Whitehall Monitor 2026: Foreword and Overview

Foreword

This 13th edition of Whitehall Monitor – the Institute for Government’s annual, data-led assessment of the UK civil service – looks at how government has changed in 2025, the first full calendar year of government under Labour.

In December 2024 the prime minister, Keir Starmer, set the stage for a year of reform when he published his Plan for Change - reiterating Labour’s five missions and setting out the milestones his government aimed to hit on the way to delivering them. Appointing a new cabinet secretary that same month, Starmer promised that mission-driven government would “change the nature of governing itself”. ⁴⁵ Starmer K, ‘PM speech on Plan for Change: 5 December 2024’, speech at Pinewood Studios, GOV.UK, 5 December 2024, www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-plan-for-change-5-december-2024

But 2025 did not prove to be plain sailing for the government. While ministers made progress on their plans for English devolution, employment rights and clean energy, the government struggled to overcome its inheritance of severely strained public services and undeliverable spending plans. On top of this, it made things harder for itself with a series of unforced errors – ranging from poorly prepped welfare reforms which prompted a backbench rebellion, to resignations for ethical misdemeanours and internal briefing spats. Over the course of the year, public support for the government fell sharply.

Nor was it a good year for relations between ministers and civil servants. Labour ministers came into office promising mutual respect and joint working in a series of upbeat town halls across Whitehall. But Starmer’s articulation of his frustration with the “tepid bath of managed decline” in Whitehall was swiftly followed by Number 10 communications guidance banning civil servants from responding to questions in public ⁴⁶ White H and Thomas A, ‘The government should not ban public servants from speaking in public’, blog, Institute for Government, 26 June 2025, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/government-ban-public-servants-speaking-public  – a move emblematic of a breakdown in trust between politicians and officials. In March, the prime minister abruptly decided to take on the “cottage industry of checkers and blockers” ⁴⁷ Starmer K, ‘PM remarks on the fundamental reform of the British state’, speech at Reckitt, Hull, 13 March 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-on-the-fundamental-reform-of-the-british-state-13-march-2025  by abolishing NHS England and taking its functions closer to ministers in the Department for Health and Social Care.

Frustration with a state that is not working well, and consequent appetite for state reform, have been growing across the political spectrum – becoming a focus for the government’s political opponents as well as ministers. Mel Stride, the Conservative shadow chancellor, used his party conference speech to argue for the reversal of the civil service expansion which has taken place since 2016; ⁴⁸ Stride M, ‘Responsible Radicalism’, Speech made at Conservative Party Conference, 6 October 2025, https://www.conservatives.com/news/responsible-radicalism  Reform UK’s Danny Kruger held a press conference in October to set out a suite of reforms, from the conventional (opening up the civil service) to the concerning (vague proposals for changes to the civil service’s professional code). ⁴⁹ Thomas A, ‘Danny Kruger has set out a mixed bad of government reforms’, blog, Institute for Government, 30 October 2025, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/danny-kruger-government-reforms

It is Labour however, that currently holds the levers to drive change. This year’s Whitehall Monitor assesses the government’s actual progress against its bold ambition to rewire the British state.

We find that the Labour government has not given enough definition to its proposals for that rewired state. So, while we have seen a patchwork of small, and welcome initiatives that draw on the concept of mission-led government – from ‘Test, Learn and Grow’ to AI pilots – these fragmented, narrow approaches have failed to coalesce into a coherent, established programme of reform. Ultimately, Labour’s missions have failed to provide the guiding force needed to lift a state still floundering in the wake of long-standing structural issues and workforce decisions taken during Brexit and Covid.

In September 2025, the government signalled that it was moving into a phase of “relentless delivery” on its Plan for Change. ⁵⁰ Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street, ‘Prime Minister appoints Chief Secretary and Chief Economic Advisor: 1 September 2025’, GOV.UK, 1 September 2025, www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-appoints-chief-secretary-and-chief-economic-advisor-1-september-2025  At both the spending review and the budget the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, focused on making the state more efficient. Moving beyond a few pockets of innovation – however encouraging – will be a prerequisite to achieving either of these aims.

Ministers and civil service leaders cannot let another year like 2025 slip by. With the next general election up to three and a half years away the government still has the space to reform the state, with reshuffled ministers and new permanent secretaries re-igniting the new government’s enthusiasm for reform. They do have the levers they need to change the state, if they can muster the ambition, focus and persistence to pull them, and exhibit the sustained leadership required to stay the course.

