LONDON — In his first Downing Street speech, Keir Starmer promised to “deliver change.” Fourteen months on, he’s still figuring out the delivery part.
The British prime minister is expected to revamp his No. 10 operation amid tumbling poll ratings and as a fraught political season gets underway. Nin Pandit, his most senior civil service aide, is being moved after 10 months to lead a new delivery team operating out of Downing Street.
“Delivery” is the watchword for Starmer, who sold himself to voters as a businesslike problem-solver after years of political chaos. But several Labour officials, MPs and civil servants who spoke to POLITICO, all on condition of anonymity, questioned whether the structures Starmer has created for his major program of domestic change really are fit for purpose.
Pandit is the latest in a growing list of civil servants and political aides with “delivery” in either their titles or remit. They include Liz Lloyd, Starmer’s director of policy, delivery and innovation, who works alongside Olaf Henricson-Bell, the director of the No. 10 policy unit; Pat McFadden, Starmer’s Cabinet ally and enforcer; Clara Swinson, who leads Starmer’s Mission Delivery Unit; and Michael Barber, the founder of Tony Blair’s delivery unit in 2001, who is advising the new PM.
Some officials think this big cast is a recognition that there is a problem. But some also see a cause: too many people with different ideas about getting things done.
Then there is that overall vision — or lack of it (an accusation that Starmer’s allies deny vociferally). One Labour MP loyal to Starmer said: “We are like a piece of driftwood floating on the ocean looking at the view. It’s a nice view, but where are we going?”
On paper, Starmer — who returns from holiday to a flurry of activity this week — should be far more comfortable than his centrist allies such as France’s Emmanuel Macron or Germany’s Friedrich Merz. He has a huge House of Commons majority and probably won’t face an election until 2029. On the world stage, his careful diplomacy has nudged Donald Trump toward more U.K.-friendly statements on tariffs, Ukraine and Gaza.
At home, though, Starmer faces populists both left and right, with Brexit veteran Nigel Farage’s Reform UK consistently ahead in the polls. Inflation has ticked up. Unpopular tax rises loom. Starmer’s backbenchers are nervous about planned welfare cuts and reforms for children with special needs. And migrants keep arriving on small boats across the English Channel.
“If the first year is about stabilizing and fixing foundations, I think the next year is going to be about deep-seated reform — and then the benefits of that will come towards the end of the parliament,” Ravinder Athwal, who wrote Labour’s 2024 manifesto and left his role as an aide to Starmer in July, predicted in an interview with POLITICO’s Westminster Insider.
So far, it has also meant bureaucracy.
The delivery bureaucrats
Deep in the 19th century stone-fronted Cabinet Office lies the Mission Delivery Unit (MDU).
Set up by Starmer last fall, this group of around 30 civil servants — led by Swinson, a Whitehall veteran who worked for Blair’s first delivery unit — measures progress against the PM’s “five missions” that pledged the highest growth in the G7, lower violent crime, better health and education systems, and a decarbonized electricity grid by 2030.
Some officials argue her unit started at a disadvantage by being based in the Cabinet Office instead of No. 10 next door, making it less visible to the wider government machine. One person said at least some of the MDU’s staff began their work in the department’s basement.
“I don’t know necessarily what their objective is,” said one government official. “From what I’ve seen, they kind of provide more of a monitoring service of how departments are getting on, rather than driving things from the center. But then there’s a question of whether that is the job of the policy team in No. 10.”
Supporters point out the MDU was designed exactly to be this sort of monitoring service and that it was never intended to actually drive policy, which is led by Downing Street.
Others were less charitable. A former government official described the MDU jokingly as “the slide pack department,” adding: “I genuinely don’t really know what they do.” A second government official complained: “The message you get from them is so fucking vague that you struggle to articulate it.”
The MDU is said to have a certain template in which departments have to submit their progress in order to be accepted. One Labour official said: “Oh my god, that fucking place. That unit is everything wrong with the civil service.”
A person who talks regularly to No. 10 said: “If the government is going to continue with missions as a thing, then it really needs to press a reset button and put a bit more oomph back under them. If the delivery unit remains where it is, as an adjunct in the Cabinet Office, away from the prime minister’s authority, then the reality of how Whitehall works is it’s never going to be given the priority it needs to actually be really pushing forward reform through the system.”
