Broken by Design and Beyond Repair: Why the UK Government Can’t Deliver and How to Fix It

Britain’s Welfare Reform Bill, a flashpoint in Parliament and civil society alike, is fast becoming a case study in how public trust in government collapses.

It’s not just that the bill will push 150,000 disabled people into poverty. Nor that it creates a morally incoherent two-tier welfare system. Nor even that the so-called Timms Review, meant to inform its direction, is arriving after decisions have already been made. It’s that all of this kind of error is now routine, and was under the previous Conservative Government also.

This isn’t an aberration, it’s the system functioning as designed. The same top-down, short-termist, fragmented policy machinery is driving crises in health, infrastructure, regional development, and economic planning.

The 10-Year NHS Plan, due this week, has been widely condemned before publication for failing to address the most basic systemic issues: workforce shortages, service integration, and funding realism.

Meanwhile, the Industrial Strategy, also due imminently, but after significant delay, is also roundly criticised even before publication, just like the industrial strategies under previous governments that were shelved almost as soon as they were published.

The UK is no longer suffering from bad policy. It is suffering from a governance crisis. And unless this changes, no amount of party-political manoeuvring will restore credibility.

This article lays bare how Britain’s policy infrastructure has broken down, and why a radically different approach, such as the Participatory Learning Network (PLN) model advocated by Paul Barnett of the Enlightened Enterprise Academy, may offer the best hope for recovery.

The Welfare Reform Bill: A Masterclass in Political Self-Harm

The Welfare Reform Bill has exposed the machinery of government at its most dysfunctional:

• Punitive in Impact: Despite late-stage tweaks, the bill still cuts support for new Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimants, effectively pushing tens of thousands into poverty. Disabled MPs like Marie Tidball have described it as an affront to dignity.

• Performative Consultation: The much-trumpeted Timms Review will conclude after legislative changes are passed. In other words: “We’ll ask you what you think, after we’ve already decided.”

• False Economies: Framed as a £5bn saving, the bill risks shifting costs to social care, mental health services, and homelessness budgets - classic silo thinking.

• Policy by Spreadsheet: The reforms are data-light, impact-blind, and ideologically brittle. There is little evidence they will help more disabled people into work.

• Reputational Suicide: For a Labour government elected on competence and compassion, the optics of harming vulnerable people while failing to engage meaningfully with their representatives is politically toxic.

This isn’t just about one bill. It’s about a policymaking culture unable, or unwilling, to listen, learn, or adapt.

Health and Growth Strategies: Missing in Action

The 10-Year NHS Plan, due for release this week, is already drawing fire from all directions. Health professionals warn that it fails to articulate a credible workforce strategy. With over 110,000 vacancies across NHS England and rising staff burnout, a strategic plan without clear targets for recruitment, training, and retention is not a plan, it’s a placeholder.

Equally concerning is its apparent reluctance to commit to concrete measures for integrating health and social care. After decades of structural fragmentation, NHS and social care systems continue to operate on parallel tracks, leaving patients, especially the elderly, falling through the cracks.

Early drafts of the plan have been criticised for offering platitudes over principles and buzzwords over blueprints. Health unions have described it as detached from the real pressures faced on the ground, particularly in primary care and community services. If confirmed, this would make it the third successive NHS strategy in a decade to sidestep implementation mechanisms in favour of vague directional intent.

Meanwhile, the UK’s long-promised Industrial Strategy remains trapped in bureaucratic limbo. The 2024 announcement promised a bold reset: to mobilise Britain’s comparative advantages in advanced manufacturing, green tech, life sciences, and artificial intelligence. Nearly a year later, the strategy remains unpublished, repeatedly delayed by internal wrangling and lack of Treasury alignment.

According to the National Audit Office’s March 2025 report, the Department for Business and Trade was unable to even list its active industrial support schemes, let alone coordinate them. This absence of strategic mapping renders effective targeting of support almost impossible.

Paul Barnett, drawing on Lord Sainsbury’s trenchant critique, argues that the civil service is not structurally equipped to deliver long-range economic planning. The result is policy theatre: announcements made without foundations, timelines, or delivery capacity.

