In his first speech as Prime Minister, Keir Starmer acknowledged that now is the time for action: “Our work is urgent, and we begin it today.” So here are three action points aligned with Labour’s manifesto promises.
Chip Off
As we set out in Building Blocks, the UK needs its most successful towns and cities to expand – delivering growth by boosting the scale at which we operate.
Nobody could accuse Labour of ignoring this agenda. As their manifesto stated: “Britain is hampered by a planning regime that means we struggle to build either the infrastructure or housing the country needs.” The slogan “get Britain building again” has been emblazoned across everything. Investors are betting on Labour being true to their word. Yesterday, the shares in housebuilding companies rallied in response to news of the Labour landslide.
Labour has even promised to build on Green Belts, something that once felt impossible under the Conservatives as they had too many MPs with their constituencies there. (Incidentally, our Green Belts aren’t very green – hence the useful new term: Grey Belts.) Labour has also promised new towns, but if new towns are going to be successful they need to be built close to existing cities with suppressed demand – as was the case with Edinburgh New Town – or connected by fast, frequent and reliable rail services.
Regulating Innovation
Labour’s manifesto stated that: “Regulators are currently ill-equipped to deal with the dramatic development of new technologies, which often cut across traditional industries and sectors. Labour will create a new Regulatory Innovation Office.”
There are good and bad ways to do this. David Stallibrass, now Deputy Chief Economist of the FCA, and regulation supremo John Fingleton CBE have some ideas on how to do this properly (as they wrote for us on this very topic).
Whatever the structure, we need to ensure the objectives of outcome-focused regulation are clear and unambiguous; reduce the number of each regulators’ objectives; increase use of sandboxes to inject bounded and targeted discretion into otherwise rigid regulatory regimes; and increase the use of block-exemptions to inject clarity into more discretionary regulatory regimes. Simple.
Our NHS
According to their manifesto: “Labour’s reforms will shift our NHS away from a model geared towards late diagnosis and treatment, to a model where more services are delivered in local communities. We will harness the power of technologies like AI to transform the speed and accuracy of diagnostic services, saving potentially thousands of lives.”
Delivering on this would near enough guarantee a second term. The Tony Blair Institute has undertaken a lot of important work on this, and Blair himself raised the role of technology – specifically AI – in a recent podcast interview:
“This is a huge agenda for a government and a really exciting one. I keep saying this to people that are in politics today. Sometimes people get a bit depressed about being in politics because you have all this criticism. Certainly people in the West feel that society’s not changing fast enough and well enough. I say no, it’s a really exciting time to be in politics because you’ve got this massive revolution that you’ve got to come to terms with.”
The Politics Bit
While the Government is our primary target for policy recommendations, the opposition still matters.
Despite all the seats, the turnout looks to be just shy of 60%, the lowest in 20 years, and Labour got around 34% share compared to 24% for the Conservatives. It has been argued that this means “Starmer is in the same position as Boris in 2019, but even more so. Massive majority, world at his feet, but incredibly hard in longer term to see how he can cling on to voters on both left and right at once.”
It’s a fair point. The lesson to learn here for Starmer is don’t obsess over constant polling and pandering to new voters (e.g. the so-called Red Wall, which is unsurprisingly once again red).
Applying this to housing, journalist Lewis Goodall suggested: “Labour winning all over the south. RIP planning reform.” Dan Tomlinson – new MP for Chipping Barnet – was quick to offer hope: “No. We won a landslide majority on a mandate of solving the housing crisis and growing our economy. People voted for change, for prosperity and for a party that was honest about what needed to be done. Now is the time to do, not duck, the hard choices.”
For Starmer, the political battle has been won – now is the time for policies.
All Change