The UK seems increasingly ungovernable. Starmer's Labour have offered a 'missions' approach. In this new blog, Jack Newman (University of Manchester), Sarah Ayres (University of Bristol) and Geoff Bates (University of Bath) argue that mission-led government is not the solution… but that it might help us find the solutions.
Writing in 2026, the notion of ‘mission-led government’ already feels like a distant memory. And yet, it was less than two years ago that it was the guiding mantra of a landslide-winning manifesto. Of course, few would argue that mission-led government won the day. Indeed, at the time, voting in Starmer’s Labour Party was the only way for the country to eject an exhausted and thoroughly unpopular Conservative Government. But, regardless of whether the public endorsed (or even noticed) mission-led government, it was the theory of change that underpinned the 2024 Labour manifesto and was explicitly described by the party as its ‘mandate to govern’. And it still carries significant weight in the government’s intention to ‘rewire the state’ .
So, what are we to make of this obtuse political slogan? In recent years, political mantras have tended to gain prominence before they actually mean anything – the big society and levelling up immediately spring to mind. In contrast, mission-led government arises from an extensive body of academic literature. ‘Mission-oriented innovation policies’ and ‘transformative innovation’ provide a bedrock of academic research and theoretical development. Recently, there has been further developed and packaging for a policy audience, most notably by Mariana Mazzucato.
Broadly, the idea of a mission-oriented approach is to set clear societal missions that galvanise a wide range of actors to work towards the same defined outcome. The aim is to coordinate activity across a diverse range of actors, from different policy domains, from public sector, private sector and civil society, and from hyperlocal to global. Mission-oriented approaches have caught the eye of policymakers as a way of addressing wicked problems at a time of political polarisation and global instability.
One problem with using this approach as a new way of governing the UK is that the underpinning literature has been developed in a much narrower context. Missions have primarily been about mobilising science and technology towards specific achievements. Hence the core example of the Apollo Programme’s successful mission to land on the moon.
When missions are conceived of in the broader sense – ‘radical change in all elements of the configuration’ – then they come up against more significant coordination challenges. Coordinating governance on a national scale means reorganising deeply entrenched governance structures. The associated challenges will be familiar to policy makers and public policy scholars: there is a need to coordinate over time, between policy priorities, across government agencies, across different tiers of government, and between state and non-state actors.
In our new paper in Public Money and Management, we trace the development of mission-led government and examine the agenda against these ‘governance coordination challenges’. We come to a simple but worrying conclusion: the government is interpreting a mission-oriented approach as a solution to governance coordination, when it is better understood as a framework within which solutions could be developed.
Mission-oriented approaches do not solve governance coordination challenges. The literature offers some useful tools, especially on approaches to procurement and public-private partnerships, but it does not provide solutions to the longstanding structural challenges of national governance.
This should come as a warning to the government’s attempt to rewire the state. The mission-led government agenda offers an important lens for linking together the various challenges faced in coordinating governance, but the solutions will require bold reforms to the structure of the political and policy processes. We conclude our paper by scoping out the starting point for such solutions:
- Resist and reform short-term political incentives.
- Strategize and democratize policy trade-offs.
- Join up the machinery of government.
- Decentralize accountability and funding.
- Carefully design a new approach to public–private partnership.
This list may not be particularly novel to those who are familiar with the challenges of coordinating governance in the UK, but there are two important lessons here.
First, there is no quick fix. A mission-led approach will not magic away the deeply entrenched challenges of governing.
Second, and more positively, a new perspective can reinvigorate the reform agenda and can give prominence to existing success stories. Mission-led government does have value in this regard, but it is not job done, it is job begun.
This article was originally published by the UKAPA. It summarises the paper Governance co-ordination challenges in the UK’s ‘mission-led government’, authored by Jack Newman, Sarah Ayres, and Geoff Bates, and published as part of the UKAPA themed issue of Public Money and Management on ‘The Future of UK Governance and Possibilities for Change’ edited by Karin Bottom and Ian Elliot. It is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.
