Targets work. They set priorities, provide focus and raise ambition.
They say something about what the government is for – and how and what it intends to change.
Labour promised a decade of renewal and the steps it has taken so far – GB Energy, planning reform – are about long term projects that might take a decade or more to come to fruition. So targets also help mark out the milestones for progress.
But targets have drawbacks too.
Tony Blair’s government used targets effectively but also found that they could have unintended consequences: in order to hit the goal of seeing a GP within 48 hours, some GP surgeries simply stopped allowing anyone to book more than 48 hours ahead. You either saw your GP within 48 hours, or not at all. This time No10 say they have thought about the targets they have set to avoid gamification but the point about unintended consequences is that they are hard to anticipate.
No10 also claim to have learned from Rishi Sunak’s ‘five tests’. Whereas Sunak’s pledges were broad, with vague metrics, this time Labour has mostly chosen more precision. Labour claim their goals are deliberately more ambitious than Sunak’s but under scrutiny the targets for the economy and net zero may not look more ambitious than the rhetoric in the manifesto.
The lesson of Joe Biden for No10 is that even if you hit your targets, you can still lose the election. While Biden achieved world-beating economic growth, measured by national GDP, US voters repeatedly said they did not feel it in their pocket. Accordingly Labour have adjusted their topline manifesto economic commitment – to be the fastest growing economy in the G7 – and have committed to achieve growth in every region.
Even more pointedly, Labour have also chosen to target an improvement in Real Disposable Household Income – that’s the money in your pay packet after tax. Although it is a clear measure of your income, RDHI does not fully account for costs, such as housing and heating, so it is not a perfect indicator of the standard of living but it is nonetheless a much better target than simply aiming for GDP growth.
On health, the target is treating 92 percent of NHS patients within 18 weeks. The argument against this sort of target is that it ‘fetishizes’ one part of the health service to the detriment of others. No10 argues that fixing the waiting list is the single most important data point in people’s perception of their health service so it is fundamental to restoring confidence in the NHS. Another argument against the target is that it appears to stand apart from Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s ‘three shifts’ – from sickness to prevention, hospital to community, analogue to digital. Labour says there is no trade-off here and that it is only by achieving the ‘three shifts’ that they will cut the waiting lists.
On crime, the target is 13,000 more police officers and to give every community a named police officer responsible for local crime. Bobbies on the beat helps tackle street crime but feels quite 2000s because it won’t address the pandemic of online fraud.
Across all these targets, there is a crucial additional step the government needs to take: instead of just using government’s own data on delivery, they should measure public confidence in the delivery of each of the targets. This approach helps to ensure they are not just paper targets in Whitehall but the real world experience of voters, and stops targets from being gamed or becoming counterproductive (like Blair’s 48 hour GP target). This approach would also help Labour avoid Biden’s strategic mistake, which was to achieve targets that satisfied economists instead of ordinary people.
Finally, while No10 will explain that immigration is not one of the milestones but part of their core ‘strong foundations’ that bit of policy framing risks just sounding like a wonky PowerPoint presentation when placed alongside the specific hard targets for education, health and policing.
Overall, these targets are a sensible next stage of the government’s plan for delivery. They tell us what the government will do. Achieving them will come at the cost of failing to achieve other things. And there will inevitably be unintended consequences. But such prioritization and decision-making are necessary steps in defining a government.
Footnote correction:
Yesterday in response to the government’s announcement, we said that the government had “watered down” its commitment to clean power by 2030 to 95%. Media reports suggest we are not alone in having had that impression. In his Labour conference speech in September 2022, and again in November last year, the Prime Minister had explicitly committed to 100% clean power by 2030.
However, we were incorrect to suggest that this puts the government at odds with the National Energy Systems Operator. In fact, NESO regard 95% clean power, with a strategic reserve of gas, as effectively achieving clean power. On the substance of the policy, we do not disagree with that position, and support the government’s ambition to decarbonise power sooner rather than later.
