Missions give government a sense of priority. They say: these are the things that matter. They allow the centre of government to place a responsibility on the wider public sector to act, to join up and work together. In the pursuit of outcome, they create the permission to operate in new areas, shape markets and stop activities that create inertia.

But the way mission goals are achieved needs to take full advantage of the digital age.

Pat McFadden has described how delivery approaches common in digital can be applied to cross-government programmes. Specifically, how the combination of the ‘test and learn’ approach and the creation of multi-disciplinary teams can lower risk, reduce costs and deliver value earlier. The approach stands in comparison to standard programme management approaches in the public sector, which tend to hoard uncertainty, misunderstand costs and delay impact.

In addition to setting up teams to test and learn in this way, those teams need to understand and exploit digital-age design and technology. Understanding these will allow teams to solve problems in new ways and help government ensure that it is getting a return on each pound it spends through improvements in the day-to-day experiences of the public, businesses and public servants.

Competence is a necessary condition for legitimacy. In today’s digital world, the public sector must continue to show it can meet the levels of digital and service design competence shown by the best commercial tech platforms. That does not mean applying commercial startup practices like-for-like - it means applying the best of modern design and digital practice to the public sphere, and reorganising the work of government to deliver it. If the state does not re-engineer itself in this way, as the big commercial platforms have so relentlessly done, then it risks never repairing the legitimacy gap between commercial platforms and the state.

Later essays will look at specific mission areas, drawing from the principles set out in Platformland: an anatomy of next-generation public services, but this first essay looks at two things that should be front of mind for all teams working on missions. Specifically, how well-designed digital-age services can:

• eliminate administrative burdens for the public, public servants and businesses
• create new networks of people and organisations at very low cost.

Within each mission, how should government decide where to act, intervene or convene?

In the analogue age, the approach might have been to estimate the greatest financial savings that can be reinvested elsewhere. Or doubling down on shifting specific KPIs like reoffending rates. It might also place some big policy bets, or attempt a top-down reorganisation of the machinery of government in the hope of bringing misaligned parts of the public sector together.

Many of those have the lure of being ‘announceable’, but they are characterised by long lead times and long feedback loops. They are also policy-centric views of the world that don't adequately describe the lived experiences of what is and what is not working for the public, businesses and public servants.

In the digital age the answer is more subtle: using technology and digital-age design to systematically eliminate ‘administrative burdens’, one by one.

Administrative burden is the total cost to people and communities of dealing with bureaucracy. Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan from the University of Michigan define three types of cost that can create administrative burdens:

• Learning costs - knowing that a service exists in the first place. It’s difficult to apply for financial support if you don’t know that support exists.
• Compliance costs - the effort required to follow the rules. That might include filling out a form, attending an assessment, providing evidence or reporting changes of circumstances.
• Psychological costs - how the experience of using a service makes people feel. Do people’s interactions feel fair? Are they humane? Do they value the relationship? Is the subject, such as providing evidence of leaving the prison system, potentially shameful? The public don’t just care about outcomes, they care about how it makes them feel too. Given many of the mission areas will require trusted relationships with public services to effect change, how services make people feel and the quality of the relationships they create must not be overlooked.

Applied correctly, well-designed digital services can point us towards a future with radically reduced administrative burden. This is about more than what is commonly termed ‘red tape’, which tends to tie the narrow identification of a problem (too many rules), to a potential solution (the removal of said rules). But rules are not a problem if they are handled by a machine!

The opportunities to reduce administrative burden - to share the benefits of technology with the public, businesses and public servants - are better today than they have ever been. Digital services, designed in the right way, can expunge much of the faff and wasted effort from the system.

Learning costs can be reduced by enabling services to be more proactive - for example, notifying businesses when they are likely eligible for grants, or jobseekers of relevant training opportunities.

Compliance costs can be reduced by using existing data to pre-fill forms for the public and save time for public servants by giving them a clear picture of someone's circumstances. For example, saving business owners from entering the same information again and again when setting up a company, or social workers from having to understand each case from scratch. The automation of application processes can mean more applications are right first time - for example the creation of valid planning applications for solar panels or heat pumps. Digital credentials, issued through the GOV.UK Wallet, will let people and businesses prove their eligibility and status without resorting to emailing photographs of things like VAT certificates, Disability Living Allowance letters or proof of their right to work status.

Psychological costs can be reduced by letting people prove facts about themselves digitally, without the need to replay information again and again. Small changes to the language services use, and evidence-based choices of when to use face-to-face, video or digital communications could also make a difference to people's feeling of being understood. Psychological costs can also be reduced by designing systems that meet the needs of public servants, which in turn frees them up to deliver the types of outcomes that can only be achieved through relational public services. For example, ensuring that parents of SEND children, teachers, and educational psychologists spend their time discussing what matters most, not battling against poor quality case-management systems.

Applying approaches like the ones listed above systematically could add up to real change that the public, businesses and public servants start to notice.

In his speech, McFadden referenced increasing the number of disadvantaged families that Family Hubs can reach as an aim for the opportunity mission. An administrative burden approach to that might look at automating application processes, making changes to how services ‘speak’ to the public on leaflets and messages, or giving parents easier ways to prove their eligibility to access related services without having to retell their story.

For each mission, the aspiration should be something like the diagram below where burden reduces in both scale and frequency over time.

But for administrative burden to become the unifying currency for the missions requires an understanding of where those burdens lay - it needs to be measurable and measured. Not within the bounds of one department or other, but across the public and private sectors. That, in turn, requires the adoption of a clear, common definition of administrative burden. Fortunately, the government's recent Blueprint for Modern Digital Government sets out just that aspiration and the missions are the perfect place to start.