Dr Hannah White OBE

CEO Institute for Government

Overview

Labour came into power in 2024 with big ambitions for state reform. Mission-driven government would break open Whitehall, transforming the civil service into a collaborative, innovative, dynamic workforce, operating in partnership with businesses, local government and the third sector alike. A new cabinet secretary, Sir Chris Wormald, was appointed at the end of that year, tasked with “the complete rewiring of the British state”. ⁶⁴ Worlidge J, Grama T, Urban J and others, Whitehall Monitor 2025, Institute for Government, 16 January 2025, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/2025-09/whitehall-monitor-2025.pdf

That ambition was welcome, and necessary. Last year’s Whitehall Monitor set out the state of the civil service as Labour took office, and found that familiar problems remained unaddressed. ⁶⁵ Worlidge J, Grama T, Urban J and others, Whitehall Monitor 2025, Institute for Government, 16 January 2025, www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/2025-09/whitehall-monitor-2025.pdf  An effective, and reformed, civil service is a key enabler of the state reform central to Labour’s mission-led approach. We said last year that 2025 would be a pivotal year, one in which Labour would need to turn ambition into action – at the end of which we would learn whether this government was capable of focusing on civil service and state reform for the long haul.

Such reforms will never be the work of a single year; this edition of Whitehall Monitor assesses the progress the government has made so far, and judges whether it is heading in the right direction.

There have been welcome changes to the way parts of government work

‘Mission-led government’ has changed the way some parts of the state are operating. Innovation has begun. Pilots of the Test, Learn and Grow programme have provided proof of concept, demonstrating that new ways of working between Whitehall, local government and communities are possible. These offer early signs of how new practices could improve public outcomes if scaled effectively (see the chapter Departmental spending and efficiencies). The government has strongly encouraged departments to experiment with AI, with the Government Communications Service’s ‘Assist’ tool a good example of scaling an effective product (see the chapter Artificial intelligence and data).

The government has made some welcome structural changes too. Darren Jones’s appointment in September 2025 as chief secretary to the prime minister, and the creation of his role chairing a cross-cutting public services cabinet committee, were good moves, building on the Institute for Government’s recommendation of a ‘first secretary’ role, ⁶⁶ Urban J, Clyne R, Thomas A, Power with purpose: Final report on the Commission on the Centre of Government, op. cit  (see the chapter Ministers and Number 10).

Jones’s additional appointment, as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has brought coherence to the centre but also risks diluting his role and diverting his attention away from government reform and towards brokering and reactive management. The 2025 spending review also brought welcome, if limited, structural changes, some of which the Institute for Government had previously recommended, ⁶⁷ Bartrum O, Paxton B and Clyne R, How to run the next multi-year spending review, Institute for Government, 01 August 2024, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/how-run-next-multi-year-spending-review  including detailed value-for-money reviews of existing policies, longer-term plans for capital spending, and publication of more detailed departmental efficiency plans than we have previously seen (see the chapter Departmental spending and efficiencies).

And finally, while not meaningfully ‘mission-led’, the government’s approach to finding workforce efficiencies is an improvement on what has come before. Ministers have continued to resist the temptation of arbitrary headcount targets, and are instead – again, in line with Institute for Government recommendations ⁶⁸ Thomas A, Cutting the Civil service: How best to slim down and save money, Institute for Government, 03 November 2022, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/report/cutting-civil-service  – targeting ‘pounds not people’ by setting out administrative budget savings targets over the rest of the decade (see the chapter Departmental spending and efficiencies).

Ministers and civil service leaders can learn from the progress which has been made. With sustained, committed leadership government leaders do have the ability to change the way the system works: Georgia Gould championed the Test, Learn and Grow pilots from the Cabinet Office; Peter Kyle, as secretary of state for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) helped set a culture and expectation of greater technological innovation; and Darren Jones’s focus on changing the spending review process has delivered good results.

The government should not, however, mistake these small changes for having built the strong foundations required for long-term, fundamental reform of the state. First, reforms are so fragmented and localised that they are not changing how the state works at any meaningful scale. Second, they remain susceptible to change with the political winds; all three ministers mentioned above were reshuffled in September. Finally, and crucially, current initiatives do not come close to addressing long-standing problems with the civil service.

Problematic workforce trends of the past decade continued in 2025

Readers of Whitehall Monitor will be familiar with the problems with the civil service workforce. While many are longstanding and structural, the past decade – and in particular the haphazard workforce decisions taken during it in responding to the twin shocks of Brexit and the Covid pandemic – has entrenched some damaging trends.

The civil service grew by 35% (136,190 people) from its low in Q2 2016 to the most recent data in Q3 2025. Growth to meet new demands is not in and of itself a problem, and much of it was an explicable choice in response to such large shocks, together with an increase in operational roles. This growth has not, however, been unwound, even though the state is no longer responsible for many of the temporary Brexit and pandemic functions it took on. That the civil service continues to grow, contrary to the repeated stated wishes of ministers, is a pernicious result of poor workforce planning and dispersed responsibility for controlling numbers.

