Britain doesn’t need government efficiency, it needs excellence
Elon Musk’s Doge assumed that cheaper government was better government. that’s the wrong way round: a better run government is a cheaper government, says Andrew Greenway
Democracies around the world are facing a big problem. They don’t deliver well enough.
In Britain, we have a housing crisis, a fraying health service and the interminable sagas of major projects like HS2 and Sizewell C. And we’re not alone. Germany has spent €11bn and 15 years on its own ill-starred rail project in Stuttgart. In the US, a $7.5bn investment in electric vehicle charging stations built only 47 stations across 15 states. Ireland’s housing crisis is bringing people out onto the streets.
The public cottoned on to the effects of low state capacity some time ago. The poverty, the pilfering and the potholes leads to populism, which thrives on that grumpiness. Pennies are now dropping among politicians on the left and right. The noisiest attempt to address these questions so far is Doge, the team set up in Washington DC under the now-departed Elon Musk. Doge promised to strip out $2 trillion of state spending and bring a bloated bureaucracy to heel. Despite much bluster, it is failing to do this. Many commentators now think the team’s bulldozer approach will in fact end up costing US taxpayers billions of dollars.
So far, Doge appears to be a failure. But that should not detract us from the need to reform the machinery of government. What we have isn’t working well enough. Improving that state capacity will mean clearing space and stopping things. But it also requires thoughtfulness about what will replace it, and how this will get built.
Doge and its imitators have assumed that a cheaper government is a better run government. To me, this is the wrong way around. A better run government is a cheaper government. Savings are a product of doing things well, not the aim. Delivering public services on the cheap – or not all – leads to expensive problems elsewhere. So rather than efficiency, we should instead demand our government delivers excellence.
Putting the words ‘government’ and ‘excellence’ in the same sentence often leads to scoffing. Yet there are plenty of examples where our institutions have delivered admirable successes. Take the Covid-19 Vaccine Taskforce or the London Olympics. Both complex projects with very high stakes, both delivered in a way that created genuine national pride. Even getting a new passport or driving licence online is an experience that now gives many people a frisson of unexpected competence. Moreover, those better online public services were millions cheaper compared to what had gone before. But that was a consequence of them doing delivery differently, not because of devotion to an efficiency target.
Government can be great
It’s unfashionable to say so, but government can be great. However, what unites the biggest successes of the last 25 years is that they have gone against the grain. Dame Kate Bingham, who headed up the Vaccine Taskforce, derided the machinery of government as “dominated by process, rather than outcome, causing delay and inertia”. Like her unit, the successful teams instead worked in different ways, brought in different outside experts, harnessed brilliant civil servants, sat in different buildings – and annoyed their colleagues. Their ministers provided them the cover to push back against orthodoxy. They didn’t try to do a leaner, cheaper version of running something that was already broken. They built something new and better – and turned off the old, broken version.
A growing number of people, such as those attending The Start-Up Society, an economics and policy conference hosted by Civic Future this week, think that paying more attention to what’s going on deep beneath the news cycle is overdue.
Labour knows that if it is to convince the country it deserves another term, it has to deliver and be seen to have done so. In 2025, it seems democracies only deliver if they do things differently. Driving efficiency through excellence, rather than shouting and spreadsheets, would be a good place to start.
Andrew Greenway is a former senior civil servant, co-founder of Public Digital, and a leading thinker on state capacity. He co-authored Digital Transformation at Scale and the influential Radical How report. He advised Pat McFadden prior to the 2024 election and currently serves as a non-executive director at the University of Exeter.