The Rundown Podcast: Can This Government Deliver?

3 min read12 June

Chancellor Rachel Reeves used this week's Spending Review to set out how and where Labour will allocate money for the rest of this Parliament, but on The Rundown we're asking whether they have a plan for how they’re actually going to deliver on their priorities, and succeed in completing Keir Starmer’s missions for government?

The vexed issue of actually delivering in office what you came into it promising to do has bedeviled administrations of all stripes, as they get bogged down in tackling the inevitable day-to-day crises and get buffeted by global issues.

But one person synonymous with getting this right is Michael Barber, who was put in charge of Tony Blair’s 'delivery unit' in 2001, and last year was made the Prime Minister’s 'Adviser on Effective Delivery' by Starmer.

He is also the subject of a new book by Michelle Clement, lecturer in government studies at the Strand Group at King’s College London, titled ‘The Art of Delivery: The Inside Story of How the Blair Government Transformed Britain’s Public Services’, which goes inside the work that Barber achieved under the last Labour government.

The author, who is also 'researcher in residence' at Number 10, joined host Alain Tolhurst to discuss what this government can learn from that period about being successful at policy delivery.

Alongside them are Charlotte Pickles, director of the Re:State think tank and a former special adviser to Iain Duncan Smith; Alexander Iosad, director of government innovation at the Tony Blair Institute; and John McTernan, former political secretary to Tony Blair and an ex-government special adviser.

Clement said her book is about how Blair "turned rhetoric into reality", but also how that process took several years to perfect.

"He didn't do it immediately, it took until 2001 for him to actually have the money in place and the plans in place, the ministers in place, to reform the machinery of government," she explained.

"The delivery unit was created in 2001 after that second election victory, and its aim was to monitor and hasten the delivery of Blair's key public service reforms in health, education, transport, crime and asylum.

"There was a sort of science aspect to it, in terms of the method, the routines, the stock takes with the prime minister, getting plans from the departments and following up in a quite routine way; boring, arduous work, but important.

"But the book focuses on the art side, which is, how do you operationalise that? You've got this method that looks very obvious, but if the chancellor and the prime minister aren't getting on, and this secretary of state doesn't talk to this one, or is being pushed aside by the chancellor, how the hell do you make it work?

"The book is the human story of how you make delivery work in practice."

The Rundown is presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced by Nick Hilton and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot