Keir Starmer’s Plan for Change puts pressure on Whitehall to deliver

The IfG’s Centre Commission final report, which we published in March, argued that governments should establish a concrete set of priorities that define how they intend to achieve their desired high-level outcomes – so Keir Starmer's decision to adopt this approach is very welcome. The 'Plan for Change' could have come sooner: we argued that a new administration should set out its priorities for government quickly following an election to drive trade-offs and spending decisions. But articulating the six "milestones" now, with the full spending review delayed to June 2025, provides the opportunity – if it is taken – for Starmer to shape the choices which lie ahead. 

At the launch of the Plan for Change, Starmer repeatedly returned to Labour’s missions, but when facing questions from the media about bringing down immigration numbers he stressed instead that this was one of the government’s three “foundations.” Starmer wants the Plan for Change to be a clear message to civil servants about the government’s priorities, but officials need to know how the milestones are intended to relate to the missions, or the foundations, and how this collection of aims and objectives – and those not included at all – will be traded off against each other ahead of the spending review.  

Meeting the targets will be difficult and could come at the cost of the wider missions

The Plan for Change sets out six milestones across the five missions, with growth being sufficiently important to justify two targets. These include timelines, metrics and, in most cases, a numerical level that is to be achieved. But the milestones differ in their nature and scale, ranging from inputs that are under the direct control of the government (13,000 more neighbourhood officers), to outputs delivered in partnership with the private sector (1.5 million new homes), and outcomes that will emerge from the complex interactions between government action and wider economic, social and technological changes (higher disposable income). 

The biggest improvement on the Sunak government’s five priorities is that they have not been published in isolation. Instead, the Plan for Change outlines plausible theories of change for how they will be delivered and, in some cases, the contribution they will make to the wider mission. But while the plan starts to provide a framework for how different parts of government will work together, it doesn’t provide much additional steer on where resources should be directed. For example, the plan says that it will meet the NHS 18-week waiting milestone by increasing hospital activity and reducing demand through preventative interventions, but it does not spell out what the balance of funding should be between the two.  

Even with further clarity on approach, the milestones will be difficult to meet, particularly without additional spending. Targets work by focusing government attention on specific issues but, with resources constrained, that will mean spending less time and effort on other important matters. The risk is that departments focus on the headline metrics but ignore the wider objectives of the missions. 

Starmer has set down a challenge to the civil service 

Unusually for such a public speech, Starmer time and again returned to internal questions of process and delivery. As well as trying to emphasise the scale of the government’s ambition, he was giving the public sector – and the civil service in particular – a shake.

In one of the most memorable passages Starmer said that “too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline”. Combine that with his earlier direction to his newly appointed cabinet secretary Chris Wormald to work on “nothing less than the complete re-wiring of the British state” and you have a sense of a prime minister frustrated with the support he is getting from the system.

Starmer’s instruction should be taken as a call for the civil service to rediscover its policy creativity and shake off the passivity which can characterise the minister-official relationship. Mission-led government requires innovative thinking, creativity and a willingness to listen to external voices, so Wormald and his colleagues can use Starmer’s new interest in internal reform to show how imaginative and energetic they can be in service of the government’s agenda. That must go alongside radically improving how the centre of government works, by restructuring and slimming down the Cabinet Office and building capacity in No.10 to hold the rest of government to account for delivering on the direction set by the Plan for Change.

Starmer needs to be careful not to alienate and disillusion his workforce, and the approach of some ministers in the last government showed that crude blob-bashing does not work. But at this moment of leadership change in the civil service, senior officials need to show they can rise to Starmer’s challenge. The new cabinet secretary inherits this plan, so Chris Wormald – who starts his new job on 16 December – has just been given a very public set of performance objectives by the prime minister.