After 14 years in opposition, you might have expected Labour to come into government bursting with plans for Britain. Yet the first four months of the Starmer supremacy have seen ministers commission a glut of various reviews, consultations and task forces about what they should actually do in office. Helpfully, Sky News has compiled a running tally of these. Their current figure is 61 in less than 150 days: a rate of one every two-and-a-half days. The obvious risk is ‘paralysis by analysis’.
Under Yvette Cooper, the Home Office has commissioned seven reviews on police and fire fighter pensions, knife sales, ninja swords, police prosecutions, family visas and counter-extremism. Angela Rayner’s Ministry of Housing has launched eight: on reforming right to buy and its past discounts, local government pensions, social housing rent policy, relations between Whitehall and municipal authorities, new towns, the national planning policy framework and on urban brownfield sites.
Inertia is an active choice, that often carries costs
Good government means taking decisions, even when they are hard decisions. The result on 4 July was hardly a surprise: by then Labour had led in the polls for nearly three years and were nailed on win the election since the mini-budget disaster of October 2022. As one aide points out, the party had already taken numerous studies in opposition. The shadow Defra team did a rural review while the Justice and Home Affairs team did ones on charging and sentencing respectively. Labour also has a National Policy Forum to undertake lengthy and detailed policy work too.
Inertia is an active choice, that often carries costs. Take the Department of Work and Pensions, which has launched four reviews, including one on ‘health-related inactivity’. Plans for overhauling the welfare system are now set to be published in the spring, according to Liz Kendall. But Budget forecasts show that the bill for sickness benefits is ballooning at a rate of £266 million a month, with an extra 85,000 people forecast to be signing on. This means that by April, when the plans are ready, welfare spending will be £1.3 billion higher – almost the same amount that Rachel Reeves hopes to save by scrapping winter fuel payments, with the resultant political pains that it brings.
It begs the question as to how much work done in opposition has actually been useful for office. ‘If you ever see any evidence of our preparations for government, please let me know’, one adviser memorably told the BBC before Labour conference. Much of Starmer’s speech a week later consisted of boasting about the various task forces his ministers had established, rather than enacting decisions taken in opposition in the first 100 days. It remains to be seen, for instance, how radically different the conclusions of the ongoing Strategic Defence Review will differ from the Integrated Review Refresh 2023. Similarly, to curb the ballooning welfare budget quicker, Liz Kendall could have simply adopted much of the work done by Mel Stride in the Sunak government.
Of course, many of the problems Labour is facing are ones which their Conservative predecessors deflected and delayed for years. One aide grumbles that the Tories ‘got about three Mail splashes on consultations on whether to ban the plastic spork’. To do better than that – and deliver the change which Starmer promised – Labour will need to kick the habit of ‘consultation-itis’, no matter how tempting it may seem.
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