Under Keir Starmer’s leadership, Labour has put the concept of ‘missions’ at the heart of its programme for government. At Demos, we are excited by the potential of this agenda to sustain prioritisation of long-term policy objectives and drive innovation by focusing on outcomes which will benefit the whole country.
Central government correctly recognises it cannot achieve missions on its own. This is especially the case because, as we showed in the first paper of this series, Mobilisation Nation, the Labour government’s missions are socioeconomic in nature, not technological. Socioeconomic missions, even more so than technological missions, require mass mobilisation.
In this second paper, supported by Serco and NCVO, we argue for an overarching shift from ‘government missions’ towards ‘shared national missions’ to harness the power of collective action. To address the barriers to cross-sectoral mobilisation, we propose a series of ‘enabling reforms’ so that all actors – different tiers of government, businesses and trade unions, civil society and citizens – can rally around delivering the national missions.