The consequences ripple through the economy. Investment confidence suffers. R&D pipelines stall. Promising innovations are relocated to jurisdictions with clearer regulatory and funding frameworks. While other G7 economies, notably the US and Germany, aggressively pursue mission-oriented industrial strategies, the UK appears stuck in neutral.

Infrastructure strategy follows a similar pattern. The East Anglia 2 offshore wind project took an extraordinary 14 years to gain planning consent, a timeline that is not only inefficient but inimical to Britain’s climate goals.

Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), touted as a key pillar of Britain’s energy future, remain mired in procedural limbo. Meanwhile, even retail expansion has slowed to a crawl. Aldi recently reported that new store openings now take up to two years due to regulatory obstructions and appeal processes.

Britain’s economy is not being held back by a lack of vision. It is being choked by its own operating system. This is a system choking on its own process.

Levelling Up or Spinning Down?

The Levelling Up agenda, once marketed as a historic effort to rebalance Britain’s economy, now lies in tatters. The Public Accounts Committee has accused the programme of incoherence and ineffectiveness. Local authorities have spent millions bidding for funds governed by ever-changing rules. This competitive chaos rewards luck and lobbying, not strategic need.

Despite rhetoric around “devolution,” most power still rests in Westminster, doled out through conditional, opaque grants. Local leaders lack the autonomy, tools, or trust to shape meaningful change. As Barnett notes, true devolution requires not just budget lines. but agency.

The Real Problem: A System That Can’t Learn

What ties these failures together is not malice or incompetence, but design. Britain’s policy architecture is built for control, not collaboration. It functions on:

• Siloed Departments that fail to coordinate.

• Short-Term Horizons that treat policies as press releases.

• Adversarial Consultation that breeds resistance rather than consensus.

• No Institutional Memory, meaning new ministers restart from zero.

The result is a “doom loop” of announcement, delay, abandonment, and blame. And it’s costing Britain dearly, in public trust, investor confidence, and international standing.

Integrated Care Systems: A Revealing Example

“Joining up care leads to better outcomes for people. When local partners – the NHS, councils, voluntary sector and others – work together, they can create better services based on local need. Integrated care systems, (ICSs) have been set up to make this happen. Their aim is to improve health and care services – with a focus on prevention, better outcomes and reducing health inequalities.” This is how they are described on the NHS website.

Though it may sound like the ICSs were about realising the long-standing ambition of several government, to integrate health and social care, that was not the case. Even so integration at the level they are aiming for is proving to be a struggle.

Integration does not happen by wishing it so, particularly not within institutional structures built for separation, not synthesis. ICSs are currently hindered by entrenched silos, clashing performance incentives, incompatible data infrastructures, and the absence of a framework to facilitate ongoing stakeholder alignment.

Without a system capable of sustained, adaptive learning, the integrated care systems are at risk of becoming another well-intentioned failure.

ICSs need to evolve into Participatory Learning Networks, cross-sector ecosystems where stakeholders co-create strategy, share real-time feedback, and refine policy through collaborative cycles. Only then will integrated care live up to its promise: delivering coherent, person-centred services that adapt to population needs rather than bureaucratic dictates.

A New Model: Participatory Learning Networks

Paul Barnett, founder of the Enlightened Enterprise Academy and a long-time critic of technocratic inertia in UK policymaking, proposes a radically different framework: the Participatory Learning Network (PLN).

Unlike traditional policy tools or time-limited consultations, PLNs would be embedded, continuous systems for strategic governance. They operate as long-term, cross-sector learning infrastructures, helping institutions adapt policy through real-time insight and collective intelligence.

At their core, PLNs would reimagine how policy is generated, reviewed, and implemented. They institutionalise feedback loops, treat knowledge from citizens and frontline professionals as valuable strategic input, and reject the notion that policymaking can succeed in silos. PLNs should be designed to function across multiple time horizons, supporting both short-term delivery and long-term visioning.

These networks do more than advise, they co-produce. Their role is not to offer opinions from the sidelines, but to help shape and revise the design of public systems as part of an ongoing collaboration between government, industry, civil society, and academia.

A well-designed PLN could:

• Bring Together Stakeholders: Government departments, regulators, businesses, trade unions, academic experts, local authorities, and affected communities all have a seat at the table.

• Foster Adaptive Strategy: Policy does not stop at publication. It becomes a living strategy that evolves with the challenges it faces.

