Labour need to act radically to change path – if they don’t, they’ll find themselves repeating recent history.
It is difficult to compare Labour’s first year with any other government I can think of. The similarities between Labour’s failure to deliver and the failure of the Conservatives are so clear that an outsider would be forgiven thinking that no election had ever taken place. A historic majority, followed by the reveal of a total lack of plan or direction, ending up in internal divisions and lack of leadership that lurch the Government from crisis to crisis.
With the next general election still some way off, it might not feel like it – but time is running out. The last 18 months of government is justifying what you did in the previous three and a half years, and they’re already a year through that. What have they got to show for it? More importantly: what is actually different and better in the country as a result?
Crucially, however, all is not yet lost. There is the practical possibility of change: many of those in Labour have extremely slim margins, for them, the only path to victory is improving life in Britain in a way that their constituents can feel, and feel quickly.
This means prioritising what voters care about – and actually delivering what those voters want. This is easier said than done, and is complicated by the social nature of politicians. They swirl in circles of people that balk at the ideas of the general population and politicians find themselves, as hyper social individuals, wanting to appeal to those friends and colleagues around them. That means they adopt the ideas and expectations of that crowd, and pitch their thoughts within that narrow Overton window.
Take Labour’s planning bill as an example. The entire bill’s premise is essentially how to best optimise the current system. This is better than the Tories (who did nothing) but is worse than reality permits. It takes two days to build a wind turbine. The question must be: why must it take several years in Britain? Why can other countries build safe nuclear and we take decades and cost more than anywhere else?
When asked, officials have told me that Labour’s current bill – with future unannounced changes – should potentially meet the ambition of reducing planning times by up to 50% (note the caveats). This isn’t anywhere near enough.
The starting premise should have been: how long does it physically take to build something? From there, officials should be forced to justify every delay on top. There are good reasons to delay, good reasons to have some processes and environmental protections – but no good reason to have a system so absurd that applications run longer than the very roads they’re written for. It’s fundamentally broken, built on decades of bad incentives that have doomed the country to decline. A restart is required.
Objections here are often of the Chesterton-fence variety: regulatory delays have grown over time and might need trimming, but that reform should not form a government’s intellectual starting point. The retort to that is very simple: look at the state of the country.
Besides, this does not often mean new approaches. Some of the solutions are as simple as reviving norms of the past. One is to pass specific acts of parliament for specific projects. This was used historically to fast track vital projects across the country – exempting them from usual rules and streamlining processes. Indeed, a version of this approach was used recently in France to rebuild the Notre-Dame cathedral in five years. Government could do this for Heathrow, for major roads, railways and power plants.
For more systemic change, the bill we at Looking For Growth have written up provides an off-the-shelf example. If Labour had passed the LFG bill at speed, construction on power plants, overhead cables and data centres could have started already. Overhead cables would mean power could start to move more efficiently around the country – while data centres would mean that Britain could grab the upside of a technology that is responsible for a large percentage of growth difference between the US and other nations. We have the talent in the UK already. We were responsible for many of the major discoveries for modern AI systems, but we have allowed the talent to leave and the infrastructure to be vacant in Britain.
Finally, contained with the LFG bill is a provision on judicial review (JR). It is not an exaggeration to say that judicial review is now clogging the country to a crawl – driving up uncertainty, delays and prices for all of us.
The absurd Aarhus Convention caps the costs of anyone bringing a case at £5,000 if the case is brought by an individual, or £10,000 by organisations, allowing mega donors to simply fund endless obstructionist JRs, designed specifically to slow down and harass vital projects. Tackling judicial review, including removing us from the Aarhus Convention, would result in significant change across the board – but would not require a wholesale planning bill.
Getting this right – and doing it fast – is vital. The population might not be crying out for planning reform, but they care deeply about living standards. The Government has the ability to to change this and to do it at speed. That means not just announcing projects that have already been rubber stamped by the Conservatives, or talking about a 10-year plan that no longer has any credibility – but instead building fast. Improve lives today, not tomorrow.
If they don’t, the results will be worse than just a bad performance at the next election. If the general population is ignored for much longer, I deeply fear the results. The public have voted for change over and over and over – they have not received it. The public mood is dire. Recent polling shows three-quarters of Britons are worried about political violence. Living standards are stagnant or decreasing. Life is getting worse in Britain. Eventually, that cracks. We are close to that point. All efforts must be made to correct course and fix the country.
That means realising that the processes and institutions that guide policymaking in the Westminster bubble are broken. It means tackling crime, immigration, living standards and NHS waiting lists (which seems to have disappeared from the news cycle but is a topic of discussion frequently with nearly anyone I speak to).
On living standards, Labour’s planning bill will potentially make a difference, but it won’t set the world alight, and it won’t work at the depth or speed voters will feel. Instead, Labour will congratulate themselves on weaving through Westminster norms and getting most of the Yimby lobby and environmentalists all on a similar page – and they’ll be crushed at the next election all the same.
Politicians must raise their agency, their ambitions and ultimately rebuild a nation. Government must forget about the policy recommendations of the dinner-party classes and act with an eye to reality. It is time to deliver actual change. They will only yell for so long. While the public are still trying to speak to Westminster, it is incumbent on government, officials and politicians to finally listen and to act.
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