What could the public sector look like in ten years’ time if we acted boldly and with vision today?

Whatever your generation, your working life will have seen you witness things that once seemed impossible: the digital revolution, the end of the Cold War, the rapid rise of China, and the dawn of AI.

As we sat down to write this final instalment of PA’s Decisive Decade series – of ten questions that will shape the next ten years – it was already evident how much had changed since the series began before last year’s UK General Election. Extrapolate that level of change and it becomes clear that the world will look very different by 2035.

The other articles in our series have examined the big questions that policymakers and public sector leaders will need to answer to be ready for this new world of change, challenge, and uncertainty. These included how to solve the UK’s productivity puzzle, how to make regulation a catalyst rather than a barrier to innovation, and how to transform transport on a constrained budget.

While the questions we’ve asked have felt vital, the answers to them have proven to be fiendishly difficult. That’s why, for our tenth and final question of the series, we’ve taken a step back to look at how the public sector needs to evolve to deliver.

We say ‘evolve’ because the elements to succeed all exist. The good news is that the public sector is often found to be innovative, purposeful, and resilient. The less pleasant news is that these characteristics are typically most conspicuous in a crisis, and less evident as a core strength leveraged every day.

Instead, these traits should be powering everyday public sector practice. Integral rather than improvised. Because it’s innovation, purpose, and resilience that will help us navigate the uncertain-yet-decisive decade ahead.

Embrace innovation

The basic premise of public service delivery has – quite rightly – been built on the foundation of reliability. Society – and politicians – rely on the success of systems such as health, transport, education, and defence. As a result, the culture of the public sector and Whitehall is often typified by caution: triple check, play it safe, take no chances.

The playbook doesn’t yet exist for new and evolving challenges like online misinformation; nor is there a set way to deploy AI for public good. Even long-held ambitions, such as the shift towards preventative policy, largely remain just that – ambitions.

If we want to solve problems that we haven’t had to solve before – or solve old problems with new solutions – we need innovation. Innovation around what we do, and in the way that we do it.

Look at organisations that perform exceptionally over a prolonged period, and you’ll see how innovation succeeds by being underpinned by adaptability. Innovation brings a constant search for new, better ways of doing things; adaptability the capacity to course-correct as information changes. And the two depend on each other: adaptability alone is drift, while innovation alone means that ideas can be ‘doomed to succeed’ – pushed through regardless of whether they’re right for the world or not.

When innovation is unlocked in the right way, with adaptability, the outcomes can be remarkable. Take space rockets. When NASA (and for that matter, the Soviet Experimental Design Bureau) launched the Space Race, they showed exactly this combination of experimentation, adaptation, and continual learning.

But once they got to the moon, things changed. NASA knew what worked and, not wanting to risk safety or performance, stuck to it. Then came new companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, with an approach built around learning, not certainty. For many years, their launches were messy and bruising. But over time, the lessons led to vastly improved capabilities that would never have come about using traditional approaches.

Needless to say, innovation isn’t anathema to the public sector. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) successfully overhauled its online services – shifting from paper to digital licensing and vehicle tax renewal systems – saving £45 billion in the process. Or look at the NHS Test Beds programme. Here, tech companies and frontline NHS services were brought together to test innovations such as wearable health monitors and AI diagnostics. Running in live clinical environments, quick test-and-learn cycles are used to deliver more timely interventions, delivering more responsive and effective services that save the NHS money.

Yet such examples remain exceptions, not rules. Which is why there have been calls for government to “think more like a start-up” – where this kind of thinking becomes a core strength, not a temporarily flexed muscle.

Deliver purposefully

There is no getting around the fact that service delivery works better when citizens are engaged. A public health campaign for vaccinations or screenings will only work if people show up. A local transport network will only fulfil its purpose easily if service users are involved and able to communicate their needs to those planning it.

Long-term purpose is what keeps public services focused on what really matters, through all the operational and strategic changes that will inevitably come.

The public sector of the decade to come, even more than today, will therefore need to be clear on its long-term purpose – both to bring people along with them, and to ensure the effectiveness of services delivered at pace in a changing world.

Yet at present, the public sector too often gets mired in debate, not delivery. Some delays are necessary and unavoidable: civil servants need to unpick, and parliamentarians debate, the potential consequences of important new measures, intended or otherwise. But it’s all too easy to find examples of seemingly valueless delay. The smart meters rollout was announced in 2008, yet delays continue nationally, with fingers pointed at procurement, supplier coordination, and regulatory adjustments.

