Lack of planning has hit Labour’s efforts to fix public services, says thinktank

Keir Starmer is failing to make major improvements to public services partly because he did not plan properly while in opposition, according to a report from the Institute for Government (IfG). The prime minister went into government without a clear idea about how to achieve his targets, the IfG found, resulting in haphazard attempts to reform various sectors, from the health service to the courts. The annual report provides a damaging overview of an occasionally chaotic first year in government for Labour, during which the party and Starmer have slumped in the polls. Nick Davies, a programme director at the IfG and one of the authors of the report, said: “Starmer went into government with a set of missions, but no clear idea about how to achieve them or how those targets fit together in any meaningful way. “He has not been properly engaged with this process. In opposition he should have been the one to say: ‘This is my view of what public sector reform looks like’, whether that’s on devolution, or the health service, or anything else. “But there has been a void at the heart of government when it comes to public services.” In the report, Davies adds: “Starmer must urgently get a grip if Labour is to enter the next election having delivered tangible improvements to the services upon which the public depends.” Related: Wes Streeting’s gamble with the NHS is greater than any play for Downing Street | Gaby Hinsliff The report forms part of a series of IfG analyses of public services across the country, including another highly critical one about the failure of the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to improve the NHS. Wednesday’s report looks at a range of services and finds that Labour has made good progress in only one area: improving children’s social services. On prisons, the institute found the government had made some progress, but not enough, while in five other services – including GPs and hospitals – there had been little or no progress. In one area – adult social care – the researchers found that government action in the previous year had made things worse. Much of the problem, Davies said, was that the government did not think enough about how it could achieve what it wanted by getting different departments to work together. For example, while Streeting has talked about getting more people out of hospitals and into community care, the government has increased funding for the NHS more than it has done for local government, which pays for adult social care. It has decided not to reform the funding of adult social care immediately, instead commissioning Louise Casey to lead a review into it, which will report before the next election. At the same time, ministers have also ended health and social care visas, which allowed care providers to bring foreign workers in to ease staffing shortages after the Covid pandemic. At times, ministers made decisions that contradicted themselves, the report found. One example was the government’s decision to change the boundaries of NHS care boards so that they aligned with those controlled by regional mayors, which it did before a separate review of local government boundaries. “NHS England is being scrapped, integrated care boards are being reorganised and we are undertaking a huge round of local government reorganisation,” said Davies. “All of the anchor organisations which are going to deliver the government’s reforms are going through huge change all at the same time.” On children’s social care, the report found that the government had made improvements by focusing on early intervention and reducing its reliance on residential care. A government spokesperson said: “We are already delivering real change for people across the UK, including cutting NHS waiting lists, launching free breakfast clubs for schoolchildren and starting a £5bn Pride in Place fund for local leaders to improve communities and deliver national renewal.“This government is significantly increasing investment in public services. Day-to-day spending will be over £50bn higher every year by 2028-29 and we’ve increased capital investment by over £100bn over the next five years.”