Guy Lodge suggests that Michael Barber's new book on public service reform provides a blueprint for the new administration

Instruction to Deliver: Tony Blair, Public Services and the Challenge of Achieving Targets
Michael Barber
Politico’s, 320pp, £19.99

The Blair years have been marked by a relentless focus on public service reform, with ‘delivery’ becoming the signature tune of the government’s domestic agenda. Sir Michael Barber’s new book offers by far the most insightful account of what – and crucially – how Blair set out to renew public services. Helpfully, he also provides a compelling manifesto for future change, setting out a clear blueprint for the incoming administration.

This is a book about how to get things done in government. Delivery, it explains, is rarely sexy, it’s about routine and hard work. And it was the Delivery Unit, under Barber’s leadership, that put the routines in place and helped achieve the transformation of core aspects of our public services.

The Delivery Unit is rightly considered the most important innovation in British government in the last decade. Some wrongly think of it as the bossy bit of the centre, endlessly prying and nagging departments. Of course it wasn’t afraid to say where improvements could be made, but it did so constructively and in a spirit of collaboration. Importantly, Barber elaborates a theory of power that shows it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, in which there are winners and losers. Instead, power is about relationships, and once you get these right, all sides are empowered.

In outlining the next stage of reform, Barber is right to recommend the creation of a new Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The current arrangements are ineffective. The Cabinet Office is a ragbag department made up of a muddle of alphabet units that lack cohesion and direction. And contrary to much prevailing wisdom, Number 10 is not well equipped to lead the government. Of course it exercises a great deal of informal power, but this in itself often makes for poor interventions.

Some will complain that such a move would act as a further step towards establishing a ‘presidential’ system in the UK. But it is the informality and opaqueness of the current arrangements that undermine confidence and the lack of coordination that militates against effective administration.

Pack this alongside the Campbell diaries for your summer reading. They need to be read together.