed to overcome these problems and yet on issues like support for Ukraine prior to Feb 2022 there were on-going divisions between Depts on a range of issues. Co-locating all those involved, giving them a management structure that was clear (maybe one Director who served in post for at least 5 years?) and making sure they had a 10 or even 20 year planning horizon might have delivered more effective policies. Whether those policies that involved spending would meet Green Book definitions of efficiency should have been a secondary consideration. We are now told that HMT take account of "unmonetisable" benefits, for example those that result in "reducing security risks".
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68494adb91c75fd63dd3a3af/Green_Book_Review_2025.pdf
There is scope for change, possibly significant change, within Whitehall structures and procedures. Involving civil society in the various missions that the Govt are pursuing is something that Ministers presumably are keen to pursue. One method that hasn't been mentioned is providing limited budgetary powers to Select Committees. After all this happens in Germany and other legislatures. Would such a move be too difficult?
My wholehearted agreement
Thanks for this excellent article. The points you make about HMT barriers to missions (business case, department-based spending) resonate deeply (I spent c2 decades in UK Civil Service). I am cheered by your reasons to stay cheerful. Do you think HMT's recent announcement of a new approach to cross-govt financial management will help?
One thing glossed over in the post is that UK society is top to bottom a vetocracy. Because of that people don't have to engage with change (since all the Missions are fundamentally about significant change to society). If the veto ability is removed (top to bottom) then all parties will have to engage with the change rather than just resisting change.
All the ways of operating and thinking which the author says are difficult or impossible for the UK Civil Service to achieve are routine for a market. And in the case of Net Zero the government could do one thing, set a carbon price.
James, the piece nails the core problem: the UK keeps setting missions but doesn’t build the machinery to deliver them. It’s not an ambition or vision gap, it’s an institutional one.
Announcing another mission won’t solve anything unless there’s a delivery engine behind it. In product terms, you don’t just publish a roadmap and hope. Real progress comes from building dedicated teams, giving them the authority, assets, and financial tools to actually execute.
That’s why I’d argue for five “mission-specific” agencies, five pillars of national renewal: one each for infrastructure corridors, NHS estate, schools, innovation clusters, and public estate renewal. Give them statutory planning power, land, and value-capture, so delivery becomes systemic instead of a not a heroic exception.
It fits the government’s stated growth ambitions, and more to the point, it matches the PM’s disposition: plan over policy, delivery over noise.
Is there any realistic path to get this kind of institutional muscle built, or does something even more radical need to happen to finally break the cycle?
Why do you think Government isn't speaking loudly and publicly about it's Missions anymore? What are the downsides?
Scared kawtowing pseudo tory rabbits have no hope against weasels and wolves. Labour needs an assertive leader with real courage. Mebbe Corrie Angela could step in and save democratic socialism in disUK?
Are you saying that Net Zero has been a success overall? Or that it is simply a sufficiently ambitious and long term mission?