Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tollust. This week,

we're looking at public service reform and how important ministerial leadership is in driving

Whitehall transformation. We'll look at what this government can learn from those who've successfully

executed their vision, but why often driving change is so difficult.

With me to discuss that, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr Rebecca McKee,

senior researcher at the Institute for Government,

and lead author of a new paper on the role of ministers in public sector reform.

Alongside her is Charlotte Pickles, Chief Executive at the Restate Think Tank,

and a former special advisor to Ian Duncan Smith. And also alongside her is Charlotte Pickles, Chief Executive at the Restate Think Tank, and a former special

advisor to Ian Duncan Smith. And also alongside her is Baroness Simone Finn, Conservative Pier

and a former Downing Street Deputy Chiefs of Staff, as well as the founder and co-chair

of Francis Moore Associates.

So Rebecca, just starting with you, can you talk us through the idea behind the paper

and what the key learnings you think from the conclusions from this paper are?

What our report is doing is it isn't looking at necessarily how individual public services are

performing right now. I tend to leave that to my colleagues who do our excellent work on our

public service performance team, including our

annual performance tracker report, which I can give a shout out for. But what we do at this report

is we look at some of the things that are a bit more upstream, but still like vitally important.

So that's what ministers can realistically do to drive reform in very complex, very fragmented systems. And in doing that,

we looked at past examples of ministers who did actually manage to shift outcomes. So we've got Nick Gibbs

introduction of the phonics screening test, which was to improve reading standards and schools.

...