Image source: Lauren Hurley, No 10 Downing Street, Open Government Licence v3.0
A UK Government minister has said its ready to adopt a ‘test and learn’ culture in solving public sector problems involving six- to 12-month secondments of specialists from technology companies.
Chancellor of the Ducy of Lancaster Pat McFadden has published a statement on the plan in advance of a speech at University College London’s East Campus today, announcing the provision of a £100 million innovation fund to support the approach.
He said this will involve crack teams of problem solvers – including people with data and digital skills, policy officials and frontline workers – being deployed with the freedom to experiment and adapt, with a mindset similar to that taken by tech firms.
This will provide an alternative approach to writing complicated policy papers and long strategy documents.
Initially the teams will be tasked with two challenges: increasing the number of families receiving support from family hubs, and reducing the costs of temporary accommodation.
They will begin next month with projects in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Essex, then aim to expand them to other parts of the country.
Tours of duty
The Government will also encourage people from start-ups and larger tech companies to serve ‘tours of duty’, contributing their skills to deal with the challenges.
The move could interpreted as a fresh drive to recruit technology and data expertise, following the previous Government's initiative to bring in support from AI and data specialists under the Digital Secondment Programme, announced last year.
McFadden said: “Test it. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again. Tweak it again. And so on, and so on, for as long as you provide the service. Suddenly, the most important question isn’t, ‘How do we get this right the first time?’. It’s ‘How do we make this better by next Friday?
“That’s the test and learn mindset, and I’m keen to see where we can deploy it in government. Where we can make the state a little bit more like a start-up.”
This will be accompanied by an effort to overhaul the recruitment process to attract the best people to work in the Civil Service.
Mind boggling
“Right now, if you’re an outsider, the process can be mind bogglingly bureaucratic and off-putting,” McFadden said. “Applications can take days to fill in, and if you don’t understand the civil service process, good external candidates can find it near impossible to jump through the hoops.
“We need to go further and faster. And so I will be asking departments across government to roll out simpler processes in their recruitment, using what we know works.”
