Sir Keir Starmer's milestones: What are they, what's missing and how easy are they to achieve?

Sky News' data unit examines the prime minister's new milestones and their prospects – along with what he left out.

By Daniel Dunford, Conor O'Neill and Joely Santa Cruz, data journalists

Thursday 5 December 2024 19:22, UK

Like Rishi Sunak did before him, Sir Keir Starmer has announced "measurable milestones" that he says his government will deliver on during his time as prime minister.

He says that this will "throw a gauntlet down" to ministers and civil servants who will have to deliver on the priorities, while also allowing the British people to "hold his feet to the fire" on issues he is happy to be held accountable for.

What's in

The milestones cover six different policy areas - healthcare, policing, education, housebuilding, energy and the economy.

Nick Davies, who wrote a report called "Using targets to improve public services" for the Institute for Government thinktank, told Sky News that targets are "better for raising minimum standards than achieving excellence."

He added: "The performance of our public services at the moment is terrible, worse than before the pandemic, but also largely worse than before 2010. So in that context, raising the minimum standard is worthwhile and valuable."

Economy

The target: "Raising living standards in every part of the United Kingdom, as we aim to deliver the highest sustained growth in the G7."

By not setting a specific number to "raise living standards" by, this target is by quite a distance the easiest of the milestones to achieve.

Any growth could be said to meet the target and no parliament in recent history has overseen a decline.

The Office for Budget Responsibility already forecasts that real disposable income will increase by half a percent each year over this parliament, having revised the figure down slightly from 0.8% following Chancellor Rachel Reeves's October budget.

The prime minister also failed to put a specific figure on his target of economic growth but did say he's aiming for the fastest growth among G7 countries.

This means that the UK economy would have to grow by more than 1.9% annually on average in order to overtake the current frontrunner the United States, based on current projections by the International Monetary Fund.

This would mean accelerating growth both from current levels, which averaged 1.6% from 2010 to 2024 under the Conservatives, as well as beating the current forecast for annual growth over the next five years, which is 1.4%.

This implied target is below the levels achieved by the last Labour government from 1997 to 2010 and the Conservatives from 1979 to 1997.

So reaching that figure would represent more of a return to normality than an exceptionally ambitious figure, but, in a global context, leading the G7 for growth would still be an impressive achievement.

NHS

The target: "Ending hospital backlogs to ensure that 92% of patients in England wait no longer than 18 weeks for elective treatment."

This one definitely falls in the ambitious category, but there is relatively recent precedent for it being achieved – as it was for three years between January 2012 and September 2015.

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The reason it's ambitious now is because of a sustained decline from 2013 to 2020, followed by a massive and rapid decline since COVID.

From 2013 to 2020 the percentage of people missing the 18-week target more than tripled from 5.5% to 17.1%. Since COVID it has more than doubled again - it currently sits at 41.5%. The trajectory needs to change enormously to get back to the standards of the early 2010s.

A regular concern raised about NHS targets is that focusing on one priority necessitates taking focus away from other issues.

The focus on the waiting list, also the main priority of the previous government, needs to be considered in the context of A&Es, ambulances and cancer treatment, all of which are also failing to meet targets by enormous amounts.

Sir Keir responded to this by saying: "I don't accept the proposition that if you drive to deal with waiting lists then everything else must suffer."

Siva Anandaciva, from health and social care thinktank The King's Fund, told Sky News he disagreed with that, based on his experiences.

He said: "We spoke to people who first introduced these targets and they said that the relentless focus on waiting times meant they frankly had little time for anything else - that focus was great for delivering one objective, but not multiple objectives. And this is a government that says it wants to achieve multiple objectives."

Mr Davies told Sky News that the four-hour A&E target was an example of one that was intelligently targeted, because delivering on it was only possible with a smooth flow through other parts of the healthcare system.

