Strategy
The creation of Defra’s policy lab – a new strategic capability that evaluates early ideas before they become policy to ensure they will deliver the required outcomes and provide value for taxpayers.
Economic and geopolitical shifts, combined with competition for government resources, have put UK government departments under immense pressure. They need to drive economic growth while providing better outcomes for citizens, at lower cost and with fewer resources.
The Department of Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) is responsible for designing policies that protect our environment, sustain rural communities and support farming and fishing industries. But how to know which policies to prioritise and what will work best in such a complex policy space involving environmental ecosystems and global trade?
Frog, part of Capgemini Invent, worked with the Farming & Countryside Programme (FCP) within Defra, to co-design the department’s first policy lab. The lab tests emerging ideas before they become policy, arming senior civil servants and ministers with evidence that, if adopted, a policy would deliver maximum outcomes while providing value for taxpayers. This avoids adopting ineffective policy that could result in expensive multi-year delivery projects, which haven’t been proven to deliver value.
Policy labs exist in wider government, but predominantly to help with policy delivery, not to inform policy thinking itself. The Defra lab is different, interrogating whether policy ideas are even focussing on the right problem to solve, or whether policy teams should explore other solutions before multi-million-pound delivery budgets are committed.
frog consultants first created a business case for the lab, winning backing of FCP executives. Next, they designed the operating model, based on interviews with cross-government lab teams, taking the best elements of each, to build a new optimised model, placing Defra’s lab upstream in the strategy and policy team.
frog then aligned senior policy, delivery and operations stakeholders behind a new vision, mission and value drivers for the lab. These value drivers enabled frog to design a prioritisation tool, allowing the lab’s team to assess which of the policy proposals submitted would yield the greatest strategic impact if taken on by the policy lab team.
Next the team turned to the lab’s policy hypothesis testing process, designing clear research methods, workflow and tooling for the lab to operate. The team used a sprint-based model to quickly share the outcomes and evidence of the lab’s approach.
This approach created an audit trail of robust evidence to validate and prove the lab’s thinking every step of the way. The processes they put in place removed barriers in the transition from policy to delivery, breaking the cycle of unnecessary fire-fighting in delivery by better problem-solving upstream.
Finally, frog drew up recommendations to scale up the lab’s strategic approach into wider policy-making across Defra.
The lab is a proof-of-concept for a new strategic approach to policy-making, demonstrating that user-centred design methods can be integrated into policy at the earliest stages, leading to better outcomes for policy-makers and the public, while improving efficiency.
As scaled, this strategic approach can deliver huge internal efficiency and productivity gains to government, and if adopted as the de-facto approach would even inform the Treasury budgeting process.
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