One point that needs underlining here, is that reducing administrative burden is not all about AI. There is a risk that ministers have painted themselves into a corner by positioning AI as the lone lever for change. But better-designed services can have a hugely transformational effect too. For example, Open Digital Planning - an open source project, originally seed funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, estimates that it can save local government planning officers up to 35% of the time spent carrying out initial checks on a case, and an average of 20% of time spent on assessing a planning application.

Where AI has a role to play, it will be as part of wider service redesign. There will likely be few public services that end up being 100% AI. Mission teams will need to see through the ‘AI fog’ and be bold in explaining to ministers and special advisors how they are using the full breadth of digital tools to remove administrative burdens.

Digital shouldn't just change how missions are delivered, it should change how the work is organised. In years to come, we’ll look back and realise that the most significant impact of digital for the work of the public sector was not efficiency, it was organisational. That’s because digital does not just make working across silos and building cross-departmental coalitions easier, it starts to reorganise those into something new. Something more networked. Networked services and networked organisations.

The change will look something like the diagram below, with more connections between more parts of the public sector emerging over time.

We saw this in action during the pandemic. Enabled by ‘common components’ like NHS Login and GOV.UK Notify, new public services were assembled by loosely joining together local government, the NHS, and central and devolved governments. Getting a Covid-19 test wasn't a service that was ‘created’ or ‘owned’ by a single part of the state, it was something emergent from a coalition of organisations and technology. It was a ‘composite service’ made from many parts.

There are other examples of networked service delivery too. The financial support social enterprise Lightning Reach semi-automates applying for cost-of-living grants from a wide range of central government agencies, local governments, energy providers and charities. Prescriptions that appear in the NHS App can also appear in the apps of high-street pharmacies, creating public and private ‘front doors’ into the same underlying service.

The true nature of this ‘rewired state’ is often missed in policy circles, in part because it is such a simultaneously radical and subtle change. Typically, policymakers have had to choose which layer of government is responsible for the ‘point of use’ delivery of a service. They have also had to choose between public, private or third-sector delivery of services. Historically, joint delivery such as PPP and PFI has been about ‘slicing and dicing’ responsibilities and funding, but ultimately services still had a single point of use.

In the digital age, ‘central vs local’ and ‘public vs private’ becomes central and local, public and private. That’s because a public service delivered locally, may make use of digital public infrastructure operated by central government. Commercial services can be built on that same infrastructure too. Teams working on missions need to recognise that, although they may be working to deliver a single service, there may be many ways for the public and organisations to engage with it.

In his speech, Pat McFadden mentioned temporary accommodation as a potential testing ground for the ‘test and learn’ approach. Today there are huge gaps in the data about temporary accommodation and costs are spiralling. What might a networked, real-time approach to exchanging information about temporary accommodation look like? One that was trusted by local authorities, housing charities and private providers?

In addition to creating more networked organisations and services, digital can create new networks of people too - what Clay Shirky in 2012 called “the power of organising without organisations”. The idealistic days of the internet’s teenage years may be long gone - the idea that the web might be a democratising, rather than centralising force, or that social networks would create positive social change seem laughable now. But that doesn't mean that Shirky's optimism was misplaced, only that the business models that became associated with social software were too often incompatible with those aspirations. Applying the potential of collaborative, social software within the public sector has the potential to succeed precisely because it has a more compatible value system and a clearer sense of purpose.

Again, there is a bit of AI fog to navigate here. The focus on developing professional practice in the public sector can be summed up in approaches like using AI to generate lesson plans or writing reports for social workers. But teams working on missions should also be asking how technology can create new connections between public servants, not just between public servants and AI. Can we imagine a future that is a bit more Wikipedia, a bit less ChatGPT, where knowledge pooled and new practices can become visible. As Nesta’s Ravi Gurumurthy put it: “there's a laboratory out there already we could be learning from”.

Because of the transversal nature of missions work, teams will find themselves needing to work in a more networked way too. Historically, the public sector has relied on hierarchical routes for public servants with a shared interest to connect. Meeting requests make their way up and down organisational hierarchies. Anachronistic constructs like ‘design authorities’ and ‘task forces’ attempt to spot weld or duct tape teams together, but are often remote for those delivering the work.

Networked thinking needs to be embedded in every mission and every project. The ethos needs to be one of contributing to, and building on, a common set of infrastructures and knowledge.

However, today, gov.uk/missions reads like a shiny brochure, rather than a place where work is happening. Government must position transparency as a multiplier of delivery. After all, you don't know what you don't know and who you don't know.

Teams will need to set themselves up like a modern open-source software project by working in the open. Working in the open creates opportunities for people across the public and private sectors with a shared interest in delivering the mission outcomes to understand and to connect.

Working in the open is not, as is sometimes misunderstood, about opening up personal data - it is about teams sharing the learnings as they go. There will likely be nervousness. The Daily Mail Test will be proffered as an excuse. People will suggest that every blog post is ‘edited by comms’. But these must be overcome because working in the open is a necessary part of a more networked public sector and, frankly, most people, least of all newspapers, won’t care. But for the people who do care, it will help them deliver and collaborate at scale.

If teams working on government missions apply these two approaches - systematically using technology and design to eliminate administrative burdens, and working in an unashamedly open, networked way - the government can start to show that the missions are truly delivering for the public.

Richard Pope is the author of Platformland: An anatomy of next-generation public services

Particular thanks to Nesta policy associate Tony Curzon Price for his helpful contribution.