Tony Blair’s Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) is one of the most successful and imitated UK civil service reforms. But it wasn’t until the arrival of ex-civil servant Zina Etheridge at Haringey LBC in 2013 that any one tried to imitate it in UK local government.
I joined PMDU in 2002 in its early days. When the PMDU’s founder Sir Michael Barber left in 2005, I became the interim head of the unit.
So I couldn’t resist the temptation to carry out an external evaluation of the first 18 months of the Corporate Delivery Unit (CDU) in Haringey LBC. I wanted to see if they could adapt the PMDU model and make it work in local government. After three months’ work I had my answer.
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