This report is part of a series looking at how the centre of government in the United Kingdom, particularly Whitehall, needs to change to improve the quality of public services at the front line. The report considers the reforms needed to build a state that is more responsive to the diversity of citizens’ needs and the barriers that are hampering reform at scale. It makes the case for reform to enable the government to “mode shift” and work in different ways to achieve different outcomes.

This report makes the case that the British state needs to be able to shift modes and deliver in different ways using different models, depending on which method works best for the citizen. Government delivery needs to become multimodal, but it is currently held back by its unipolar architecture. Until this architecture is redesigned to accommodate a multipolar approach to public administration, attempts at broadening how the state delivers public services will continue to collapse back into the logic of markets, metrics and outputs over outcomes. It would also help resolve some of the misplaced tensions between different reformers who back different approaches, within and around government.