How Starmer wants to sharpen Whitehall is unclear

Good morning. From missions to milestones: Keir Starmer has refined down his government’s focus to six new (or newish) targets. He also used his speech yesterday to argue that the machinery of Whitehall itself needs to be reformed to deliver that agenda. My thoughts on that in today’s newsletter.

The joy of six

My first thought about Keir Starmer’s new milestones is that they look incredibly expensive:

• Raising living standards in every region of the UK, as part of the government’s aim to deliver the highest sustained economic growth in the G7

• Building 1.5mn homes in England

• A named police officer for every neighbourhood in England and Wales, with the recruitment of 13,000 additional officers, Police Community Support Officers and special constables

• Ending hospital backlogs to meet the NHS target that 92 per cent of patients in England wait no longer than 18 weeks for elective treatment

• Increasing the proportion of five-year-olds in England who are “ready to learn” when they start school, to a record 75 per cent

• Delivering “at least 95 per cent of low carbon generation by 2030” (this dilutes a pre-election pledge that the UK would “run on 100 per cent clean and cheap power” by that year)

Between them it is difficult to see how they can be accomplished without either further tax rises or deeper cuts to the spending departments whose efforts are not focused on the “milestones” or a bit of both.

I had forgotten until Lucy mentioned it on the Political Fix podcast this week that in addition to the comprehensive spending review next year, the strategic defence review is likely to complete. It is highly likely the review will conclude that defence spending needs to rise, which will also put further pressure on the government’s spending plans. Negotiations over the comprehensive spending review, which will form much of the backdrop of the first half of 2025, could get quite acrimonious quite quickly.

My second thought is that what is missing here is any overarching theory of change. Starmer says Whitehall needs to reform and sharpen up to deliver his plan. That’s fine as far as it goes, but essentially, if you want to change how a system operates you need to change the incentives it operates with. What incentives does Starmer think need to change to improve how the civil service operates? What governing method or approach to modernising public services does he have?

When Tony Blair gave his first major speech on public sector reform in 1999 — now remembered for him saying he bore the “scars on [his] back” after two years trying to reform the UK’s public services — it was similarly not obvious what “reform” actually meant. Indeed in some outlets it wasn’t even the main story out of the speech. Here’s our report from 1999:

We now think of something very specific when we think of “Blairite” public sector reform — of choice and competition driving up standards, of league tables, essentially much of what underpinned the changes driven by Alan Milburn, Patricia Hewitt, Andrew Adonis, James Purnell but also Michael Gove.

But that wasn’t really what Blair had done at that point in 1999. Indeed when a few days later the FT (correctly) tipped that Milburn would be made health secretary, it was his success in dismantling the NHS internal market introduced by Ken Clarke that marked him out as a reformer:

In the end, what we now think of as “Blairite” reforms looked a lot more like the changes pursued by Clarke as health secretary and by a variety of departments under John Major, than those of the 1997 to 1999 period.

It may be that similarly, we look back at the various analyses — like my column in today’s paper, for instance — saying “Uh, where’s the vision, Keir?” — as ones that badly missed that this was the first step in what we would come to recognise as a “Starmerite” approach to reforming public services and Whitehall. Just as Blair’s “scars on his back” speech now seems much less like a bolt out of nowhere, we may look at this speech as the start of something.

But one reason why the Blairites had the time to find their feet and to develop a distinctive style is they had a benign fiscal inheritance from Major, a benign geopolitical context and a great economy. Starmer has none of those advantages and it may be that he doesn’t have anything like the flexibility or breathing space that Blair was able to enjoy to develop a proper theory of how to improve public services.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to John Harle playing Glazunov’s saxophone concerto while writing my column. I saw Jess Gillam play it last weekend alongside the London Philharmonia — she was terrific.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend.

Top stories today

• Gong watch | Labour mayor of London Sadiq Khan is to receive a knighthood in the New Year honours list, according to people briefed on the document. They said Commons foreign affairs committee chair Emily Thornberry, a long-standing Labour MP whom Keir Starmer dropped from his front bench team upon entering government, is set to be awarded a damehood, along with Patricia Hewitt.

• Adding up IHT | The UK’s largest 40 taxpaying estates paid an average of £9.2mn in inheritance tax in 2021-22, according to figures released under the freedom of information act, seen by the FT.

• Je Thames — Moi Non Plus | Thames Water has received a bid from Covalis Capital that would see France’s Suez flown in to help manage a break-up of the UK’s largest water utility before listing it on the stock market.

• Getting out of the ‘warm bath of empty promises’ | Keir Starmer told the BBC it is not his “plan” to have any more tax rises before the next election — but says he could not rule them out in the event of “unforeseen” circumstances.