How reachable are Keir Starmer’s new policy ‘milestones’?

Sir Keir Starmer on Thursday set out six “milestone” targets to hit by 2029 in a push to convince voters his government is back on track.

The prime minister vowed to “give the British people the power to hold our feet to the fire” as he sought to reset his administration after a sharp fall in opinion poll ratings in the five months that he has been in power.

The milestones — spanning health, housebuilding, policing, early years education, clean energy and living standards — varied wildly in the scale of their ambition, according to policy experts.

Cut 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 referral to begin non-urgent hospital treatment on the NHS. 

This is highly ambitious. The 18-week target was introduced by Tony Blair’s Labour government in 2004 but has not been hit since February 2016. In recent years, the health service has been seeing about 60 per cent of patients within this timeframe. 

To deliver this milestone, judged the most important by voters polled by YouGov on Thursday, ministers have previously pledged to provide 40,000 extra routine hospital appointments a week. That would equate to an extra 2mn a year. 

But with an overall waiting list of 7.6mn for routine hospital treatment in England, health bosses fear focusing on this one target could divert attention from other parts of an overwhelmed and strained system. 

Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of The King’s Fund think-tank, said hospital waits had “never been — and should not be — the main measure of how the NHS is performing”. 

“Patients and the public are also struggling to get a GP appointment and unable to get support with social care,” she added.  

Build 1.5mn homes in five years

Starmer stuck to his pre-election commitment to build 1.5mn homes over the five-year parliament — a goal that he described as “hugely ambitious”. The last time England succeeded in building 300,000 new homes in a single year was 1969.

Private and public sector housebuilding in England totalled about 200,000 new homes in the year to March, resulting in 221,070 net additional dwellings — down 6 per cent from the year before.

The government said it would continue to measure its housing target against net additional dwellings, which includes conversions of existing buildings into housing.

Ministers are trying to reverse the decline in supply at a time when higher mortgage rates have tempered demand for new houses. The National Housing Federation, which represents affordable housing providers, and the Home Builders Federation industry group have said ministers are on track to miss the target by almost one-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 easing access to mortgages, pulling in more private finance and increasing the pool of skilled labour.

Make the streets safer

Starmer promised to put a “named, contactable officer in every community”. His pledge of 13,000 extra “bobbies on the beat” was not just about numbers, according to home secretary Yvette Cooper, but “rebuilding the vital connection between the public and the police”.

After a decade of cuts, officer numbers were 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 much-depleted numbers of community support officers, who do not have powers of arrest.

Experts said additional community policing risked draining resources from other already hard-pressed operations and that this could have a knock-on effect on tackling crime. “If you are pulling officers away from other things, do you end up with problems in other areas?” asked Rick Muir, director of the Police Foundation think-tank.

The question is particularly acute for London’s Metropolitan Police, which is still more than 1000 officers short of recruitment targets set by the Tories and so stretched that it has warned it might have to cut 2,700 staff.

More children ‘school ready’

Starmer vowed that a record 75 per cent of five-year-olds in England would be “ready to learn” when they started school — a measure of development that includes being able to sit still, share with others and do basic numeracy. At present, only 68 per cent are deemed to have reached this level when they begin school.

The cost of living crisis and the after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, which disrupted traditional learning, has worsened the challenges facing schoolteachers, who have called for extra 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 achieving it would be a “momentous task”.

“The gap between children eligible for free school meals and their peers in meeting these learning goals has been widening since 2017 and there is no sign of this trend reversing,” he added. 

Other experts said meeting the milestone would require the government to invest in the early years workforce, particularly in the most deprived areas, and take steps to eradicate child poverty. 

Deliver clean power by 2030

As the main opposition party, Labour said in March that the UK would be the “first major country in the world to run on 100 per cent clean and cheap power” if it won the election. Starmer on Thursday said the government was aiming for “at least 95 per cent of low carbon generation by 2030”. 

The watering down comes after the government-owned National Energy System Operator said last month that gas-fired power stations would need to supply up to 5 per cent of Britain’s electricity in 2030 even in a system mainly powered by renewables, in order to avoid disruption on windless days. 

Gas-fired power stations now supply more than one-third of Britain’s electricity across the year. Cutting that to less than 5 per cent will require a big buildout of wind farms, solar farms and electricity cables, on top of changes to consumer behaviour. NESO says more than £40bn in investment will be needed annually. 

Britain has a strong renewables industry, and there is plenty of money ready to invest in the sector if conditions are right. But overstretched global supply chains, skills shortages, clogged-up planning permission timelines and queues to connect projects to the electricity grid make the milestone a tall order. 

Raise living standards  

Starmer set a 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 RDHI is on track to grow, with the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, predicting in October that it would increase by an average of 0.5 per cent per year from 2024-25 to 2029-30.

Paul Dales, UK economist at consultancy Capital Economics, said failing to put a number on how rapidly disposable income should grow meant the target was “not very ambitious at all”.

The government has previously pledged to achieve the highest sustained growth of G7 countries by the end of this parliament. On Thursday it said it would “aim to deliver” that result but stopped short of setting a timeframe. 

Recent forecasts suggest it is unlikely to be met by 2029. The OECD predicted on Wednesday that the US would 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 visualisation by Amy Borrett and Keith Fray