Start the rebuilding work, Keir Starmer, and show us you’re different to the last bunch of cowboys
Is this really going to be the year that the government “gets things done”? Keir Starmer is branding it as a “year of rebuilding”, returning to work with a series of announcements that he claims show the government is serious about fixing the NHS. Tomorrow, he will unveil an elective recovery plan for the health service, which he hopes will be received as a radical overhaul – and a sign that he is on the right track after a difficult start to his premiership.
The changes include patients being able refer themselves for tests and scans, as well as consultations on the same day as those tests so that they can get on with treatment or have the reassurance of knowing nothing is wrong. There are also changes to the way surgery is planned, so that hip and knee replacements aren’t routinely cancelled during winter crises.
That’s all very well, but Starmer’s first act in his year of rebuilding was to delay doing anything about one of the greatest failures of modern public policymaking. By setting up a long-term commission on creating a national care service that won’t report until 2028, the prime minister risks looking more like one of those builders who turns up when they feel like it and leaves the site under a tarpaulin for months at a time.
Social care is an extreme example of the policy problems that Labour needs to do some serious rebuilding work on: successive governments have produced towers of documents in the form of commissions, taskforces and even manifesto proposals, all amounting to very little in the form of concrete reform.
The final report deadline of 2028 seems almost deliberately designed to prevent any meaningful reform and allow the blame to fall on the other parties that didn’t help. We know from Andy Burnham’s experience back in 2009 what happens when a government has cross-party talks on a social care reform that conclude shortly before an election: the consensus turns out to be false, the parties turn on each other and use the proposed reform as a means of attack, with a scary slogan like the “death tax” – or indeed the “dementia tax” that Labour itself campaigned against in the 2017 election. Politics hasn’t suddenly turned into everyone holding hands and singing Kumbaya........
© The Guardian
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