Labour under pressure over housing and waiting lists targets as Starmer prepares to unveil new ‘plan for change’
Good morning. Keir Starmer is giving a speech on Thursday and you can tell it is important because No 10 started briefing on what it is going to say in a news release to journalists sent out last Friday. He is going to announce a “plan for change” that will include “measurable milestones”. In the advance briefing Keir Starmer said it would be “the most ambitious yet honest programme for government in a generation”.
But hang on – hasn’t Starmer announced plenty of “measurable milestones” already? In 2023 he announced five missions, which he said were not just conventional performance targets but part of an attempt to make government more strategic and focused on the long term. The five headline missions all included sub-missions, so arguably there were around 26 targets or pledges in the document. Then, as the election approached, Labour simplified matter by announcing six first steps for change.
The new milestones will build on what the missions set out. No one is saying the five missions have been junked. But, by announcing new priorities, it is hard to avoid the conclusions that the old ones are being at best downgraded, and so it is not surprising that this is being seen as a relaunch. Politico this morning is describing it sarcastically as the “definitely-not-a-reset speech”.
In an interview yesterday Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, revealed that one of the new milestones will be to increase the number of children who are deemed educationally and socially ready when they start primary school from 60%, the current figure, to 75%. It is being reported that another milestone will be for the NHS to reach its target of getting the number of patients who get their operation within 18 weeks up to at least 92% – a goal that has not been reached for years.
But today, in their Times splash, Chris Smyth and Oliver Wright say NHS leaders are concerned about the impact of prioritising cutting waiting lists above all else. They say:
Health bosses accept the need to focus on the government’s political priority but say ministers will need to accept trade-offs to achieve it. “If the priority is putting all the money into electives, what we will see is warzone A&E departments and all sorts of other things being sidelined,” said an NHS source. “It will have a number of casualties, including mental health, community care and waits in A&E.”
The pre-election missions also included plans to build 1.5m new homes – a target reaffirmed by the housing minister only last month. In July Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, announced new housing targets for local authorities in England designed to ensure this target is reached.
But this pledge is also looking problematic. The BBC has published the results of an investigation showing that many councils, including Labour-run authorities, believe the new Rayner targets are unrealistic. In their report Alex Forsyth, Jack Fenwick and Hannah Capella explain:
Local councils have told the government its flagship plan to build 1.5m new homes in England over the next five years is “unrealistic” and “impossible to achieve”, the BBC can reveal.
The vast majority of councils expressed concern about the plan in a consultation exercise carried out by Angela Rayner’s housing department earlier this year.
The responses, obtained by the BBC through Freedom of Information laws, potentially set local authorities on a collision course with Labour over one of its top priorities.
The report quotes many examples of what councils have said in response to the consulation.
Labour-run Broxtowe council in Nottinghamshire described the proposed changes as “very challenging, if not impossible to achieve”.
South Tyneside, another Labour-run council, said the plans were “wholly unrealistic”, while the independent-run council in Central Bedfordshire, said the area would be left “absolutely swamped with growth that the infrastructure just can not support”.
We will be hearing from Rayner later in the Commons, where she is due to take questions at 2.30pm.
Yesterday McFadden said migration, which was not included in the original five missions, will be in the plan for change document. That topic is coming up later today too because Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is giving a statement on irregular migration in the Commons after 3.30pm.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, makes a statement to MPs about irregular migration, and the government’s deal with Iraq covering people smuggling.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I have still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Key events
Anneliese Dodds, the development minister, is attending a humanitarian conference in Cairo today where she is announcing £19m in UK funding for Gaza, “including £12m in funding to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and World Food Programme (WFP)”. In a statement she said:
The situation in Gaza is catastrophic. Gazans are in desperate need of food, and shelter with the onset of winter. The Cairo conference will be an opportunity to get leading voices in one room and put forward real-world solutions to the humanitarian crisis.
The UK is committed to supporting the region’s most vulnerable communities, pledging additional funding for UNRWA, and to supporting the Palestinian Authority reforms.
Israel must immediately act to ensure unimpeded aid access to Gaza. I will meet counterparts both in Israel and the OPTs [occupied Palestinian territories] to discuss the need to remove these impediments, bring about a ceasefire, free the hostages and find a lasting solution to the conflict.
Peter Apps, the leading housing journalist and author of a brilliant book on the Grenfell tragedy, isn’t impressed with the new government targets for the removal of unsafe cladding from tall buildings. (See 10.08am and 10.17am.) He has explained why in posts on social media. Here are some of them.
As a reminder, Labour promised in its manifesto to “review how to better protect leaseholders from costs and take steps to accelerate the pace of remediation across the country, putting a renewed focus on ensuring those responsible for the crisis pay to put it right.”
Does this do that? Well… no, not really. The aim is to accelerate remediation, but how that will be achieved in practice is pretty uncertain. We have seen targets set and missed and set and missed since the whole thing started. It doesn’t seem to work.
Currently the stasis seems to be the result of disagreements about the level of remediation required, arguments about who is responsible, and a general squeeze in the (lengthy) supply chain for fixing buildings. More here:
Currently the stasis seems to be the result of disagreements about the level of remediation required, arguments about who is responsible, and a general squeeze in the (lengthy) supply chain for fixing buildings. More here: https://t.co/7cfalWGlEV
— Peter Apps (@PeteApps) December 2, 2024
I can’t really see how today’s announcement is going to fix any of those. The fines for freeholders are clearly aimed at forcing them to get moving, but it isn’t always the freeholder who is causing the delay.
