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Last updated: 17 November 2008
In March 1999, the Modernising Government White Paper announced that the Performance and Innovation Unit would undertake a project directed at '...identifying the key future challenges that government will have to face. This work was to help Departments and other organisations to look beyond their existing policies towards the Government's long term goals'. The PIU 'strategic challenges' team was assembled in August 1999. It was subsequently superceded by a strategic futures team (further details below).
The impetus for the original project was clear: a belief that on the one hand, government policy should be based on a consistent long-term strategy; and on the other, it should be prepared for new problems and be able to take advantage of new opportunities. In order to do this, the government had to understand the way the world was changing, the drivers of these changes and their likely implications for policy. The aim was therefore to identify some of the key challenges - both threats and opportunities - which the UK government was likely to encounter over the next 10 to 20 years.
Project approach
The first step in identifying future challenges was to gather ideas about what the world might look like over the next 10 - 20 years. The research drew on the enormous range of forecasts, predictions and scenarios for the coming decades, produced both within the public sector and by business. The team also talked to experts and looked at some past 'futures' exercises to get an idea of the pitfalls; and looked at a range of scenarios constructed by government and the private sector to get a feel for the range of possible future worlds. Based on this research, six key forces driving change were identified:
The next step was to look at how the drivers of change and key trends might impact - in very broad terms - on government objectives. A simplified matrix of drivers and objectives was used to draw up five sets of issues for further work:
These five broad issue areas formed the basis for five full-day workshops (one on each of the issue areas) with senior civil servants, academic experts, business people and others.
The output from the workshops was a list of policy challenges.
The Strategic Futures project, set up in November 2000, took forward the above work, and other issues.
As part of the project, research was conducted on cross-cutting issues affecting government's policy makers:
Other initiatives carried out by the team included: strategy papers on various topics and a series of Strategic Thinkers seminars covering such topics as 'workforce development', 'future structures of central governments' and 'risk'.
Report: The Future and How to Think About It (pdf, 1,030kb) This paper explores six key drivers of change which will impact on government over the next decades. This was the result of early work by PIU and was conducted in 1999.
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