Mr Anandaciva explained that this may not be the case for the 18-week milestone. He said: "Previously, people running hospitals would plan their elective operations around different times of the year, knowing that there may be fewer beds available during peak flu season in the winter, for example.

"[The milestones] become 'P45 targets' - you work out what you're going to be fired for and then how to avoid that, rather than what you might judge is better for the system overall."

Housebuilding

The target: "Building 1.5 million homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions on at least 150 major economic infrastructure projects."

The first part of this, building 1.5 million homes, is arguably the most ambitious of the milestones established today.

The measure used by Labour is "net additional homes", which is the number of properties, including conversions, which have been added once demolitions have been factored out. To achieve 1.5 million over the course of the parliament effectively means an average of 300,000 a year.

Most recently, the figure for net additional homes was 221,070 in 2023/24, so reaching 300,000 requires a major uplift of 36% from the rate achieved by the previous government.

Hitting the target would be unrivalled in historic terms. Even during the country's peak year of housebuilding in 1968, when 350,000 homes were built, high rates of demolition, partly to make space for the new homes, meant that net additions were below 200,000.

In the most recent six months, including the first three months after Labour took office, early indicators suggest that net additions were in decline.

As a result, the government is starting from an even lower base, and the number of net additions would need to increase by more than 50% to around 76,300 every three months to hit targets by the end of the parliament.

Each quarter that they are behind this target also builds a bigger backlog to catch up on by the end of the five years.

The recent slowdown will not come as a surprise to the government, as uncertainty over planning rules and suppressed demand due to high interest rates had already been acknowledged to be slowing down building in recent months.

However, whether these fundamental issues can be overcome is a major question.

The second part of the pledge, to get 150 major planning decisions in the works, also appears ambitious, requiring a tripling from current levels.

This will be another area where tackling local planning opposition will be a major concern, as well as requiring adequate funding and workforce to back up the plans.

Energy

The target: "Putting us on track to at least 95% clean power by 2030."

This one is undeniably ambitious, but the wording has sparked some confusion as to whether it constitutes a rowing back from manifesto promises.

Many had understood Labour's election pledge of a "zero-carbon" electricity system to mean full decarbonisation by 2030.

However, the National Energy System Grid Operator (NESO) says that "clean power" refers to an electricity mix with at least 95% derived from clean energy sources. This is aligned with the definition of the Climate Change Committee.

Back to whether it can be done, then.

Renewables now account for around a third of energy output, up from just 1.3% in 2009.

However, reliance on imported electricity has also reached record levels. Sir Keir has emphasised the importance of "homegrown British energy" to ensure that "a tyrant like [Vladimir] Putin" cannot "attack the living standards of working people."

Part of the reason for this new reliance on imported fuels is due to gas-fired and nuclear power stations in the UK being taken offline.

According to estimates from NESO, achieving decarbonisation will require at least doubling the UK's current wind capacity and tripling its solar capacity.

NESO projects the cost at £40bn annually, without increasing costs for consumers. That's equivalent to almost double the current annual government investment in infrastructure projects.

NESO concluded that the milestone is a "huge challenge" and that "several elements must deliver at the limit of what is feasible".

However, renewable energy capacity is one area which has regularly outperformed projections in recent decades.

Policing

The target: "A named officer for every neighbourhood, and 13,000 additional officers, PCSOs and special constables in neighbourhood roles in England and Wales."

On the face of it, this appears to be one of the easier measures to achieve. It's also the one that is least reliant on circumstances outside of the government's direct control.

Achieving the target would signify a slowdown of the recruitment achieved since 2019, as part of Boris Johnson's Operation Uplift policy to add 20,000 new police officers.

However, Dr Rick Muir, director of the Police Foundation, the UK's independent policing thinktank, told Sky News he thought the numbers were quite ambitious.

He said police forces were struggling to recruit, for reasons related to comparatively low pay, reputational damage due to recent well-publicised incidents of misconduct, and because the pool of would-be officers is dry after the previous recruitment drive.

