State of the State 2025
Researcher
‘State of the State’ is an annual flagship Re:State and Deloitte publication exploring the key issues and opportunities facing the public sector. It is based on exclusive polling, alongside more than 80 interviews with public sector leaders — providing both an insider’s view of public services, and a public view of their priorities, how those services are functioning, and their future expectations.
Yesterday, we were delighted to welcome Kate Josephs CB, the Chief Executive of Sheffield City Council; Lucy Fisher, Whitehall Editor at the Financial Times; Ed Roddis, the Director of Government and Public Services Research at Deloitte, and Professor Jonathan Slater, former Permanent Secretary for the Department for Education, for a panel event to preview the report’s findings.
Here are our three key takeaways:
The importance of skills and further education
- The polling shows that the public identifies education and skills as a crucial component for improving growth. Interviewees for the report pointed out how public sector skills shortages could hinder the Government’s ability to deliver on its missions. But for decades further education has been an afterthought for policymakers. The panellists discussed how education in Britain requires fundamental improvement, despite progress made by previous governments. They also raised questions about scale: greater devolution could be a vehicle through which to deliver skills and further education approaches that reflect the specific needs of local areas.
The burden of bureaucracy
- The panel also reflected on the frustration felt by public servants over the amount of time spent working through complex approvals in order to turn plans into action, and completing reporting requirements for funding which were duplicative and unnecessary. One of the challenges for the "rewired" state the Government wants to deliver is how to strip out layers of complexity and empower public servants to deliver, measuring their performance based on results instead of paperwork.
Importance of health and wellbeing for growth
- The polling asked what measures would deliver the most growth, with the public answering that the number one thing that needs to happen is improvements to health and wellbeing. The rise of the economically inactive population is an issue that the Government appears to be serious about addressing, and are promising to ensure cross-departmental work in this area. A key finding of the report is that mission delivery requires civil servants to “break away from the gravitational pull of their own departments in order to succeed in cross-departmental missions”. Operating outside of usual Whitehall siloes is essential to ensuring that health and wellbeing can be improved, but in a way that reduces economic inactivity and contributes to growth.
You can read the full report here!