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A cabinet minister has denied that Sir Keir Starmer’s plan to announce new targets for his government next week is a “reset”, and defended the UK prime minister’s decision not to include a cap on internal migration.
Pat McFadden, chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, insisted that Starmer’s “plan for change”, under which he will set out new promises on Thursday, had been in the works since July when Labor won the general election.
The Prime Minister will discover concrete milestones that his government intends to meet until the next time the electorate goes to the polls, expected in 2029, along with a public online dashboard that will allow voters to track his progress.
Asked if the announcement meant a reset after a difficult first five months in power, McFadden he told the BBC Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg program: “No. We have been working on this since the first days of the government.”
Comments come after a challenging start for a Labor government amid falling public support and growing corporate anger over budget tax hikes.
The targets will be linked to Starmer’s five missions for government: growing the economy, improving the NHS, fighting crime, boosting green energy and breaking down barriers to opportunity.
Labor colleagues predicted there would be “week-to-week events” to deal with, but the government had to “take a long-term view”, McFadden said.
While Labor has promised to reduce net inward migration, McFadden confirmed that Starmer would not include a cap in his pledges next week, telling Sky News that “number migration targets have not had a happy history in recent years”.
He quoted former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron as saying he would reduce annual net migration to “tens of thousands” of people.
Last week’s official statistics showed that net arrivals to the UK in the 12 months to June 2023 were hit a record 900,000 people.
However, McFadden insisted that Starmer’s plan would “talk about migration — both legal and illegal” in a broader sense.
Victoria Atkins, the Tory shadow environment secretary, criticized Labor for failing to set out “firm plans” on migration numbers. She admitted the Conservatives “wanted immigration to be reduced but it wasn’t” during their 14 years in power, but said new leader Kemi Badenoch had been honest about the party’s failings.
Akins also said that measures implemented by the last Tory administration – including a crackdown on overseas students who bring dependent family members to the UK – were beginning to bear fruit, after recent statistics showed that net inward migration was falling.
Starmer’s decision to set new targets is not without precedent or political danger. Former Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s attempt to save his founding administration in early 2023 with five new promises only sunk it.
Sunak came nowhere close to fulfilling his pledge to “stop the boats”, which was derided as overambitious, while he received little credit when inflation halved as he had promised, as critics argued it was not the result of government efforts.
At the end of a difficult week, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster defended Starmer for appointing Louise Haigh to his backbench and denied he was a hypocrite, after Starmer said in opposition that a person “cannot be a lawmaker and a lawbreaker”.
Haigh, who resigned as secretary of transport she indicated in her resignation letter on Friday that Starmer knew when he promoted her to his shadow cabinet that she had pleaded guilty to fraud before becoming an MP.
