Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday set out six “milestone” targets to be achieved by 2029 in a bid to reassure voters that his government is back on track.
The Prime Minister promised to “give the British people the power to hold our feet to the fire”. sought to reset his administration after a sharp drop in poll ratings in the five months he has been in power.
The milestones – including health, home building, policing, early education, clean energy and living standards – varied widely in the scope of their ambitions, according to policy experts.
Reduce NHS waiting lists
Starmer repeated Labour’s election manifesto pledge to ensure that within five years 92 per cent of people in England wait no more than 18 weeks after being referred to start non-urgent NHS hospital treatment.
This is very ambitious. The 18-week target was introduced by Tony Blair’s Labor government in 2004 but has not been met since February 2016. In recent years, the health service has seen around 60 per cent of patients within that time frame.
To meet the milestone, voted the most important by YouGov voters on Thursday, ministers had previously pledged to provide 40,000 extra routine hospital appointments a week. This would be equal to an additional 2 million per year.
But with a total waiting list of 7.6 million for routine hospital treatment in England, health bosses fear that focusing on this one target could distract from other parts of an overburdened and strained system.
Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of think-tank The King’s Fund, said hospital waiting times “have never been – and should not be – the main measure of NHS performance”.
“Patients and the public also struggle to get a GP appointment and can’t get social care support,” she added.
Build 1.5 million homes in five years
Starmer stuck to his campaign pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the five-year parliament – a target he described as “very ambitious”. The last time England managed to build 300,000 new homes in one year was in 1969.
Private and public housebuilding in England totaled around 200,000 new homes in the year to March, resulting in 221,070 net additional dwellings – a 6 per cent fall on the previous year.
The government has said it will continue to measure its housing target by net additional dwellings, which includes the conversion of existing buildings into housing.
Ministers are trying to reverse the fall in supply at a time when higher mortgage rates have reduced demand for new homes. The National Housing Federation, which represents affordable housing providers, and industry group the Home Builders Federation said ministers were on course to miss the target by almost a third.
Melanie Leech, chief executive of the British Property Federation, said the government’s initial steps to reform the planning system were welcome, but more was needed, including making mortgages easier to access, attracting more private finance and increasing the number of skilled workers.
Make the streets safer
Starmer promised to appoint “a designated officer who can be contacted in every community”. His promise of 13,000 extra “bobies on the beat” was not just about numbers, according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, but about “rebuilding the vital link between the public and the police”.
After a decade of cuts, the number of officers was restored to 2010 levels in the final years of the previous Conservative government. Starmer’s “neighbourhood policing guarantee” will involve recruiting more officers, redeploying others and increasing the vastly depleted number of community support officers who have no arrest powers.
Experts say the extra community policing risks draining resources from other already hard-pressed operations and could have a knock-on effect on crime-fighting. “If you’re distracting the officers from other things, are you having problems in other areas?” asked Rick Muir, director of the Police Foundation think-tank.
The issue is particularly acute for London’s Metropolitan Police, which is still more than 1,000 officers short of recruitment targets set by the Tories and is so strained that it warned they may have to lay off 2,700 employees.
More children ‘ready for school’
Starmer has promised that a record 75 per cent of five-year-olds in England will be “ready to learn” when they start school – a measure of development that includes the ability to sit still, share with others and do basic numeracy. Currently, only 68 percent are thought to have reached that level when they start school.
The cost of living crisis and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has disrupted traditional learning, have exacerbated the challenges facing teachers, who have sought additional government funding.
Nick Harrison, chief executive of the Sutton Trust, a think-tank focused on social mobility, welcomed the ambition but warned that current levels of support for the poorest children meant it would be a “major task”.
“The gap between children entitled to free school meals and their peers in meeting these learning targets has been widening since 2017 and there is no sign of this trend reversing,” he added.
Other experts say meeting this milestone will require the government to invest in the workforce at an early age, especially in the poorest areas, and take steps to eradicate child poverty.
Deliver clean energy by 2030
As the main opposition party, Labor he said in March that the UK would be “the first major country in the world to run on 100 per cent clean and cheap energy” if it wins the election. On Thursday, Starmer said the government was aiming “at least 95 percent off low carbon production by 2030″.
The dilution comes after the state-owned operator of the national energy system said last month that gas-fired plants would need to supply up to 5 percent of Britain’s electricity in 2030, even in a system powered mainly by renewables, to avoid outages on days without of the wind.
Gas-fired power plants now supply more than one-third of Britain’s annual electricity. Reducing that share to less than 5 percent will require massive construction of wind farms, solar farms and power cables, on top of changes in consumer behavior. NESO says more than £40bn of investment will be needed annually.
Britain has a strong renewable energy industry and there is plenty of money ready to be invested in the sector if the conditions are right. But overstretched global supply chains, skills shortages, jammed planning permission deadlines and queues to connect projects to the electricity grid make the milestone difficult.
Raise the standard of living
Starmer set the goal of achieving an increase in real household disposable income per person and higher GDP per capita by the end of this parliament.
Existing forecasts suggest the RDHI is on track to grow, with the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, predicting in October that it will increase by an average of 0.5 per cent a year from 2024-25. until 2029-30.
Paul Dales, UK economist at consultancy Capital Economics, said the failure to put a number on how fast disposable income should grow meant the target was “not very ambitious at all”.
The government previously pledged to achieve the highest sustainable growth among the G7 countries by the end of this parliament. On Thursday, it said it “intends to achieve” that result, but did not set a time frame.
Recent forecasts show it is unlikely to be met until 2029. The OECD predicted on Wednesday that the US will be the fastest-growing member of the G7 next year, with Canada close behind.
Reporting by Anna Gross, Peter Foster, Sam Fleming, Laura Hughes, William Wallis, Joshua Oliver, Jim Pickard and Rachel Millard in London. Data visualization by Amy Borrett and Keith Fray
