When Keir Starmer announced his ‘measurable milestones’ yesterday, he called them ‘the most ambitious and credible programme for government in a generation’. But are they really so ambitious? Many of them sound remarkably similar to the missions in the Conservatives’ Levelling Up white paper, published just under three years ago – only less detailed and lacking a focus on improving the worst-performing areas of the country. Starmer has six milestones compared with the white paper’s 12 missions and 51 metrics.
On living standards, Starmer promised that they will be ‘higher in every region of the country’. Which sounds very much like the white paper promise that ‘pay, employment and productivity will have risen in every area of the UK’ by 2030 – as well the gap between the top-performing and other areas having closed.
To give every child the best start in life, Starmer wants 75 per cent of 5-year-olds starting school ready to learn by 2028, up from 67 per cent at the last count. The Levelling Up white paper target looked at what pupils achieve at the end of primary school rather than before they start, aiming for 90 per cent of children achieving the expected standard – as well as demanding that the third of worst-performing local authorities improve their results by at least a third too. When the white paper was published, the latest figures showed 65 per cent of pupils reaching the standard in 2019.
On homes, Starmer wants 1.5 million more in England over this parliament, while the white paper repeated the Tories’ aim of ‘delivering 300,000 new homes per year in England by the mid-2020s’ – which would mean 1.5 million every five years. The white paper also has ambitions for renters, saying that the number of non-decent rental homes should be 50 per cent lower by 2030 and that the number of first-time homebuyers should be higher in all areas of the country.
The latest crime target is 13,000 more neighbourhood police. Reports say that 3,000 of them will be new police officers, 4,000 will be new PCSOs, 3,000 will be new special constables and 3,000 will be police officers moved from other roles. (Labour also plans to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls within a decade.) The levelling up white paper metrics were reductions in the levels of neighbourhood crime, homicide and hospital admissions for stabbings, with a focus on the 5 per cent of areas where a quarter of neighbourhood crimes happen.
Labour’s manifesto promised a zero-carbon electricity system by 2030, while keeping a ‘strategic reserve of gas power stations to guarantee security of supply’. That means a target of just 5 per cent of electricity generation over 2030 being from gas, Starmer said yesterday – similar to the Conservative aim for 95 per cent ‘low-carbon’ electricity in that year.
The NHS target for 92 per cent of routine operations and appointments to be carried out within 18 weeks hasn’t been met since early 2016. Starmer wants it met by spring of 2029. The Tory white paper’s health goal was not appointments, but outcomes, and to reduce the disparity in outcomes across the country. To that end, it promised ‘the gap in healthy life expectancy (HLE) between local areas where it is highest and lowest will have narrowed, and by 2035 HLE will rise by five years’ by 2030, with supporting targets on smoking, obesity, early cancer diagnosis and under-75s’ mortality from cardiovascular diseases.
Starmer said his targets may even be ‘too ambitious’. We’ll follow his progress towards them on The Spectator’s data hub, updated daily.
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