When Keir Starmer’s Labour party gathered on Monday to celebrate their election victory, the difficulty was finding a big enough venue. There were so many MPs that aides had to abandon Labour’s usual meeting room on parliament’s committee corridor, and instead head for Church House, where Tony Blair met his party after the 1997 landslide. Cabinet ministers joked that their biggest problem in government would be learning their colleagues’ names. Later in Strangers’ Bar, the queue for a drink went six rows back. ‘It’s freshers’ week,’ said one newbie.
Yet some in the party still felt a sense of unease. ‘This majority is a mile wide and an inch deep,’ said one new MP. ‘Lots of these wins are very slight.’ Already Labour strategists are worried about the next election. ‘If we don’t deliver, we will be out.’ The fear is that the same wave of anti-government sentiment which led Starmer to Downing Street could quickly turn against Labour. As one frontbencher in a northern seat put it: ‘The threat from the Reform party could become our problem.’
‘This majority is a mile wide and an inch deep,’ said one new MP. ‘Lots of these wins are very slight’
Throughout the campaign, when Labour had a 20-point lead in the opinion polls, Starmer often talked about a ‘decade of national renewal’. In the end, Labour’s lead was ten points and the vote share was just 34 per cent: the lowest of any governing party since 1923.
Despite the scale of Labour’s majority, Starmer knows he does not yet command the public’s trust. His plan is to respond with action. With no real room to borrow or spend more, the only way to do that is with reform. When he became the Labour party leader, a few members of his shadow cabinet – Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, Pat McFadden and Steve Reed – would often meet to talk about the need for public sector reform, knowing there would be little money if they came to power. Starmer has two things Rishi Sunak did not: a huge majority and a united party. This means Labour may be able to oversee the kind of structural reform that the Tories never dared to do for political reasons. ‘This is the stuff we’re really excited about,’ says a Starmer ally.
The pace so far has been striking. Within two hours of being appointed Health Secretary, Wes Streeting declared that the NHS was broken and that Labour’s huge majority was a mandate for reform. The arch Blairite and former health secretary Alan Milburn was also hired as an adviser. Streeting has not said much about what he plans, but Milburn’s agenda is clear: NHS care should be defined by patient outcomes, so we need more private clinics to meet the demand.
Milburn is closely associated with market-based reform and he has been working with Streeting and his team for 18 months on plans for government. During the election campaign, he helped Streeting get the party ready ‘to hit the ground running and prepare our plans for day one’, says a Labour figure.
Milburn is not the only returning Blairite. I understand that Paul Corrigan, who served as Milburn’s special adviser during his time as health secretary and was known to be even more radical, will come into the department to lead a new strategy unit – at the age of 76.
How far will Streeting go? His team say there are some red lines. The NHS will not be privatised – still a dirty word – but independent clinics will probably be used for more than just bringing down waiting lists. There will also be closer ties with pharmaceutical companies and tech entrepreneurs.
The first mission for the Starmer reformation is an overhaul of planning, which is essential for the Treasury’s growth plan. In Reeves’s first few days as Chancellor, free market thinktanks have been quick to shower her with praise for bringing back a firm housing target – equivalent to 300,000 a year – while also axing what she calls the ‘absurd’ ban on onshore wind farms.
The planning battle will be fought by Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary. Blair promised 200,000 homes a year and hit the target. Gordon Brown raised the goal to 240,000 a year, but didn’t come close. Boris Johnson promised 300,000 a year only for the number of new projects to drop to lower than it was a quarter-century ago.
Under Starmer, a consultation on planning rules is expected before the summer recess. There is a view in government that changes can be made quickly since plenty of measures require no primary legislation. Labour’s promise of new towns will be more complicated to enact. Decisions on where they will be built will come in the first year, and the government hopes building will start by the time of the next election.
