Mode Shifting: Whitehall reform that liberates public services to shift between transactional and relational delivery modes

This paper forms part of Demos’s Powering Public Service Reform programme, which looks at how the centre of government, particularly Whitehall, needs to change to achieve that shift and improve the quality of public services at the front line.

This paper considers the reforms needed to build a state that is more responsive to the diversity of citizens’ needs and considers the barriers that are hampering reform at scale. It makes the case for reform to enable the government to “mode shift” and work in different ways to achieve different outcomes.

Previous reports in the programme have examined the cultural and narrative shifts needed and the most recent paper, Powering Prevention, set out a suite of measures which, if taken together, help develop a funding architecture that shifts resources towards preventative measures. Forthcoming work will reflect on how AI can be incorporated into public services without jeopardising either citizen trust in the service or in ways that undermine outcomes.