Pat McFadden also confirmed that ministers will be told they need to find more efficiency savings in their departments in the spending review starting this week.

In his speech he said:

At the recent budget, the chancellor demanded efficiency and productivity savings of 2% across departments, and there’ll be more to come.

As we launch the next phase of the spending review, at its heart must be reform of the state in order to do a better job for the public.

According to a story by Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times yesterday, ministers will be told they need to find 5% efficiency savings. Shipman said:

On Tuesday a letter will land on the desk of every cabinet minister from Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the Treasury, announcing the start of the public spending review, which will decide precisely how the government spends taxpayers’ money for the next two years.

It will demand three things: first, that ministers spend money on things the public actually cares about to demonstrate they are on the side of voters. Second, that they tackle waste. Every department will be told they need to find 5% savings from waste and inefficiencies. Third, that they reform public services to make them more productive and get better value for money for the taxpayer. “We cannot keep paying more for poor performance,” Jones writes.

In his speech this morning Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, channelled Dominic Cummings when he said he wanted to see “innovators and disrupters” working for the civil service.

He said:

You might remember a few years ago, there was a call for weirdos and misfits in the system.

Well, whatever term you want to use, we do want innovators and disrupters and original thinkers.

My message to creative thinkers is this is your chance to serve your country, use your brain power, your technological talents, to fix some of the biggest problems we face today.

Britain needs you, and if you choose to serve I want government to empower you to help us deliver, to move fast and build things.

There are more details of the speech in the Cabinet Office news release here. It includes details of how the “test and learn culture” approach McFadden is proposing will be be tried first with two projects, operating in Manchester, Sheffield, Essex and Liverpool and covering family support and temporary accommodation.

Q: [From Alex Wickham from Bloomberg] Do you think you will be able to learn from Elon Musk and the Doge (Department of Government Efficiency) review he is doing for Donald Trump? And has there been any outreach to him from the government?

McFadden said:

Let’s see how he gets on.

I was around in the government last time, and we brought in various people from the business world to help out. Some of them were an enormous success, made great ministers, did great things. Some others less so. Let us see what he can do.

One thing that’s clear is, in the technological world and in the industrial world, he’s been an incredible innovator, and he’s managed to do things in new ways. So let us see how that works out.

In terms of specific outreach to them, not that I’m aware of. But I think it will be interesting to follow what happens.

This was relatively positive, given what Musk has been saying about Keir Starmer, and Britain under Labour, on his X platform in recent months.

The Conservative party has dismissed the government’s announcement about civil service reform (see 9am and 9.31am), saying what matters is cutting the size of the state. In a response to the Cabinet Office overnight briefing on Pat McFadden’s speech, Richard Holden, his Tory shadow, said:

The bureaucracy of the British state urgently needs cutting back, which is why at the general election we had a plan to reduce it to pre-Covid levels, plans Labour opposed.

Everything Labour has done so far has been to swell the size and cost of the state, on the backs of workers, pensioners, farmers and family businesses across the country.

Starmer urged to protest about executions in Saudi Arabia when he meets crown prince

Patrick Wintour

Keir Starmer is being urged to raise the execution of more than 300 people in Saudi Arabia this year when he meets the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman today to seek Saudi investment in the UK.

Starmer was scathing when Boris Johnson failed to raise the issue of Saudi executions when he visited the Kingdom in 2022, and so far none of the pre publicity for the trip issued by Downing Street makes any reference to human rights.

When Johnson visited Saudi Arabia in 2022, Starmer as Labour leader accused Johnson of “going cap in hand from dictator to dictator”.

Number 10 said the focus of the visit is sealing joint green energy projects that will bring jobs to the north-east, but the prospects of a ceasefire in Gaza, normalisation between Israel and Saudi Arabia as well as the future of the Houthis in Yemen will also be raised.

Starmer has also been visiting the United Arab Emirates, one of the countries in the Middle East closest to Syria’s toppled President Bashir al-Assad.

The total of 304 executions in 2024 in Saudi Arabia exceeds the record of 196 set in 2022. Analysis by Reprieve suggests less than half of those executed had been sentenced for lethal offences, including 79 foreign nationals executed for non lethal drug offences. In total nearly 40% of those executed were foreign nationals. In normally uncompetitive elections, Saudi Arabia lost its bid for a seat on the 18 strong UN Human Rights Council in October when it came last in an election for five regional seats.

The country’s own human rights commission has largely focussed on improvements to women’s rights.

In interviews with western media, including Time and the Atlantic, the crown prince has promised to abolish the death penalty for all but the most serious offences.

Commenting on Starmer’s visit Taha al-Hajj, legal director of the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights, commented:

Each time a world leader visits Saudi Arabia and says nothing about the bloodbath taking place in the Kingdom’s prisons, the executioner sharpens his blade. The families of men and women on death row tell us they are more terrified than ever, desperately hoping that someone with influence will speak up before it is too late for their loved ones. Many of the execution victims have committed no act of violence themselves: these killings flout international law and break the crown prince’s own promises.