During that same decade the policy profession grew by 116%, the second fastest growth in any profession behind government digital and data. But while it seems clear government has more digital and data capability, it is not at all clear that ministers feel any better served by having twice as many policy officials, the profession with which they typically work most closely.

In a similar vein, much of the growth in civil service numbers during this time was in the middle bands of HEO–Grade 6 (just below the senior civil service). While some of the shift to a more senior grade composition is down to automation of more junior roles, this does not explain all of the mid-level growth. Grade inflation plays a role as, in a bid to attract and retain new and existing staff, many roles have been advertised at higher grades, and individuals promoted more quickly than they might previously have been. Expectations for work done at each grade have been distorted as a result.

It was in 2016/17 that movements of civil servants between departments increased sharply. They have never subsequently reduced to 2015/16 levels, the high frequency with which civil servants move jobs has been damaging since we have been collecting data on such moves, incentivised in part by pay structures. And finally, in the past decade the number of civil servants in London grew faster, and from a higher starting point, than any other region.

For all their long-term consequences, the intense phases of both Brexit and the pandemic are now in the past. The trends they established, or accelerated, should not be continuing. But the data and analysis in this year’s Whitehall Monitor reveal the limitations of the government’s current approach to reform on the workforce.

Ministers have managed to slow the rate of growth of the civil service and reduce the frequency of internal transfers. But both changes appear to be driven by short term restrictive recruitment practices, rather than long term structural change. The focus on reducing headcount – including with financial incentives for people to leave – is welcome, but risks losing good performers (see the chapters The size of the civil service and Turnover, leaving routes and exit schemes).

Last year also saw the policy profession continue to grow rapidly (see the chapter Professions and functions), and it was the middle grades that grew the fastest yet again (see the chapter The size of the civil service). While there have been welcome announcements on mission hubs, the government currently looks on track to miss its own target of getting 50% of senior civil servants out of London by 2030 (see the chapter Location). And while the new ‘digital centre of government’ has effectively identified the problems it faces, it’s not at all clear that is has the cross-government leverage to make digital transformation happen (see the chapter Digital transformation).

Nor did we find evidence of clear plans that would indicate these trends are likely to shift. The way pay works in the civil service incentivises churn and grade inflation; while the government’s review of the senior civil service’s pay structure (at the insistence of the Senior Salaries Review Body) ⁶⁹ Review Body on Senior Salaries, Forty-Seventh Annual Report on Senior Salaries, Report No.98, May 2025, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/682f20dec054883884bff424/SSRB_47th_Report_2025_Web_Accessible.pdf  has included some welcome trailing of changes to pay progression, that review has not yet been published (see Pay).

Positive measures to make it easier to remove poor performers were announced in March – but the NAO reported that at the start of August 2025 departments had applied for only 30 individuals to leave through the current pilot of mutually agreed exits, ⁷⁰ Comptroller and Auditor General, Government exits and redundancies, National Audit Office, 25 September 2025, www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/government-exits-and-redundancies-1.pdf  and the government has not yet published information on how the scheme will work (see the chapter Turnover, leaving routes and exit schemes). Crucially, the strategic workforce plan, which was originally due to be published alongside the 2025 spending review, and was already in train when we published Whitehall Monitor 2025, has been delayed to the first half of 2026.

Mission-driven government has proven so broad a concept as to be functionally useless for driving workforce reforms

Missions, by the government’s account, encompass both what the government wants to achieve as part of the five missions themselves, and how to change and improve the way that government itself works. On the former, some prioritisation seems to have been given to ministerial stability in departments leading missions (see the chapter Ministers and Number 10) and to spending review allocations, although here it is not clear this was more than they might otherwise have received (see the chapter Departmental spending and efficiencies).

On changing the way government works, ministers came into office in 2024 with a fairly clear sense of what they wanted for the civil service: fewer departmental silos, closer working with the community, and a more agile state. That clarity of ambition has since collapsed, with ministers badging an increasing number of shifting reform initiatives as ‘mission-led’, from cost-cutting measures, to relocation, to the abolition of NHS England.

As a concept for changing how government works, the ambiguity and sweeping nature of missions is preventing, rather than enabling, prioritisation of objectives and delivery of coherent state reform (see the chapter Mission-driven government).