Take it to the board
Starmer’s “mission boards” have also come under question.
These were set up with the aim of bringing in outside expertise to discuss the big hurdles facing the government. Each one is led by a Cabinet minister in charge of a mission — plus a sixth board led by Deputy PM Angela Rayner, on her pledge to build 1.5 million homes by 2029.
Swinson and McFadden would customarily sit in on the meetings, though McFadden’s attendance rate has dropped off recently, said two people with knowledge of the boards. Several people who have worked with the boards argued their lack of decision-making ability has left them underpowered.
The boards are “pointless,” said the first former government official quoted above: “They’re chaired by the cabinet ministers who are marking their own homework.” When more junior ministers join meetings to present their plans, they come across like a school “show-and-tell” day, the former official added. “They don’t actually achieve anything.”
The person who speaks regularly to No. 10 quoted above said: “You either soup them up and make them more useful, or you put them out of their misery, quite frankly.”
A second person who speaks regularly to No. 10 predicted that Starmer — who initially said he would chair the boards personally — “will have to” overhaul them. “There is a sense that the mission delivery boards aren’t working,” they added. “Pat largely doesn’t turn up to them anymore. They need to inject energy into them or rethink delivery across the PM’s priorities.”
More broadly, civil servants do not “feel like an awful lot has changed,” said another person in regular discussions with senior officials. “It doesn’t feel like there’s been a revolution in how the government makes decisions. There were always units for how you do joined-up government … they’ve been trying to solve this for decades. This is just a different way of doing what other governments have been trying to do.”
The final boss
One element that is effective, several officials said, involves Starmer himself.
Since last fall the PM has been leading regular “stock takes” with the five “mission lead” Cabinet ministers, plus Rayner, that can run for two to three hours each. He began by visiting Cabinet ministers in their own departments, though now they come to him in No. 10. There tend to be a dozen or fewer attendees, including McFadden, Barber and Swinson.
The stock takes put pressure on departments to get their ducks in a row, said people with knowledge of them, and give Cabinet ministers face-time with Starmer to press their most urgent requests — including getting No. 10 to lean on other departments. “The prime minister wants” are still among the most powerful words in Whitehall.
There is continuity, too. Supporters of the PM point out that the missions themselves still stand, two and a half years after Starmer unveiled them. The Cabinet ministers leading them have all remained in their jobs. Starmer’s “Plan for Change” — which attached “milestones” to the missions — is mentioned constantly in government press releases (under orders from No. 10), and the missions govern the structure of the “grid,” the weekly news planner circulated to senior communications officials.
While roles as “business champions” for loyal, fresh-faced Labour backbenchers to sell the message were quietly scrapped in July, similar “mission champions” still exist. There are regional champions, as well as mission-specific ones — Rosie Wrighting on health, Dan Tomlinson on growth, Tom Hayes on net zero, and Sarah Smith on opportunity. Fellow new MP Linsey Farnsworth was the champion for tackling crime, but her role ended in the summer after she spoke out against planned welfare cuts and she has not yet been replaced, said one person with knowledge of the move.
Some other Labour MPs, though, have long complained that Starmer’s overlapping missions, milestones and steps blur the message they are meant to send to the public. Events and crises can knock these long-term goals off course, too. A second former government official said: “They’ve been talking about nothing but small boats all summer.”
It takes time
These struggles should surprise no one, according to Michelle Clement, a lecturer at King’s College London who wrote “The Art of Delivery,” a study of Blair’s first delivery unit.
“We’re in the equivalent of 1998,” she told POLITICO. Blair, frustrated by the pace of change on key domestic priorities, only set up his unit in 2001. Whitehall is still getting over life under five Conservative PMs in 14 years. “All of the change and churn that we saw in recent years of prime ministers does have an impact on the capacity of the state,” she added.
Clement argues that Starmer has taken the right approach in creating “institutional ballast” to ensure he has people focusing on the important issues, while other staff focus on the urgent ones. Pandit will be “well-placed” to do policy delivery, she said, despite some negative briefing (denied by No. 10) to the BBC about her effectiveness. Lloyd, Clement said, was “one of the unsung heroes of the Blair years.”
