With a new government and a new mandate for change, Wales must do things differently over the coming months to deliver change that can be felt by the public.

The government has inherited significant challenges: pressure on the NHS, rising demand for local services, tighter budgets and growing expectations from the public.

But it has also inherited something else: the chance to rethink and reset how government works.

For years, public service reform in Wales has focused heavily on what government should deliver: housing, health, care, transport.

Far less attention has been paid to how change is delivered.

That matters more than ever.

Wales needs a modern approach to delivery

Across the public sector, many organisations are still working in ways that were designed for a different era.

Large programmes take years to plan and procure before anything reaches the public. Teams work in silos. Technology is bought before the problem is fully understood. Different organisations solve the same problems separately.

The result is familiar:

  • services that are difficult to use
  • duplication across organisations
  • systems that are expensive to change
  • frontline staff relying on workarounds to keep things moving

Wales has talented, committed people working across government, councils, health boards and public bodies.

But the problem is that many teams are operating inside systems that make good delivery harder than it should be.

We only need to look at other government organisations like Government Digital Service (GDS) and Scottish Government’s digital directorate for inspiration.

Services like GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay were built as shared public infrastructure that multiple teams and organisations could reuse, rather than each department buying or building separate systems from scratch. That reduced duplication, improved consistency and helped teams deliver services more quickly.

The same thinking could help Wales reduce waste and collaborate more effectively across public services.

Poor delivery creates hidden costs

When services are confusing, people need more support to use them.

When systems do not join up, staff spend time manually re-entering information.

When policy is developed without understanding operational reality, frontline teams inherit complexity that becomes expensive to manage later.

These costs rarely appear clearly on spreadsheets or business cases. But they add up across the system.

Small inefficiencies, repeated thousands or millions of times, become major financial pressures.

Workarounds create hidden costs too. When systems do not share basic information, staff are forced into manual processes just to keep services running.

In social care, workers often spend hours contacting providers to find available placements, understand costs, or check eligibility because no shared data platform exists. These workarounds drain time, delay support, frustrate users and staff, and create costs that are rarely visible.

Over time, people become resigned to systems everyone knows are broken, but no one expects to improve.

Perhaps the greatest hidden cost is that poor delivery prevents people from experiencing the intended benefits of policy at all — eroding trust in both public services and political leadership.

That is why delivery matters.

Better ways of working already exist

This is not about chasing trends or importing ideas that do not fit Wales.

More modern approaches to service delivery are already well established across high-performing public organisations around the world.

Small multidisciplinary teams. Continuous improvement. Designing around user needs. Testing ideas early before investing heavily. Working openly and learning quickly.

Wales already has examples of this approach too.

The Centre for Digital Public Services (now Digital Public Services Wales) has helped organisations across Wales test modern delivery methods. The Welsh Revenue Authority has worked openly while developing services and policy. Councils in Gwent are collaborating to share digital capability and reduce duplication.

The challenge now is scale.

These bright spots of good practice need to become “the way things are done around here” if we want to avoid falling further behind.

This is about building a stronger Welsh public sector

Modernising public services is often framed as a technology challenge.

In reality, it’s an organisational one.

The biggest opportunity is creating the conditions for teams to work better with:

  • clearer ownership
  • joined-up teams
  • faster learning
  • simpler processes
  • stronger operational understanding
  • better use of public money

This approach becomes even more important during financial pressure.

Every avoidable delay, workaround, duplicated process or confusing interaction creates downstream cost somewhere else in the system.

Improving how services are designed and delivered helps government respond faster, reduce waste and build public trust.

Wales is well placed to lead

Wales has advantages that larger systems often struggle to replicate.

It is small enough to collaborate. Small enough to test new approaches quickly. Small enough to bring together policy, design and delivery around shared national priorities.

That creates real potential.

The new Welsh Government has an opportunity to build a more confident, capable and modern public sector. One that:

  • learns continuously
  • designs services around real needs
  • supports staff to do their best work
  • spends public money more effectively
  • earns trust through delivery

Because the future of Welsh public services will depend not only on what government wants to achieve, but on how effectively it can deliver change in practice.

A simple place to start: spend time with the people delivering services day to day. Ask what slows them down, what they duplicate, and what they have stopped expecting to improve. The answers will usually tell you where transformation is most needed.