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

This week, after the PM's chief secretary, Darren Jones, set out plans to move fast and fix things,

we're asking, is it too late for this government to try and rewire the state ahead of the next election?

And how does wholesale transformation

to public services and the way Whitehall operates fit together with getting the so-called barnacles

off the boat in a slim down operation meant to be laser focused this year on improving the cost

of living? To answer those questions and much more on Labor's attempts at civil service reform,

and delight to be joined by Hannah Keenan, Associate Director at the Institute for Government and lead author of their Whitehall

Monitor 2026 report. Alongside her is Alexander Yossad, director of government innovation at the

Tony Blair Institute, and who co-wrote their recent paper on public service reform in the age of AI,

and Luke Sullivan, director at Headland Consultancy, who was Kirs Starrman's political director until the election, and a former spad in the age of AI. And Luke Sullivan, director at Headland Consultancy,

who was Kirstarmer's political director until the election, and a former spad in the cabinet office.

Hannah, I'll start with you. You're at Down Jones's speech this week. What were the kind of the

main themes that he was trying to get across? So I think he spoke about three kind of buckets of stuff in terms of reforming the state.

So the first was this idea that will have wholesale digital transformation of the state.

Everything will be sort of as easy to do as shopping online or on Amazon.

The second bucket of stuff is all about civil service reform.

And he had some pretty kind of solid concrete things.

He announced a new National School of Government and Public Service, which I think is really good.

And a few other bits about senior civil service, some stuff on performance management that we might come to where good language, questionable, kind of how much that's actually going to buy.

And then your third bucket that you went quite hard on is this idea of setting up a whole suite of task forces, these kind of little crack teams that are going to like

bust through the most difficult problems of the state. But they don't know what those are yet.

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