Frustration with the civil service is continuing to grow

In the absence of a clear vision for reform, the way the state works is changing at neither the scale nor the pace sought by ministers. In July 2024, soon after the election, Starmer shared his first message to the civil service: “Together, as one team, we can deliver our mission”. ⁷¹ Starmer K, ‘A message from Prime Minister Keir Starmer to the Civil Service’, speech online, GOV.UK, 8 July 2024, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/a-message-from-prime-minister-keir-starmer-to-the-civil-service  That message was echoed by secretaries of state across Whitehall, as ministers were keen to position themselves in opposition to what they saw as a series of Conservative politicians who had alienated and demoralised the civil service.

The relationship that ministers have with the civil service matters, but as Labour quickly discovered, fine words are not enough – in the absence of structural changes – to improve how the state is working. Frustration built quickly; it was five months after he personally assured civil servants that they had his respect that Starmer accused some of them of being “too comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. ⁷² Starmer K, ‘PM speech on Plan for Change: 5 December 2025’ op. cit  Less than a year later, in March 2025, Starmer’s big speech – pitched as “remarks on the fundamental reform of the British state” ⁷³ Starmer K, ‘PM remarks on the fundamental reform of the British state’, op.cit  – announced the abolition of NHS England in a bid to get a better handle on the levers of power, and tackle the “cottage industry of checkers and blockers” ⁷⁴ Ibid.  (see the chapter Public bodies and appointments). It has since been reported that the prime minister has, on two separate occasions, attempted to speed up the write-round process (the exchange of letters through which ministers agree most cross-government policy decisions). ⁷⁵ Allegretti A, ‘No more flexible deadlines for policy, Keir Starmer warns’, The Times, 15 April 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/starmer-end-government-flexible-deadlines-new-policies-jdhxlxjz9?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqcThstCkbgzGz_eh… ^{, 76} Scotson T and Payne A, ‘Whitehall Decision-Making Procedure Could Be Overhauled To Stop Delays’, Politics Home, 13 November 2025, https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/cabinet-decision-making-could-be-overhauled-whitehall-reform

Such efforts might give ministers more control, or more speed, in limited areas. But this will be undermined if they also give them the illusion of having discovered the cure to the civil service as it operates today. However well each individual measure works, unless and until they are part of a wider vision for how the state should work and a plan to get there, they will only ever be addressing a narrow set of symptoms.

The year ahead

Ministers spent 2024 talking about the revolutionary difference mission-led government would make to how the state functions. 2025 appears to have passed with some useful examples of how ministers and officials can shift ways of working in localised, limited way. But there is little sense that this adds up to more than a few good stories. If 2026 is to bring more than this, the government should measure itself against two core tests.

First, is there a defined vision for state reform – and a plan to get there?

Whether it is badged in the language of 2024 as a ‘mission-led’ and ‘rewired’ state, in the language of September 2025 as a ‘delivery-focused’ state, or in that of last November’s budget as a ‘productive’ one, the government must put more definition behind its ambitions for state reform. Have ministers and civil service leaders set out what they mean by rewiring the state, have they done so in a way that is sufficiently specific to prioritise some actions and preclude others, and are they acting on that plan?

If ministers remain committed to a more innovative, agile civil service that plan should include a route to far more ambitious mass scaling of the types of Test, Learn and Grow initiatives we are seeing now, and an analysis of and plan to address the structural barriers to those ways of working.

Whatever way the government chooses to define ‘rewiring’, however, it is crucial that it directly tackles the structural workforce issues set out in Whitehall Monitor. The forthcoming strategic workforce plan – or others supporting it such as a proposed senior civil service (SCS) strategy – must give accountable leaders the direction and the tools they need to curate and control the size and shape of the civil service. Specific questions that such a plan needs to answer are whether it:

• sets out a clear rationale for the size and seniority of professions in government, and how these will change over time
• includes measures to remove poor performers (through mutually agreed exits operating at scale or another route), or other plans to prevent the need to re-run expensive voluntary exit schemes
• includes ways to ensure the civil service opens up more effectively to new talent, even while numbers are being controlled or reduced, through changes to secondments, recruitment practices, or other routes
• includes measures to reduce churn – where required – and reward expertise.

Second, is there a guiding mind to ensure the delivery of those plans?

In his role as chief secretary to the prime minister and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Darren Jones is well placed to take this on, and should fully own reform alongside the cabinet secretary, Sir Chris Wormald, and chief operating officer, Cat Little. Delivering on it will require a much clearer governance system around missions and state reform; one which supports the delivery of a coherent plan, rather than fragmenting responsibility for it as at present.

Labour entered office a year and a half ago with a mission to change government. It would be hard to say the civil service at the close of 2025 is meaningfully different – let alone ‘completely rewired’ – when compared to the one Labour ministers were introduced to in the summer of 2024. There is much to do in 2026.