• Enable Systemic Intelligence: PLNs harvest insights from multiple domains to detect unintended consequences early and adapt before failure scales.

• Build Trust Through Inclusion: By allowing stakeholders to co-create solutions, PLNs reduce resistance, increase transparency, and promote legitimacy.

PLNs could be particularly powerful in situations characterised by uncertainty, complexity, and interdependence, hallmarks of nearly every major challenge Britain now faces, from AI governance to energy transition, regional inequality to social care reform.

In Towards a 21st-Century Statecraft, Barnett outlines the architecture of a National Policy Planning Framework (NPPF 2.0), grounded in the operational logic of PLNs. This framework would hardwire long-termism into Whitehall by:

• Establishing cross-departmental strategic objectives with statutory delivery milestones.

• Embedding PLNs within key sectors, health, welfare, infrastructure, and industry, as mechanisms for iterative design and stakeholder alignment.

• Mandating public reporting, independent evaluation, and citizen oversight to maintain transparency and accountability.

This is not a policy reform, it’s a systems redesign. One that shifts the role of government from issuer of directives to enabler of intelligence-led collaboration across society.

Case Study: Reimagining the Water Industry

In the article, Restoring Public Confidence in the UK Water Industry, Barnett explains how a Water Sector PLN could overcome the sector’s deep governance failures, fragmented regulation, poor public trust, and weak investment planning.

The same architecture could rescue other struggling systems:

• A Welfare PLN could co-design benefits policy with disabled communities and job services.

• An NHS PLN could help realise the aim of the Integrated Care approach that all political parties support, but it going to fail without a radically different approach.

• An Industrial Strategy PLN could align business, unions, and regional leaders around shared economic missions.

These are not utopian concepts. They are pragmatic structures designed to handle complexity, and restore credibility, confidence and trust.

A New Role for Government

PLNs would require a fundamental cultural shift in Whitehall. Government must move from top-down authority to strategic stewardship. That means:

• Creating the conditions for collaboration, not issuing orders.

• Investing in coordination and capacity, not just legislation.

• Building institutional memory, so each government doesn’t restart from scratch.

• Measuring success by trust and outcomes, not media cycles.

Angela Rayner’s override of the Environment Agency on Cambridge housing suggests ministers are willing to challenge the status quo. But gestures won’t be enough. What’s needed is a whole-of-system redesign.

Conclusion: Time to Govern Differently

Britain’s policymaking machine is broken. It cannot plan. It cannot deliver. And it cannot learn. Until that changes, every new welfare reform, NHS plan, or industrial white paper will land with diminishing credibility and impact.

Participatory Learning Networks could offer a different path, one rooted in humility, shared intelligence, and genuine co-creation. They promise not a single solution, but a better system for generating solutions.

The alternative is more of the same: reactive politics, policy drift, and declining faith in the very idea of public leadership. Britain doesn’t just need better policy. It needs a new political operating system. The time to build it is now.

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References

1. Barnett, P. (2025, June 8). Towards a 21st-Century Statecraft: The Need for a New Policy Planning Framework. Enlightened Enterprise Academy.

2. Barnett, P. (2025, June 3). Restoring Public Confidence in the UK Water Industry: How a Participatory Learning Network Could Deliver Long-Term Strategic Renewal. Enlightened Enterprise Academy.

3. Barnett, P. (2024, October 18). Government, governance, and leadership: systemic redesign is overdue. LinkedIn.

4. National Audit Office. (2025, March). The UK Government’s Approach to Industrial Strategy.

5. Institute for Government. (2024). Performance Tracker: Planning and Infrastructure.

6. Public Accounts Committee. (2024, December). Levelling Up: Implementation Failures and Delayed Disbursements. UK Parliament.

7. Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI). (2023). Survey of UK Regulatory Environment. https://www.abpi.org.uk/media/news-releases/2023/regulatory-barriers-in-uk-pharma

8. Rayner, A. (2024). Cambridge Housing Overrule Decision. Hansard Record. https://hansard.parliament.uk

9. Sainsbury, D. (2023). Windows of Opportunity: How Nations Create Wealth. Profile Books.

Revisions:

The section of the article talking about Integrated Care Systems was revised to correct a factual inaccuracy on the same day the article was first published.