As Keir Starmer stands down as prime minister and attention turns toward Andy Burnham, the current moment should not be reduced to a story of personalities. The question that matters is strategy, and the Labour party has three years left to get this right.
When Labour won its landslide in July 2024, it did so on the promise of a new kind of governance: five national missions to tackle the UK’s deepest structural challenges, from clean energy to child poverty, inspired by my book, Mission Economy. That was the right answer to a real question: what is the economy for, and why should it matter to people’s daily lives? Mission-oriented government is not just a political slogan, but a proven approach to solving society’s biggest challenges, generating good jobs and resilient growth in the process.
Around the world, missions have helped governments clarify and deliver on goals – from strengthening domestic production of health technologies in Brazil to promoting social cohesion and national identity in Barbados. The UK can also learn from innovative projects at home, from creating healthy and sustainable estates for London’s Camden council, to placing clean growth at the centre of Manchester’s economic strategy, which I advised Andy Burnham and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority on from 2018.
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But as Starmer’s government took shape, it lost its way. The mission agenda has been treated as a communications exercise rather than a governing architecture. The Mission Delivery Unit, briefly established in the Cabinet Office to coordinate across departments, was dissolved in autumn 2025 and replaced with a team inside No 10 focused on three short-term priorities: reducing NHS waiting lists, securing the border and tackling the cost of living.
At the same time, the Treasury has failed to fullyalign its fiscal framework and spending review process with mission goals, while the industrial strategy has reverted to identifying eight “high growth” sectors – a fragmented, pick-winners approach that contradicts the whole logic of missions. The government has compounded these errors by defining economic growth as a mission in its own right. Growth is not a mission – it is an outcome of well-designed missions that catalyse public and private investment around shared goals.
Still, important changes have been made. After I and a number of economistsraised the need for a step-change in public investment, Rachel Reeves updated the fiscal rules to consider what we own, not just what we owe, giving a better picture of the UK’s fiscal sustainability. The government also established new public finance bodies, including the National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy. These steps have yielded results, particularly on the Clean Power mission – low-carbon sources produced 73.3% of energy generation in 2025, up from 60.3% in 2023.
However, achieving the government’s mission agenda in full requires a deeper state transformation that has not yet materialised. Burnham is set to inherit this unfinished task. As the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, where I am founding director, sets out in a new report, From Mission Talk to Mission Delivery, this month, that requires five key changes.
First, missions require a genuine whole-of-government approach where every lever of the state pulls in the same direction. That means re-establishing a central coordinating unit with real authority – not a monitoring body but a delivery engine with the full backing of No 10, the Cabinet Office and the Treasury. The UK can learn from Brazil, where tackling the ecological crisis has been made a priority of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s office and his core economic agenda. And it means redesigning the industrial strategy around challenges to solve, such as health or clean water, rather than sectors to support, placing the missions at the heart of economic policy rather than on the periphery.
Second, fiscal rules need further reform to encourage critical long-term investment. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s own analysis shows that a 1% increase in public investment is expected to generate an 8.7% return to the wider economy over 10 years – a significant return that is not properly factored into the government’s spending decisions. What’s more, every £1 of public money spent on net zero delivers between £2.20 and £4.10 in return. The UK’s fiscal framework should be redesigned to capture this upside by adopting public sector net worth as a way of measuring the true value of public assets such as infrastructure, housing and land, as well as extending the fiscal horizon from three to 10 years.
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Third, policy tools and institutions must be truly mission aligned. Public procurement – £341bn a year in the UK – remains one of the most powerful and underused levers in government. A mission-oriented approach makes public buying power go further, moving from buying the cheapest products to achieving good outcomes. Similarly, public finance institutions such as the national wealth fund – launched by the chancellor in July 2024 to boost investment in national infrastructure projects – must be empowered to act as investors of first resort, funding innovative new projects that align with the government’s missions rather than simply de-risking private investment by stepping in as lenders of last resort when things go wrong. The foundations for these levers are in place – what is required now is a more ambitious approach to using them.
Fourth, accelerating mission delivery requires state capacity. As I wrote in my book The Big Con, decades of outsourcing to consultancies have hollowed out the civil service’s ability to steer the economy, negotiate with business and shape investment conditions rather than merely facilitating private-sector activity. The government’s new public interest test – asking whether a service can be delivered in-house before large contracts are outsourced – is promising. But ministers must go further, conducting a comprehensive review of the public-sector skills, capabilities and cultural shifts required to deliver transformative policy.
Finally – and perhaps most critically – mission delivery must be co-created and governed with citizens, workers and communities. Missions gain their legitimacy and resilience from the degree to which the people affected have genuine ownership of the goals being pursued. That means deliberative forums, citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting. It means trade unions with a meaningful seat at the table, not a symbolic consultation. And it means investing in arts and culture as core social infrastructure for the green transition, building the public imagination and democratic engagement that durable economic transformation demands.
Burnham has called for an end to “40 years of neoliberalism”. But confronting the challenges that Britain faces requires going beyond just naming the problem, and actually building concrete partnerships between the state and the private sector where business is held to its role in producing value rather than extracting it. Labour cannot afford to be simplistically “business-friendly”. It should aim to work symbiotically and productively with business, sharing the risks and the rewards of investment under a robust governance architecture that also delivers for people in the near-term. That is the standard this government must now meet.