Planning reform will, of course, be wildly unpopular – not just among nimbys, but also the current cabal of housebuilders who have a huge grip on the market and cannot be trusted to do things to the required quality. In Ed Miliband’s Energy Security and Net Zero department, his team are most worried about the reaction from rural England to the number of pylons they need to build to hit their 2030 target.
It wasn’t so long ago that Labour was opposing Gove’s planning liberalisation on environmental grounds. But Starmer’s voter base is 25- to 45-year-olds who want to get on the housing ladder. Since 2021, migration has added 1.9 million people to the country but only 600,000 houses have been built. Labour is moving quickly not just because the housing crisis is so acute, but because Starmer’s political clout is never likely to be higher than after a landslide victory. Starmer will soon find out how much of No.10’s power is illusory: how many levers, if pulled, do nothing. There are many ways to stop development – mainly through the courts and judicial reviews demanding studies on the effect of wildlife.
Prisons will be another urgent area for reform. Britain’s are close to full. There were 87,000 inmates in England at the last count and the Tories’ lock-’em-up policy means this number will rise to 95,000 by Christmas if nothing changes. Sentences have been getting longer (the maximum sentence for animal cruelty is now five years, up from six months) without any significant increases to prison capacity. The new Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has told her colleagues not to promise longer sentences unless they can find the money for prison places.
The appointment of James Timpson, head of the key-cutting firm, as prisons minister, suggests Labour intends radical reform. He’s on record praising the Dutch example where a third of prisoners were released and Labour has already announced that it is considering releasing inmates after they’ve served 40 per cent of their sentence. As one Whitehall figure puts it: ‘Timpson would not take the job unless serious change was planned on prisoner release and rehabilitation.’
Tories are already pointing out that when Italy released thousands of prisoners in 2006, crime rose. Each year of a sentence, it was calculated, prevented between 14 and 46 crimes reported to the police. The soon-to-be-Lord Timpson has spent years working with prisoners (one in nine Timpson’s staffers has ‘prison experience’) so he is well placed to make a careful case for targeted early release. He believes these changes would save some £3.5 billion a year.
On education, there is little money for new schools. Even Starmer’s manifesto pledge for 6,500 more teachers was minuscule (an increase to the headcount by just 0.3 per cent a year). So Phillipson, the Education Secretary, is more interested in the curriculum than schools structure. Harder subjects should still have a place, she believes, but critical thinking and creativity should feature more. Starmer takes great pride in the fact that 21 of his 22-member cabinet are state-educated (his school, Reigate Grammar, went private by the time he left). By promoting ‘oracy’ and certain other subjects, ministers believe they will help less-privileged children compete with private-school pupils, whose fees will soon be going up.
The biggest crisis facing the new government is one that has so far had little attention: welfare. The volume of mental health complaints has discombobulated the system so much that the number of people on disability benefits is likely to rise by 1,000 a day each day for the rest of this parliament. Once the various Tory pension promises are also considered, this all amounts to an extra £50 billion a year being spent by the Department for Work and Pensions. The Chancellor views the cost as too high as it stands.
Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, is no stranger to having a fight with the left. Her 2015 Labour leadership contest flopped because she did not oppose some of the Tory government’s benefit cuts. Morgan McSweeney and Matthew Doyle, who worked on her campaign, are now two of Starmer’s most senior aides. Are they prepared to support benefit cuts again? It’s thought that they have the intention but not yet the agenda.
For years, Starmer’s team has been obsessed with Joe Biden’s trouble in America – how he can end up, after four years, on the brink of losing to Donald Trump. Olaf Scholz is not having much more luck in Germany. There are some recent examples of centre-left politicians winning power, but not many of them keeping it. ‘The age of voter loyalty has gone,’ said one member of the new No. 10 political strategy unit. ‘Either we prove beyond doubt that we fix what the Tories could not, or we’ll be out.’ Starmer has good reason to act quickly – the closer MPs get to the next election, the more concerned they will become about their majorities.
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