“People need to panic a bit less,” said a second Labour official, who argued a “huge amount” is being done but that some of it — like extending free school meals to 500,000 more children — doesn’t resonate with the Westminster bubble.
Government-funded childcare hours increase from Monday, while Starmer is expected to put a renewed focus on his pledge to open hundreds of nurseries in spare school classrooms. A third Labour official said: “That’s our priority [this] week, not tittle tattle gossip.”
Missions: Impossible
Others, though, question the overall direction. Starmer’s mission-led approach to government was inspired by Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London who wrote “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism.”
In an interview with POLITICO, she suggested the majority of Starmer’s five missions do not lay out clear and sufficiently direct means of changing the way the British economy works. “I don’t know what the economic strategy is, in terms of what economy we want,” she said.
Mazzucato favors setting “moonshot” public sector goals that drive private investment and innovation “along the way” — just as John F. Kennedy’s pledge to land on the moon by the end of the 1960s began a chain of inventions that led to camera phones and baby formula.
Mazzucato praised Labour’s net zero mission, but said overall that the party needs “a really ambitious positive strategy which resonates with people” — and that it should have had one from the start.
“Growth is the result of a strategy,” she added. “So, beyond the narrative on growth, what kind of society, what kind of economy do we want? That’s not clear. I think if you asked anyone on the street, what is Labour’s strategy for the direction of economic growth — not the rate — it wouldn’t be totally clear.”
Mazzucato suggested the government is thinking about delivery “in the Michael Barber way” of Blair’s first unit: more focused on key performance indicators than on serious economic reshaping. “It’s a productive critique,” she added. “I think they can still turn it around. It’s not like they’ve got the wrong DNA for thinking this way. They just don’t have it set up right.”
Making the public notice is still a huge challenge, Mazzucato warned. “Biden’s agenda worked, actually, economically, but it didn’t work in terms of resonating with people.” Mazzucato remains in touch with the government in what she calls a “light touch” way. She last met Chancellor Rachel Reeves in the spring, has contact with the No. 10 policy team, and has worked closely with Cabinet Office Minister Georgia Gould.
Much of the proof that Starmer’s government is delivering will come from 11 Downing Street.
Allies of Reeves say the top finance minister is actively working on the government’s growth strategy ahead of her fall budget. A fresh overhaul of planning laws is an “attempt to grip” the system and shift the way it works, said one person who speaks to No. 11 regularly. “The Treasury is really trying to get other departments to kick into gear,” they added.
No. 10, meanwhile, plans to add more firepower of its own. As well as an in-house delivery team, Starmer has been seeking a high-profile economic adviser for at least six months. It is widely reported that he will appoint Minouche Shafik, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England who resigned as Columbia University’s president after turmoil over the treatment of Gaza war protests on campus.
Former Greater London Authority official Kate Webb also joined No. 10 recently to work on infrastructure and housing policy, a person with knowledge of the appointment said, after Nick Williams left a similar post earlier this year.
Lessons from history
If Tony Blair remains the model for government delivery, No. 10 aides can turn to a 20 year-old debate clip that many of them will be familiar with.
It was April 2005, just ahead of a general election, and Blair faced an angry grilling from a voter in a BBC debate. The man complained he wasn’t allowed to schedule a doctors’ appointment for later in the week — because Blair had set a target for patients to be seen within 48 hours. It meant the man had to be seen within two days.
Blair was agog. It appeared to be an example of KPIs gone mad — but it was also a clear example of a public service target that had cut through with the public and was working.
Unlike Starmer, however, Blair had eight years in office under his belt by that moment — and didn’t have Farage’s Reform UK breathing down his neck.
Farage is now making moonshot promises of his own, including a vow to deport hundreds of thousands of people. Labour aides have been encouraged by recent press interviews with Farage that have tested how deliverable his pledges are.
“People forget that it took a long time to make that change under Tony Blair,” said the second Labour official quoted above. “It would be great if the speed of delivery ramped up with the size of our majority. Sadly it doesn’t work like that.”
With Farage eyeing that majority in 2029, Starmer has to find a way of proving that his own brand of “deliverism” works — and soon.
Patrick Baker interviewed Ravinder Athwal for Westminster Insider.
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