Reprieve has been highlighting two cases Abdullah al-Derazi and Adbullah al-Howaiti who were both sentenced to death for offences allegedly committed when they were still children. Both were subjected to torture that was used to secure false confessions used against them in court.

Reprieve deputy executive director Dan Dolan commented:

When Boris Johnson visited Mohammed bin Salman in 2022, three days after the mass execution of 81 people, Sir Keir Starmer was rightly scathing of Johnson’s unconditional embrace of one of the world’s most prolific executioners of protesters. Now he is the prime minister, he has the opportunity to address the escalating execution crisis in Saudi Arabia. If he publicly raises the cases of child defendants Abdullah al-Howaiti and Abdullah al-Derazi when he meets with the crown prince, he could save their lives.

Last week Keir Starmer was criticised for suggesting, in his Plan for Change speech, that some civil servants are happy indulging in the “tepid bath of managed decline”.

In an interview with Sky News this morning, asked why the government was picking a fight with the civil service, Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, insisted that this was not the case. He said:

I’m praising the civil service today. I think we’ve got a lot of good people caught in bad systems.

Explaining why he wants the civil service to adopt a tech startup approach to delivering services, he said:

And the point I’m making today is that we’ve got huge change in the private sphere. If we think about all the companies we use and rely on, Airbnb or Spotify or WhatsApp - [they] didn’t even exist 20 years ago. They’ve changed our lives.

Has the government changed, the way it thinks about delivering services changed at the speed of the private sphere? It hasn’t. So we’ve got to take the learning from what’s happening in the private [sector].

Asked to give an example, McFadden replied:

When they started developing the universal credit system, they spent hundreds of millions of pounds doing it in the old Whitehall way. You issue a policy paper, you have lots of committees, lots of meetings, and they got nowhere.

What they did after that was they took the process out of the department, put together a small team of about 30 people, policy people, tech people, frontline workers, said, ‘Let’s do this small, we don’t have to do it for the whole country at once, let’s test this in a really small way and see if it works.’

They did that in Sutton. Then they rolled it out a bit more, and a bit more.

It’s what we call the test and learn approach where you don’t have to design everything from scratch. You test, you learn. You allow for some failure in the system. You don’t get panicked by that. You learn from that.

I want to see that approach adopted more in policy in the the future.

Some of McFadden’s colleagues may not find this example encouraging. While the decision to roll out universal credit gradually, in the way McFadden describes, not as a single ‘big bang’ reform, was generally seen as sensible, the project (an enormous reform undertaking) was nevertheless beset by problems, and rollout has taken more than a decade.

Good morning. Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch have both spoken about their desire to completely “rewire” the way the British state operates. Badenoch has not said much about how this might happen (although she has spoken about wanting the state to do less, implying not so much a rewiring of the state as a complete removal of some of the wiring instead). And Starmer has not given a detailed vision of what rewiring might involve either, but this morning Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, will give a speech providing the answer, or at least one answer.

As Eleni Courea reports in her overnight story, McFadden will say the government will ask officials managing public service delivery to operate as if they are running a tech startup.

If the overnight press briefing is anything to go by, this will be bad news for civil servants who enjoy writing erudite policy documents. The Cabinet Office says:

‘Crack’ teams of problem solvers will be deployed to improve public services and support delivery of the Plan for Change. Made up of a mix of people working in partnership to drive change - with data and digital skills, policy officials, and frontline workers, they will be given the freedom to experiment and adapt - adopting the ‘test and learn’ mindset of Silicon Valley.

Instead of writing more complicated policy papers and long strategy documents, the government will set the teams a challenge and empower them to experiment, innovate and try new things.

In his speech McFadden will say he wants civil servants to adopt a “test and learn culture”. Explaining what this means, McFadden will say:

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.

McFadden will say the government will start this approach with two smallish projects, before rolling it out more widely. He will say that, while “each of these projects is small”, they could ‘rewire the state one test at a time”.

McFadden has been doing an interview round this morning, and I will post more from what he has been saying about this in those exchanges shortly. But inevitably the interviews have been dominated by Syria. McFadden confirmed that the government is considering whether Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist group which has taken over Syria, should remain proscribed in the UK as a terrorist organisation. HTS says it has changed since it emerged some years ago as an al-Qaida offshoot. There will be some discussion of Syria here on the blog, but most of our coverage will be on our Middle East crisis live blog.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10am: Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, gives a speech on the civil service and public sector reform.

Late morning (UK) time: Keir Starmer arrives in Riyadh for a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. Earlier he was in the United Arab Emirates for a meeting with its president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Afternoon: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is in Brussels for a meeting with EU finance ministers. As Mark Sweney and Phillip Inman report, she will say she wants a “mature, business-like relationship [with the EU] where we can put behind us the low ambitions of the past and move forward, focused instead on all that we have in common”.

2.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

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