Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
20 October 2026
Contents updated on 20 Oct 2026
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00:03 - 01:07
Speaker 3
Please. And very pleased the Right Honourable Darren Jones, Member of Parliament, has kindly agreed to join us under no compulsion whatsoever, voluntarily. But having served as the Prime Minister's Chief Secretary and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, we thought it useful to hear your fresh sort of thoughts, reflections and suggestions on your time in the Cabinet Office, the sort of the good, the bad and the ugly as it were. But it would be remiss of me, Mr. Jones, not to put on the record in public this committee's thanks to you for how you engaged with the committee when you were a minister, for the time that you spent with us, etc., and indeed for what you did within the department. And sometimes politics isn't terribly good at saying thank you, so on behalf of the committee, thank you.
01:07 - 02:07
Speaker 4
I want to take us back to the sort of heady days before the gilt came off the gingerbread of mission government. Great fanfare, you'll remember, Paton, your predecessor, issues that you then inherited. And I think there wasn't a day that went past without us hearing at least four times from ministers about mission-led government, how it was going to shake everything up, how the silos were going to be broken and the way of doing government recast. When did mission government get its sort of death certificate? Because nobody talks about it anymore and it doesn't seem to be the underpinning mindset of let's change things around and make things better.
02:07 - 03:01
Speaker 1
Well, the missions for the incoming Labour government were a set of political priorities that came through the manifesto process in opposition coming into government, which were then attempted to be translated into changing the way government worked in order to focus on delivering those outcomes. So it was essentially an exercise of prioritisation and trying to get the system to tackle some big challenges that maybe it hadn't done for a long time. And certainly in the first year or so, when I was at the Treasury as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, we were trying to embed mission structures into government. So we had these mission boards which brought departments together. In the spending review that I led, I asked mission boards to submit their own spending bids alongside the departments so we could see how we could pool budgets to come together.
03:01 - 04:08
Speaker 2
In practice, it didn't work for a number of reasons. I mean, firstly, the money we assigned to missions ended up going to departments anyway because mission boards, we were told, couldn't be constitutionally accountable to Parliament in the same way that departments are. And once the departments got the money, the departments decided how to spend the money, and so collaboration wasn't as easy as it maybe should have been if it had gone to the mission board.
And cross-departmental working is just is just very hard. And actually I think constitutional norms and and a tendency to protect the way the system works eventually stopped it from being effective in in my view. Now with Andy Burnham's team, I think Andy Burnham has a different set of priorities and has clearly set those out. And he's decided that the missions, which will still be delivered under the bonnet by the government, you know, NHS waiting lists coming down, more police officers in our community, the clean energy mission, you know, going for economic growth at the top of the league table, these things will continue, but I think the political focus has changed with a new a new administration.
04:08 - 05:20
Speaker 4
Let's just pause there for a moment because I think there was a growing sense that the sort of the orthodox high priests of the Treasury suddenly saw mission boards as being effectively a challenge to their total authority because no longer would Treasury be able to play one department off against the other because there was a cross-departmental approach to policy delivery. What you seem to be saying now is it it was just a accountability bit. Did did any minister at that time say, yeah, but we want to try and do something new here, so let's create a way for mission boards to have that line of democratic accountability through parliament, or was it just a shrug of the I mean, a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders and something going, oh, okay, well, it was a good idea, but it's fallen at the first fence?
05:20 - 05:54
Speaker 2
My sense of it, and other ministers and former ministers might think differently, but my sense of it is it was a classic example of the system saying, well, you can't do that because of constitutional norms. And therefore the mission boards continued as I think they were technically cabinet subcommittees in their status, which do have decision-making power, but the money still sat with the departments in their normal structure. And as we all know, if you don't have money in the spending review to do something, you're probably not going to get around to doing it.
05:54 - 07:07
Speaker 3
I mean, that's an understandable answer, but I'm sure you'll understand that it is also a disappointing one because here was a fresh-faced government coming in, 14 years in opposition, master of all they surveyed in terms of parliamentary majority at that time, a belief that Keir Starmer would be Prime Minister for at least two terms was the working presumption. Does that just speak to a surprising lack of small small r radicalism within the early days of that government, which slightly speaks to the wider assessment of Keir Starmer, and I'm not asking anybody to sort of speak ill of the metaphorical dead, but as a sort of rather unambitious, non-creative technocrat who just tried to make the status quo work rather than try to create anything new?
07:07 - 08:02
Speaker 2
I wouldn't personally pin it on Keir Starmer or quite frankly any minister. I think my two observations are one, I spent a lot of my time when I was in the Cabinet Office trying to get the system to focus less on process and more on delivery of outcomes because there's a lot of process, meetings, slide decks, you know, groups.
You just think, what is actually changing in the real world as a consequence of all of this activity? And so I had to do a lot of work in terms of the incentive and accountability structure for senior civil servants, but also absolute clarity on what they were being measured against in terms of real-world change. And so I think what happened initially in response to mission boards was a lot of process. A lot of people worked very hard, but there were mission boards, there was lots of data, there was lots of slide decks, there were lots of people talking. But it didn't actually deal with the fundamental constitutional barriers to radical change of the state.