2018 PLMR | Church House 29 Great Smith Street Westminster SW1P 3BL
0207 622 9529 | info@plmr.co.uk | Privacy Policy
This website uses cookies to provide you with the best browsing experience.
Find out more or adjust your settings.
This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
You can adjust all of your cookie settings by navigating the tabs on the left hand side.
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
DELIVER!
PLMR
Delivery, delivery, delivery! Tony Blair set up The Delivery Unit in number 10 at the beginning of his second term as Prime Minister in 2001. David Cameron has now, at the beginning of his second term, set up 10 new task forces to be chaired by ministers as ‘an extra way of making sure that delivery happens’. There is something about Prime Ministers and second terms. They are comfortable in power, are secure in the role, but are then aware of time passing and objectives still to be seen through. Delivery becomes the mantra.
And in terms of delivery, government’s real job is to ensure and insist that the conditions for delivery are there, so that people on the front line do the business. Even as I write this there are thousands upon thousands of interactions going on between teachers and students, doctors and nurses and patients, social workers and families, police and the public and so on. Delivery is everyone’s business and government should not give the impression that only cabinet committees deliver.
I suspect ten task forces are too many and will end up servicing the needs of politicians to be reassured that things are being done. The advantage of a central delivery unit was its single minded focus and purpose. It took away the fatalism that dogged the UK in previous administrations that things could not be done quickly. And nothing is a substitute for a driven, focused cabinet minister with one time sensitive objective. The new government could learn a great deal from Harold Macmillan’s drive to build hundreds of thousands of homes in the 1950s. Now that is what I call delivery.
Mike Gibbons ran The Department For Education Innovation Unit from 2002-2008
Fuelling the Sustainable Aviation agenda: How the East of England is flying toward Net Zero travel
The student experience in 2021 – where next?
Trading into 2021
Share this article