Cath Haddon

@cathhaddon.bsky.social

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Senior Fellow @instituteforgov.bsky.social + history, Whitehall geekiness and constitutional agony aunt Subscribe to our newsletter: http://bit.ly/3dxiJ5J

By the end of your first 100 days, the public, the Opposition and the media should understand what you are trying to do with your department. You should have provided a frame through which they interpret its activities. If you don’t provide such a frame, someone else will and it will not be the one you want
Extract from The Times newsletter: The prime minister wants to appoint someone immediately to the job to avoid a power vacuum at the heart of government. This means only those shortlisted for the job when Wormald was appointed in December 2024 will be eligible. One of the candidates has left the civil service, while another was also involved in vetting Mandelson. By process of elimination, this puts Dame Antonia Romeo in pole position to become Britain’s first ever female cabinet secretary.
IfG senior fellow Jill Rutter is a former Treasury civil servant. On the BBC podcast The Tax Conundrum she describes how the Treasury would look for positive stories to sweeten the bitter pill of tax rises: "When I was in my very early days at the Treasury, and chancellors were making some quite unpleasant decisions in budgets, we used to spend the last few weeks ahead of the budget in what was called a lollipop hunt. The idea was that the chancellor wanted to leaven the bad news with some lollipops that were tweaks to the tax system or maybe a bit of money for something that you could point to and you would get… [something like] "the association of duck farmers welcome the chancellor’s final recognition that they need this relief". The problem is that after you've brought in that relief, you've got a built-in lobby group that will squeal the moment you decide you need to take it away because either it’s costing more than you thought or it’s not having the effects you wanted."
Chart showing remaining, new and departed ministers, 15 November 2023
With the increased attendance of businesses, lobbyists, foreign diplomats and other external groups who turned up in droves, this was also a busy conference. The poll lead that Labour has built up was discussed, and acknowledged, but 'no complacency' was a line repeated more than once. It was clear that Starmer's team wanted to take nothing for granted and wanted the conference to be seen as boring - rather than exciting for the wrong reasons
Labour is still committed to the Ethics and Integrity Commission that Rayner described in a speech at the Institute, and indeed the theme of tackling low standards and corruption was common across the conference, with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves announcing a Covid- 19 corruption commission. Details, however, are thin on the ground - exactly who would sit on either of these commissions, what their legal base will be and how they will work with other existing bits of government remains to be seen. It is clear, though, that despite Rayner's move, Labour still see integrity and ethics as a way to differentiate themselves from the Conservatives, and therefore as a key plank of their pitch to voters
Rachel Reeves said that "Brexit, without a plan" was one example of the mayhem caused by Conservative governments. Keir Starmer also allowed one mention of Brexit into his conference speech - in his litany of Conservative delusion misleading voters, his most substantive point was when he declared: "When they told you - to your face - that Brexit would only bring benefits to your business." In other words, this is not to say that Brexit was wrong but that this Brexit is not working - and that a Labour government could and would make it work better.
One area where Labour's plans are clearer is English devolution. Paula Barker, the shadow minister for devolution and the English regions, spoke about the Take Back Control Bill - legislation to underpin further devolution at the start of a Labour government - at another of our fringe events. And detail released from the National Policy Forum said that a Labour government would give places a formal right to request powers devolved elsewhere, in line with recommendations from Institute for Government research. Further work is required to set out how a Labour government would deliver further devolution in practice, but it is welcome that progress made by the current government over the past decade or so will be built upon and developed whichever party wins the next election
Both Starmer and shadow net zero secretary Ed Miliband seemed happy to take on Rishi Sunak's weaponisation of net zero the week before, with Starmer arguing that "climate change is an opportunity we can't pass up" and insisting the UK should "speed ahead". Both rejected Sunak's argument that moving more slowly on net zero would save consumers money, arguing that energy bills had risen because of the failure to invest in clean energy
On public services we heard a lot about reform, but less about how Labour will achieve it without raising investment. Opposition is not a place to work up every policy in minute detail. But in 1997 - one of the victories Starmer invoked - Labour benefited from detailed work on clear policy pledges on the minimum wage, devolution and class sizes. Starmer and his party need to convince the electorate that a future Labour government would have the ideas and plans to deliver change. They are still some way short of achieving that, and will need to narrow the gap between Labour's pitch for power and the scale of policies currently on offer