Time to deliver
It’s almost a quarter of a century since the Downing Street Delivery Unit was set up under New Labour, based on a proposal drafted before the 2001 election by Michael Barber, Jonathan Powell (Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff) and Jeremy Heywood (then Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister).
Given the ubiquity at Westminster and in Whitehall of the word ‘delivery’ these days, it’s hard to believe that, until a generation or two ago, responsibility for delivering specific public service outcomes was not viewed as a traditional role for senior civil servants.
How times have changed! A quick search of Hansard shows that mentions of the words ‘deliver’ and ‘delivery’ in Parliament have increased exponentially over the previous two decades, with 2025 an all-time ‘bumper’ year.
In the Fifth Edition of Heywood Quarterly (Autumn 2025), we drew attention to low levels of public trust in government and offered some ideas on how this fracture might be repaired. In this issue it seemed appropriate to shift the focus towards delivery, not just because it’s fashionable but because repeated and persistent delivery failures are among the public’s principal reasons for lack of faith in their politicians and bureaucrats.
Delivery includes not just everyday services, of course, but the completion to time and to budget of infrastructure projects like aircraft carriers and rail networks. This was most recently criticised in a report launched by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Project Delivery (APPGPD) last November, drawing attention to competing (and conflicting) interests, delays, overspending, short-term decision making and lack of skills.
Let’s hope that today’s Delivery Unit, brought back in 2021 after being abolished in 2010 and now under the new leadership of Axel Heitmueller, with Sir Michael Barber as an adviser to the Government in this area, can recapture some of the undeniable magic of the early years and channel many of the imaginative solutions being put forward by enthusiastic proponents inside and outside Whitehall.
In this context, I hope the reflections of the contributors in this quarter’s line up will provide some stimulating reading.
Everyone’s jumping at (or, in some cases, feeling jumpy about) the opportunities for AI in government, not least to improve and potentially one day take over the delivery of our public services. But the article by Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein, formerly Chief Scientific Adviser for National Security and now President of City St George’s, University of London, should dampen at least a little of the euphoria. A self-confessed techno-optimist, Anthony argues that the improvements AI undoubtedly promise in the longer term – both in the delivery of services and the development of policy – will be hobbled if we do not first tackle the state of digital systems across government and the public sector. Before rushing to create a plethora of new AI ‘tools’, we need to address what he calls our collective ‘enterprise tech debt’, an accumulated liability that has been created through sustained underinvestment in software and systems and is manifested in, amongst other things, outdated systems and frameworks, piecemeal changes, inadequate testing and hasty compromises.
Fixing the architecture is one type of challenge; how civil servants behave and perform on the front line is another (and vividly highlights that link between delivery and trust). As David Robinson, Rich Bell and Ray Shostak (another former head of the Downing Street Delivery Unit) point out in their article, building strong relationships – of both the public servant-citizen and citizen-citizen varieties – is vital to improve decision-making within government. “Making relationships the first step rather than the extra mile should be regarded as at least as foundational to 21st century government as the strategic use of data or digital transformation”, they conclude.
Peter McDonald’s interviews with prominent government leaders have been a notable feature of the Heywood Quarterly thus far, and Peter’s conversation with the business executive-turned Cabinet Office permanent secretary John Manzoni (from 2014 to 2020) once again hits the mark. John was brought into the Civil Service with a strong delivery mandate in mind, and as Civil Service World observed during his tenure “you can’t go long talking to Manzoni without the words ‘functions’ or ‘delivery’ escaping his lips.” In discussion with Peter he is as robust as ever, recalling efforts to complement line leaders (departmental permanent secretaries) with cross-government horizontal functions, and insisting that meaningful change in the Civil Service can be driven from within the system itself as well as from outside.
If changing people’s lives for the better is one of the strongest motivations for individual civil servants, Bowie Penney’s short analysis of the English Index of Multiple Deprivation 2025 should be a useful primer. Containing place-based insights and data on the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country, Bowie explains how this resource can be used well beyond the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to shape and implement different funding projects, as well as underpinning the annual Local Government Finance Settlement.
We serve up a little light relief in the excerpt from Peter Cardwell’s book on Political Animals which chronicles Jeremy Heywood’s battles with the Cabinet Office cats Evie and Ossie (and involving occasional ‘deliveries’ of an unwelcome sort).
In one bound we then move from this domestic drama to a fascinating retrospective on her time at the United Nations by former UK Permanent Representative Dame Barbara Woodward, who ended her five-year term in New York last November. Many outside commentators believe the UN to be increasingly sidelined by growing international disorder but 80 years after the UN’s creation, Dame Barbara, while acknowledging that the organisation must change, offers a strong assertion of its importance to UK foreign policy.
The last two articles in this edition both concentrate on the work of Lucy Smith, last year’s Heywood Fellow, and her team at Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford, on long-term government strategy. In her own short essay, Lucy nails the myth that short-termism and incrementalism are inevitable costs of a democratic society. And in a longer analysis, her colleague Philip Bray presents compelling evidence from Japan, Korea, the Netherlands and Spain (democracies all) that it’s possible, and desirable, to do things differently.
At the end of this edition you will also find a short round-up of interesting snippets from other publications and sources and a selection of books on public policy and related topics recommended by Heywood Quarterly contributors.
Tim Dickson, Editor in Chief
