The British state is not fit for Starmer’s purpose

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The man at the ministry often does know best. That in a nutshell was Keir Starmer’s message to the nation as he set out some of the hard trade-offs the public must accept for the greater good of the nation. From the location of prisons and pylons to new housing estates, the prime minister could not have been clearer — your country needs you to take it on the chin. 

In part this was an admirable readiness to confront people with the difficult choices that his predecessors pretended do not exist. How indeed can you build more houses or prisons without putting them somewhere? It was also a welcome riposte to the “easy answers” of left and right populism.

But this was also a signal of a wider instinct — even if Starmer did not quite echo the former cabinet minister Douglas Jay’s much-derided 1937 comment that in matters like nutrition “the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”.

Starmer’s outlook is not as nakedly paternalistic. And sometimes it will be a regional rather than central government official taking the decisions. But key to his administration will be the belief in an active state, capable of seeing the bigger picture and intervening as a force for good. Ministers are already returning most of the railways to state control, further regulating work and placing government at the centre of green investment and industrial policy.

Tuesday’s speech at the Labour party conference saw Starmer subverting the Brexit slogan to declare that “taking back control is a Labour argument”. The word “control” featured more than a dozen times.

Such remarks should and will send a shiver up the spines of all those who dream of a smaller, less intrusive state. Starmer’s central message was one of strategic, interventionist or interfering (choose your adjective) government.

But there is a reason why the prime minister’s direction should also be a concern even to those who are instinctively sympathetic. Conversations with the new Labour ministers leave little doubt that the British state is not actually fit for Starmer’s purpose. 

Much is made of failings at the centre and the current shortcomings of the Downing Street operation: key posts are filled by lame ducks, there are issues over who speaks for Starmer and whether his “mission boards” can break down departmental silos to deliver on Labour’s five missions. Even so, as Sam Freedman’s Failed State makes clear, the problems of an underpowered centre, where nothing happens when the premier “pulls the levers”, predate Starmer.

And the focus on the centre risks missing a wider picture. Across Whitehall, new ministers have found themselves taken aback by the weakness of the overall machine. From systemically poor public procurement to hopeless IT, to the hollowing out of core services and expertise at both central and local government, this newly active state stands on atrophying limbs.

Stories abound. Officials grappling with the early release of prisoners due to overcrowding found there was no way to process this digitally. Sifting the potential names was a paper exercise involving multiple files. The lack of digital transformation is routinely cited as one of the reasons for low NHS productivity. Ministers talk in heroic terms about the promise of artificial intelligence and yet even a unified database is beyond some public services.

This is about more than IT, though. It is also about quality and bandwidth of management. Much of Labour’s ambition depends on ministries working well and together. Welfare ministers want to reduce the 872,000 under 24-year-olds not in work, education or training, but need therapists to help address the plague of mental illness swelling those numbers.

The goal of 1.5mn new homes demands the country train a new cohort of construction workers. So progress on housebuilding requires reform of further education. Skills, health, work and welfare — all depend on separate departments already struggling with existing targets. Mission boards and metrics can get you only so far.

The crisis in social care, which bleeds into NHS capacity, is a direct consequence of the erosion of capacity in local authorities, who were underfunded and then encouraged to privatise provision so that it now rests in the hands of companies, which cut staff ratios and underpay care workers just to break even. The regulator, the Care Quality Commission, has been denounced by the health secretary as not fit for purpose. Other regulators are also under scrutiny.

Then there is the lack of expertise. Having legislated on rail ownership, the Department for Transport is now having to recruit people who can oversee the system. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, wants much less spending on outside consultants. But this ambition also demands building up in-house knowledge.

Ministers need to recognise and address the fact that the capacity of both central and local government has been disempowered by austerity, loss of experienced people and failure to reform. An inexperienced government with grand ambitions finds itself reliant on an already underperforming bureaucracy.

Starmer has heralded a new era of intervention. But before Labour can truly attend to the condition of the country, it is going to have to address the state of the state.

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