And sure, developers can promise to double the pace of building remediation, but how? Why? The 2029 end date for above 18m buildings is also not especially ambitious. Given the funding first came out in 2020, that’s about where you’d expect it to be without further intervention
If you live in one of the affected buildings, I don’t think life will feel particularly different after this announcement. The problems of non-qualifying leaseholders, non-cladding defects, orphan buildings, insurance costs, interim measures etc etc still stand
Apps also says today’s announcement is “miles and miles away” from the approach to this problem Keir Starmer proposed in 2021 when he called for an independent taskforce on cladding to take direct control of dealing with the problem.
Growth expectations among UK firms take ‘decisive turn for worse’, says CBI
Growth expectations among UK companies have taken “a decisive turn for the worse”, in a fresh blow to Rachel Reeves amid warnings that business confidence has plummeted since the budget. Julia Kollewe has the story.
Building owners who fail to remove dangerous cladding could face jail, minister says
Building owners who fail to remove dangerous cladding could face jail, a minister warned today.
Alex Norris, the building safety minister, issued the warning as he gave interviews this morning promoting the government’s plan to ensure that all inflammable cladding on high-rise flats is removed by the end of 2029. (See 10.08am.)
Speaking on Sky News, Norris said:
I would want people who own buildings that are watching this, who have not been remediating them, to know we are on them, we are after them, and we want those buildings remediated. And if they don’t, they will feel the force of the law.
We have a range of powers already, ranging from fines to prison sentences, that can be used in health and safety cases.
We will use that basket of tools in whatever way with each building to get it resolved. We have committed that that will be the case by the end of this decade.
Cladding will be fixed on high-rise buildings in England by 2029, says Angela Rayner
Dangerous cladding on all high-rise buildings in government-funded schemes in England will be fixed by the end of 2029, Angela Rayner has pledged. Haroon Siddique has the story.
And here is the news release with details of the announcement from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
Here is Jessica Elgot’s story about the NHS concerns about Labour prioritising cutting waiting lists.
And here is an extract.
No 10 insiders have said the new numerical targets, although risky, are a necessary recognition that Starmer’s “missions” which he set out in the run-up to the election were too conceptual for most people.
The prime minister will cease rhetoric about achieving the highest growth in the G7 in favour of specific promises on a pledge to increase real disposable income. He will also recommit to a plan to build 1.5m affordable homes and to measurably improve school-readiness for nursery children.
Labour under pressure over housing and waiting lists targets as Starmer prepares to unveil new ‘plan for change’
Good morning. Keir Starmer is giving a speech on Thursday and you can tell it is important because No 10 started briefing on what it is going to say in a news release to journalists sent out last Friday. He is going to announce a “plan for change” that will include “measurable milestones”. In the advance briefing Keir Starmer said it would be “the most ambitious yet honest programme for government in a generation”.
But hang on – hasn’t Starmer announced plenty of “measurable milestones” already? In 2023 he announced five missions, which he said were not just conventional performance targets but part of an attempt to make government more strategic and focused on the long term. The five headline missions all included sub-missions, so arguably there were around 26 targets or pledges in the document. Then, as the election approached, Labour simplified matter by announcing six first steps for change.
The new milestones will build on what the missions set out. No one is saying the five missions have been junked. But, by announcing new priorities, it is hard to avoid the conclusions that the old ones are being at best downgraded, and so it is not surprising that this is being seen as a relaunch. Politico this morning is describing it sarcastically as the “definitely-not-a-reset speech”.
In an interview yesterday Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, revealed that one of the new milestones will be to increase the number of children who are deemed educationally and socially ready when they start primary school from 60%, the current figure, to 75%. It is being reported that another milestone will be for the NHS to reach its target of getting the number of patients who get their operation within 18 weeks up to at least 92% – a goal that has not been reached for years.
But today, in their Times splash, Chris Smyth and Oliver Wright say NHS leaders are concerned about the impact of prioritising cutting waiting lists above all else. They say:
Health bosses accept the need to focus on the government’s political priority but say ministers will need to accept trade-offs to achieve it. “If the priority is putting all the money into electives, what we will see is warzone A&E departments and all sorts of other things being sidelined,” said an NHS source. “It will have a number of casualties, including mental health, community care and waits in A&E.”
The pre-election missions also included plans to build 1.5m new homes – a target reaffirmed by the housing minister only last month. In July Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, announced new housing targets for local authorities in England designed to ensure this target is reached.
But this pledge is also looking problematic. The BBC has published the results of an investigation showing that many councils, including Labour-run authorities, believe the new Rayner targets are unrealistic. In their report Alex Forsyth, Jack Fenwick and Hannah Capella explain:
Local councils have told the government its flagship plan to build 1.5m new homes in England over the next five years is “unrealistic” and “impossible to achieve”, the BBC can reveal.
The vast majority of councils expressed concern about the plan in a consultation exercise carried out by Angela Rayner’s housing department earlier this year.
The responses, obtained by the BBC through Freedom of Information laws, potentially set local authorities on a collision course with Labour over one of its top priorities.
The report quotes many examples of what councils have said in response to the consulation.
Labour-run Broxtowe council in Nottinghamshire described the proposed changes as “very challenging, if not impossible to achieve”.
South Tyneside, another Labour-run council, said the plans were “wholly unrealistic”, while the independent-run council in Central Bedfordshire, said the area would be left “absolutely swamped with growth that the infrastructure just can not support”.
We will be hearing from Rayner later in the Commons, where she is due to take questions at 2.30pm.
Yesterday McFadden said migration, which was not included in the original five missions, will be in the plan for change document. That topic is coming up later today too because Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is giving a statement on irregular migration in the Commons after 3.30pm.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
2.30pm: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
After 3.30pm: Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, makes a statement to MPs about irregular migration, and the government’s deal with Iraq covering people smuggling.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I have still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.