The result is that the speed of government administration – with some notable exceptions, such as issuing driving licences and passports – no longer matches the pace of people’s lives.

And despite the positives of the NHS App, many patients still need to call GP practices or visit in-person to access their full records.

Perceptions count here. When services lag expectations, or delays become systemic, trust erodes. The public judges performance by visible, purposeful outcomes, and time-to-impact. For this reason, policies can lose public support before they’ve had a fair run. Pace therefore isn’t just operational, it’s political. And pace is best delivered – and sustained – by a clear purpose.

The Vaccines Programme was a masterclass in how to deliver for a mission with momentum. Over more than 18 months, we collaborated with the Vaccines Task Force to shape, lead and, ultimately, deliver a range of projects that enabled the UK to launch one of the first and fastest vaccine rollouts in the world. The question is how widely and deeply the lessons from crisis-led programmes such as these can be learned and applied.

Public sector professionals will need more than just a mandate to change how they work. Systems must change too. There is much that could be done, for example, to streamline how procurement and governance work in many cases. And then there are the tools that enable faster delivery without sacrificing quality.

HMRC is already using AI for fraud detection – with Machine Learning flagging irregular claims in real time, reducing delays in legitimate payments and enabling faster interventions.

Hardwire resilience into everything

Resilience might risk sounding like an obvious aspiration. But true resilience is about more than the avoidance of utter collapse. It’s about being able to excel despite imperfect conditions.

Such disruptive conditions are hardly uncommon in modern government, and they’re only likely to become more intense, interconnected, and interminable over the decade ahead. Whether it’s sudden threats like pandemics, cyberattacks, or economic shocks, or the relentless pressure from climate and social change, the systems we rely on are under increasing strain.

Public sector leaders will inevitably need to tackle problems without the resources and preparation they would like. And while the public sector tends to perform admirably in a crisis, it shouldn’t take the dopamine hit of disruption for resilience to come to the fore. Success is far more likely if resilience is hardwired into the organisational DNA, and designed into every service, system, and decision.

Building a resilient public service is a hard task, particularly when the most obvious lever – budgeting for excess capacity – is unlikely to be available. But it is possible in other ways.

For example, public sector leaders can plan for long-term risk rather than just short-term delivery. This goes beyond enumerating what could go wrong, but also asking how you can keep functioning if the most unlikely items on your risk register come to pass.

Risk should also feature more prominently in frameworks for policy design and funding, as they already do for supply chain decisions. For example, the risk of digital exclusion should consistently feature in all service digitalisation plans, with inclusive design principles such as co-creation outlined in response.

At a more strategic level, government can prioritise investments in infrastructure and services that are flexible, sustainable, and interoperable. The Local Government Reorganisation funding models serve as a good example here, with some councils now adopting cloud-based casework and modular platforms that allow faster pivots during emergencies or policy changes.

Government can also devolve capability to local areas and regions. This can boost capacity in the system – if empowered to do so, regional authorities can step in when national systems are stretched, rather than just the other way around.

As an additional benefit, a place-based response to unexpected challenges is likely to be both more effectively targeted and faster to deliver, because it’s closer to the frontline. Case in point: Greater Manchester’s devolved health and care model, which enables local coordination and faster action on mental health and homelessness than national systems could have delivered.

A renewed public sector

Throughout this series, we’ve surfaced the big questions that policymakers will need to address to be ready for the decisive decade ahead.

To deliver, the public sector will need the ability to go further and faster across a range of priorities that often transcend traditional departmental briefs. Innovation will provide the capacity to evolve and improve to address these priorities. Purpose will restore and sustain momentum while rebuilding public trust. And hardwired, always-on resilience will ensure that reform endures, even through future disruption.

Doubters may say that such qualities don’t exist in the public sector, or somehow can’t. But the public sector receives more criticism, and less praise, than it deserves. Such pessimism also ignores an impressive catalogue of achievements. Whether it’s the response to the 7/7 terror attacks or the COVID-19 pandemic, national emergencies have brought out capabilities that many public servants didn’t realise were there.

In doing so, the public sector can be recognised and lauded as a great national asset, a competitive advantage for British business, and an enabler of full lives for its citizens.