Philip Swann

The extent to which the Blair government’s delivery unit became the focus of tension between No 10 and the Treasury is a key theme in Michelle Clement’s fascinating history[1] of the unit. It was a product of Tony Blair’s ambition to reform public services and was seen by Gordon Brown as a threat to his dominance of domestic policies generally and his planning mechanism, public service agreements, specifically.

There are striking similarities between the Treasury’s “not invented here” attempted dismissal of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) and the treatment of the government’s missions in the recent spending review.

Prime Minister Kier Starmer announced in February 2023 that five missions would form the “backbone” of Labour’s election manifesto. In October 2024 the Cabinet Office announced the establishment of a “mission board” for each mission chaired by the relevant secretary of state.  In December 2025 the government complicated things slightly when it published its Plan for Change: Milestones for Mission-led Government. It set out six targets which, “guided by our missions” would “set clear milestones[2]” to track the government’s progress.

The milestones were: raising living standards in every part of the UK; rebuilding Britain with 1.5m homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions; ending hospital backlogs; putting police back on the beat; giving children the best start in life; and securing home-grown energy.

The missions were largely ignored in the spending review. Only one of the missions was referred to in Rachel Reeves’ speech and there were only 14 cursory references to missions in the core spending review document. This must mean that the missions were not central to the discussions about the government’s public expenditure priorities. This is so far removed from the way in which missions have been deployed elsewhere, such as by Camden Council. There missions were central to the council’s strategic planning and were used to engage partner organisations and the community in a concerted drive to address the challenges facing the borough.

It is clear from Clement’s book that the first head of the PMDU, Michael Barber, managed to keep the Treasury on board. His unpublished diaries are a key sources for the book, and Clement argues convincingly that, as one of the few senior figures who were respected by both Blair and Brown, he was instrumental in keeping the No 10-led show on the road.

In retrospect it is clear to me that local government suffered as a result of the differences of approach to delivery advanced by No 10 and Treasury. At the time the LGA, where I was director of strategy and communications, made a series of attempts to secure a more collaborative approach with government to the challenges then facing the country.

Local public service agreements (the name gives the game away) and their successors, local area agreements, became entangled in the Treasury’s target-laden bureaucracy and did not benefit from Barber’s more thoughtful “deliverology” which Clement refers to as an art rather than a science. Similarly the LGA’s “shared priorities, an earlier version of missions, got little traction beyond the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the then Audit Commission.

I do not recall any significant engagement with Barber, but I am not sure we would have made much progress. Clement refers to local delivery but not to local government and all the evidence suggests that Barber would have shared David Blunkett’s antipathy to the perceived lack of ambition of local education authorities (Barber worked with Blunkett in Blair’s first term).

It is not clear whether the absence of any significant reference to missions in the spending review was an oversight or a reflection of a bigger split between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. If there is a serious divide we do not know where the Prime Minister stands. What we do know is that local government faces an urgent task in getting the Treasury to give more energy and political capital to the fundamental reform of local government finance. It is also fair to argue that, if taken seriously, the missions provide a good basis for a discussion why that should be a priority for central as well as local government.

One clear message from Clement’s book is that people matter. Local government needs to find its Barber.

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[1] Clement, M. 2025 The Art of Delivery. Biteback Publishing

 

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD on central-local government relations at INLOGOV.