The new Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit needs prime ministerial authority and attention

Boris Johnson has resurrected the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU), creating a new team in No.10 following Sir Michael Barber’s review into how the government can be more “focused, effective and efficient” at delivering its priorities. The review itself followed Johnson’s concerns that his – and his government’s – energy had been absorbed by the pandemic and Brexit at the expense of his wider agenda.

The PMDU – first deployed during Tony Blair’s premiership – is a tried and tested approach, and Boris Johnson is right to try to improve government delivery. However, Johnson should not view a revived PMDU as a way to delegate the difficult task of policy implementation. The new unit will only succeed if Johnson is personally involved from the outset – and if he gives it a focused to-do list rather than a vague mission. 

The prime minister needs to know what he wants to deliver before setting the PMDU to work

The original PMDU worked best when it was given clear policy priorities. As Blair’s chief adviser on delivery from 2001 to 2005, Barber led the unit’s work on specific targets related to education, crime, health and transport policy and, in doing so, helped to ensure that targets on school class size and NHS waiting times were met. The unit became less successful after Barber left government, with its resources spread thin across the full breadth of the government’s priorities.

A new PMDU needs to be given a few clear policy objectives, but its remit currently looks in danger of replicating the mistakes of those later New Labour years. The prime minister is reported to^[1] want the new unit to focus on his two "repair agendas": "building back better" from coronavirus and "levelling up". However, both slogans cover a huge range of tasks and policies. "Building back better" might mean clearing public service backlogs, tackling education or health inequalities made worse by the pandemic, launching major new infrastructure projects or achieving net zero. Similarly, "levelling up" could include anything from regional investment programmes like the UK Shared Prosperity, Towns, and Levelling Up funds, to future transport projects.

The role of the PMDU is not to put flesh on the bones of vague political aspirations, but to push for achievement on specific aims. It also needs to be realistic about what it can achieve with its size and skills. The prime minister must pick a small number of clearly defined projects for the unit to work on and set out how their success will be defined. The new PMDU will fail if its remit is too sprawling.

The unit needs to support ministers and their departments, not just mark their homework

As well as its purpose, the new PMDU also needs to replicate the successful methods of its previous incarnation. Johnson has been accused of trying to centralise too much government business in Downing Street, weakening departments through, for example, No.10’s management of special advisers or the planned centralisation of communications. But the lessons of the PMDU show that centralisation has its limits. It worked best when it worked with ministers and their departments, rather than working around or against them.

The primary responsibility to implement government plans sits with departments, and the new delivery unit will fail if it tries to manage major programmes entirely from No.10 and the Cabinet Office. It should not see its job only as marking ministers’ homework, telling them to work faster or refocus their efforts, but should show departments how it can add value. This will only happen if ministers recognise that the unit has expert problem-solving and delivery skills to add to their department’s existing capabilities. This will be helped by the appointment of Dr Emily Lawson – who led the NHS’s delivery of the vaccine rollout – to head up the team, but it also needs to build supportive relationships with departments, contribute the capacity of knowledgeable officials in crucial areas, and connect departments to other parts of Whitehall and the wider public sector. And it must avoid duplicating the work of others: at the moment it is not at all clear how the unit will work alongside the existing Implementation Unit, the successor to the PMDU created by David Cameron.

The PMDU should also be wary of creating perverse incentives through its interventions, such as in the early 2000s when parts of the NHS were accused of meeting targets for waiting times by cancelling other  appointments. The new unit should proactively use its clout to remove cross-cutting barriers, convene and co-ordinate key projects that span multiple departments. The aim should always be to strengthen ministers’ capacity to deliver rather than sidelining them. This is the best use it can make of the prime minister’s authority.

The prime minister must give the unit his attention, not just his title

The original PMDU worked because it enjoyed the personal patronage and close involvement of Blair himself, who made clear that it acted on his authority and regularly participated in its ‘stocktake’ meetings with departments. On becoming prime minister in 2007, Gordon Brown thought the unit was a "creature of Tony Blair", disengaged and moved the unit into the Treasury. This weakened the unit's impact.

Johnson will need to dedicate time to support the PDMU; keeping up to speed on the detail of policies being pursued and, where necessary, holding departments’ feet to the fire. If he does not do this, it could become ‘Michael Gove’s Delivery Unit’, lacking prime ministerial authority and not so closely tied to Johnson’s priorities. If Gove is seen as the real powerhouse driving the government’s priorities this might still allow the unit to unblock delivery across Whitehall. But what happens when Johnson decides to jump in and give conflicting messages? Or when other parts of No.10 and the Cabinet Office compete with the PMDU for ownership of certain priorities? Without Johnson’s personal authority and attention, he might find the team adds to his problems rather than helping to solve them. 

The PMDU could help Johnson make progress on his agenda, but it is no substitute for setting clear policy priorities or appointing a cabinet capable of delivering them. If the prime minister wants his government to make better progress he needs to lead from the front.

1. Newton Dunn T, Boris Johnson the chameleon is preparing to change his skin again, Evening Standard, 14 April, www.standard.co.uk/comment/boris-johnson-chameleon-changing-skin-b929640.html