What's more important than the number of people employed by the police is whether it leads to a reduction in crime and an increase in solved crimes. What wasn't included in the government's new plan was a manifesto commitment to halve serious violent crime, and violence against women and girls, within a decade.

Dr Muir said there is good evidence that an increase in neighbourhood police officers does contribute to a reduction in crime, particularly when targeted at known hotspots. "It leads to a reduction in all types of crime, but it's not the way to focus on specific types of crime," he said.

Levels of police-recorded violent crime have been going down recently, after a rise through the 2010s that has been largely put down to improved recording rather than increased incidences.

Halving levels of violent crime in a decade would mean only a limited shift from the current trajectory since 2022.

Although the increase in police numbers was welcomed overall, there are also concerns about whether the focus on "bobbies on the beat" is the most efficient use of resources.

"If you focus too much on the numbers of officers, you have to reduce the numbers of civilian staff like crime analysts and police intelligence," said Dr Muir.

He added that these civilian staff are not only generally better suited to these kinds of roles, but also tend to be on lower salaries and require less training than warranted police officers.

Education

The target: "Have 75% of five-year-olds in England ready to learn when they start school."

Having more young children ready to meet the mental and social demands of primary school was a key pillar of Labour's pre-election manifesto.

Being "ready to learn" as a five-year-old sounds difficult to measure, but it's actually an established metric based on teacher assessments around literacy, mathematics, communication and language, and personal, social, emotional and physical development.

However, the measure has only been tracked by the Department for Education for three years, so it's hard to tell exactly how achievable or ambitious it is.

During this period it has increased by a modest 2.5 percentage points, and a slight improvement in this rate would be enough to meet the new target.

Labour's manifesto, however, pledged 90% school readiness by 2030, and this revised intermediate goal raises doubts about the achievability of the higher target.

Whether the five-year-old measure is the best one to focus on is another question. "There is obviously a lot of schooling still to do after the age of five," pointed out Mr Davies.

He added that schooling is one public service that has performed well in recent years, so perhaps wasn't so much in need of a milestone at all.

Beatrice Merrick, the chief executive of the charity Early Education, welcomed the "change of direction to shift attention away from childcare simply as a means of helping parents to work, and returning the focus to making sure children are supported to develop, learn and thrive in the early years."

However, she warned that to make the milestone achievable "the government must target resources at children who need the most support."

Labour's manifesto also stressed the importance of bridging the educational attainment gap between the most and least deprived in society. There is a considerable disparity between school readiness between those eligible for free school meals and their classmates at five years old.

Sir Keir didn't mention it today, but Labour also pledged in their manifesto to raise the percentage of students achieving A-Levels by the time they finished their compulsory education.

The party has also committed to recruiting 6,500 additional teachers, with a focus on subjects facing shortages and in areas where recruitment challenges are most acute.

No specific timeframe for this recruitment has been provided, but teacher numbers have already risen by more than 7,500 since 2021.

Currently, 61% of 19-year-olds are qualified to Level 3 standard (2 A Levels or an equivalent qualification). Labour wants this to be 75% by 2030 and 80% by 2035.

What's missing

The most noticeable omission is a formal pledge on migration, despite the prime minister accusing the Conservatives last week of running an "open borders experiment", and his manifesto pledge to reduce net migration and "smash the gangs" of people smugglers sending small boats from Calais.

This breaks from the tradition of his predecessors who promised – and failed – to "stop the boats" or reduce immigration to the tens of thousands.

The latest figures, released last week, showed a significant reduction in net migration from 2023 to 2024, but from a record high of 906,000.

A far stretch from the "tens of thousands" that David Cameron and then Theresa May aimed for.

Overflowing prisons was another issue mentioned by Sir Keir in his speech, although he did not set out a measurable target to fix them.

Sir Keir Starmer's milestones: What are they, what's missing and how easy are they to achieve?

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