Keir Starmer – a man without a plan

More than one civil servant has noted the assessment is largely true, and during the last Conservative government, civil servants got used to hearing much worse about themselves from their ministerial masters.

The actual gripe from those interested in policy is more technical – it will take a bit of unpicking here – but speaks to much bigger potential problems for the government. Essentially, officials and those who track policy and delivery are worried that Keir Starmer is throwing out plans about what the country actually needs in favour of a series of pledges that can go on political posters and leaflets.

There’s only one “technical” distinction that’s important for what follows and it’s this – when discussing government policy, they tend to refer to inputs, outputs, and outcomes. These are best differentiated with examples, but in broad terms the government has direct control over inputs, and these hopefully connect fairly predictably to outputs, but it’s the outcomes that really matter (and, we think, that the public really care about).

So on healthcare, a promise to recruit 5,000 more doctors would be an input. Similarly, saying that you’re intending to make sure that almost every patient who needs an operation gets it within 18 weeks would be an output (one which you’d hope hiring more doctors would help). But the outcome you want from that might be higher public satisfaction with the NHS – or it might be rising life expectancy, or falling number of people unable to work due to sickness.

The point of Labour’s flagship five missions were that they all focused on actual outcomes – the bit that directly affects voters. They weren’t immediately quantifiable in the way that hiring X many doctors or police would be, but they were about actually delivering better services, or boosting better growth.

What’s more, they weren’t particularly focused on the politics of the whole thing: they weren’t an attempt to repeat Labour’s famous 1997 pledge card. Instead, the party had brought in a veteran policy expert from the Blair era, Peter Hendry, to formulate the missions with the goal of using them to focus Whitehall on its priorities.

The idea was that the missions would have enough political backing to give civil servants certainty as to what Number 10 thought was important, and that would serve as a counterweight to the Treasury – which by default seeks to cut costs in the short-term above virtually all other priorities. Labour’s theory of the case is that it has to actually deliver for voters, and the missions were supposed to be the vehicle for making that happen.

Labour’s first few months in government showed there was less to the missions than civil servants had hoped (though the IFS’s Paul Johnson had noted the missions were flawed too – one called for the UK to have the strongest growth in the G7, meaning it was reliant on what other countries did, for example).

But the launch of the milestones quietly all but junked the approach for “a grab bag of policies that would make good election posters,” as one senior civil servant put it. There is no consistency between the milestones – the one on policing governs inputs, promising 13,000 additional officers. Some target outputs, such as 1.5 million homes or a return to an NHS target on waiting times, while some still target outcomes.

What’s worse for the wonks is that some of Labour’s new milestones directly contradict what the government had said it would do just weeks or months before. Health secretary Wes Streeting commissioned an urgent review into the NHS by Lord Darzi which said the government must urgently increase spending in the community and in GP surgeries to tackle the UK’s health crisis – and the government said it would follow the report’s recommendations.

The new milestone on health, though, is focused entirely on bringing down hospital waiting lists, and will require virtually all of the new funding available to the NHS to go into hospitals – leaving nothing for the thing this government said was most important. It is as blatant a policy u-turn as it is possible to make.

The result is a policy blancmange, or at best a fudge. The government seems unable to decide what it actually thinks is important, and seems to be incapable of keeping to a decision for more than a couple of months at a time. Starmer’s director of campaigning was made his chief of staff, which has further confused short-term politics versus long-term delivery.

Neither civil servants nor policy analysts know whether the missions or the milestones are more important, or if something else will come along in a few months to supplant both. It is now widely accepted that Labour didn’t have a plan for government, but the fear now is that the party is incapable of making one now it’s in office.

Morale was at something of an all-time low towards the end of Rishi Sunak’s government, with officials tired after years of constantly shifting policy being accompanied with constant berating of their own performance. They were ready for a change and hoped that a new government would offer it.

Instead, they are increasingly resigned to more of the same. Keir Starmer has a landslide majority, a different electoral coalition to the one that sustained the Tories, and a ministerial team fresh from 14 years of opposition. Everything suggests he should be a breath of fresh air in the corridors of Whitehall. Instead, officials complain, things feel as stale and as staid as ever.