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Memo to a new minister

How to keep implementation on track in the final year.

Last autumn, the Prime Minister told the Commons Liaison Select Committee that 2014-15 was to be the year of delivery. Today, as his new ministerial teams convene to make plans for the final nine months of this parliament, the pressure is on to make that happen. New research from the Institute for Government published today, gives those teams and future ones advice about how to make a success of policy implementation.

Minister, Congratulations on your new position. You may think you have been put in post to present a fresh face the media, calm tense relationships or enable a slight tilt of political balance. But long before he started planning the reshuffle, the Prime Minister told the Liaison Committee that 2014-15 was to be the year of delivery. The Government will be judged next year on what it has achieved in its five years in office, so ensuring effective implementation has to be top of your priority list. Simply by conducting such an extensive reshuffle the prime minister has already made the task harder – not because new incumbents are any less able than their predecessors, but, as our new report Doing them Justice shows, stability among officials and ministers helps with effective implementation. But there are some other tips from our research that you can use: 1.Understand and stay focused on the problem: ministers need to see themselves as ‘problem owners’. It is vital you understand the change that the policy is trying to achieve – and you are more likely to succeed if you stick the course. The last government saw the focus of Sure Start Children’s Centres shift with each ministerial change. You need to be clear what the policy is trying to do – and how the chosen intervention is intended to deliver it. Question whether that hypothesis is being borne out in practice, but unnecessary change at this stage risks neither achieving the original goals – nor achieving your new ones. 2.Avoid unnecessary changes of personnel in teams: continuity of personnel is an essential ingredient of effective implementation. Excessive turnover of officials is already a well-known problem of the Civil Service that destabilises delivery, and the policies in our case studies suffered when key staff left, so you should avoid changes with only nine months to go until the general election. All of the case studies we looked at involved implementing policy over a period of many years and officials often provided much-needed continuity; both the London Challenge and automatic enrolment for pensions benefitted from stable senior teams. Make clear to the permanent secretary you want key people to stay in post to the election. And where possible keep junior ministers who understand the detail and hold the key relationships. 3.Understand yourself what is happening on the ground: you need your own sources of intelligence on how implementation is going. This means maintaining strong relationships with the people responsible for implementation, and citizens, to understand how policy is working in practice. Ian Pearson, then a Minister of State in Defra, talked to citizens directly about how they were experiencing the implementation of the fuel poverty strategy and discovered people were avoiding the government’s offer because local firms were providing the same measure more cheaply. And more recently, Steve Webb has kept in close touch with industry to ensure regulations on automatic enrolment into pensions are as effective as possible. 4.Use routines to keep implementation on track: you need to signal your interest in successful implementation. Schedule regular stock-takes or progress meetings. Beverly Hughes undertook regular stock-takes with the Sure Start team to monitor progress against milestones and look at data on how many Children’s Centres were up and running. As minister for London schools, Stephen Twigg was happy to delegate considerable authority to his officials, but he backed this up with quick and informal KITs – ‘keep in touch’ meetings – that focused on the latest data about school results. The government has a large number of priority programmes which are still in progress, from welfare reform to infrastructure investment. Implementing someone else’s programme is harder, less rewarding work compared with announcing a new initiative – but at this stage in the parliament it is the job that matters.

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