Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Explains why Farage is keeping pretty quiet

Yeah. The public have a very, very clear view on this:


All the polls since about 2015 have shown that the overwhelming majority of the British public detest Donald Trump - and yet right-wing politicians routinely seem to forget this/forget that we're not America.

Also striking just how invested the British public is in Ukraine:


On the other hand - it'd be interesting to see some other Euro-polls on this (and to see the change in Britain in the last ten days), because I'm surprised how low the numbers are here:

[Legbiter]

God help us if our commitment to increasing defence spending requires new factories

We really want to help support European defence and Ukraine, unfortunately there may be bats in the area - soz.

(Total aside - the bat tunnel is overbudget, so it's now £120 million )

 

[Sheilbh]

I'm always saying this.

Separately I think this is interesting - basically push from Labour MPs and peers (but with cross-party backing) to get arms companies within ESG. Especially because lots of big public sector pension funds have commitments on ESG investing which is a big issue for the UK defence sector because many of the biggest institutional investors basically can't touch them.

I've seen some soft-lefties like Polly Toynbee come out and say this is the right thing to do given European defence and Ukraine - however I can't help but think the problem with this and European defence firms generally is you can't conjure up a manufacturing industry very quickly because there's a particular crisis. So I'm not sure moving it from non-ESG to ESG will necessarily help if (God willing) in a couple of years we move it back into non-ESG - it needs sustained, long-term investment and orders.

However I say that having been one of those soft-lefties. Everywhere I've worked and had my pension I've always chosen the ESG funds - and moved them all into general funds in February 2022. There are still some sectors I'd rather not have any savings in but that's tough and it'd probably be an idiosyncratic list:

Treat weapons investments as 'ethical' to help arm Ukraine and UK, MPs urge
More than 100 Labour MPs and peers sign open letter saying ESG policies are holding back defence spending
Jasper Jolly
Thu 6 Mar 2025 13.07 GMT

Banks, investors and pension funds should treat weapons manufacturers as "ethical" investments so that more money goes to the industry to arm Ukraine and the UK, according to a group of more than 100 Labour MPs and peers.

Ninety-six MPs and six peers have signed an open letter calling for financial businesses to "sweep away ill-considered anti-defence rules which are acting as a barrier to doing what is right", in another sign of the backlash against environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies.

Donald Trump's talks with Russia and denial of US military aid and intelligence to Ukraine this week have prompted a scramble by European countries to boost defence spending. Keir Starmer has said the UK will increase spending to 2.5% of GDP, up from 2.3%, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has pledged a raise, while Germany's incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, wants to loosen strict debt rules to fund an increase.

On Thursday the Italian defence group Leonardo announced a deal with the Turkish drone-maker Baykar to try to rapidly increase the manufacture of unmanned weapons for Ukraine within Europe.

Roberto Cingolani, Leonardo's chief executive, told the Financial Times Trump's verbal "attacks" on Europe had given the region "an unprecedented sense of urgency" to spend more on defence.

The Labour politicians who signed the letter argued that ESG rules adopted by some institutions have held back defence spending, echoing a longstanding gripe from weapons company bosses.

However, it is unclear whether ESG rules have held back investment in defence companies. The industry's stock market value has soared in recent weeks in anticipation of higher spending. The market value of BAE Systems, the British maker of weapons ranging from shells to fighter jets and submarines, has nearly tripled since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.

The huge share-price surge of Rolls-Royce, which makes fighter jet engines and submarine reactors, has also benefited from increased defence spending, while the valuations of the British plane parts maker Melrose and the military services company Babcock International have more than doubled since the start of Russia's invasion.

The peers who signed the letter included George Robertson, a former Nato secretary general who is working on a strategic defence review for Labour.

"There can be no more ethical investment than giving the Ukrainian people every ounce of support that can be mustered by their allies," the letter said.

The letter was led by Alex Baker, MP for Aldershot, known as the home of the British army because it is the site of a major garrison. Baker won Aldershot for Labour in last year's general election for the first time since the seat was created in 1918. That highlighted the scale of the landslide victory, but also the party's renewed support for the armed forces.

Starmer has been a keen proponent of the UK defence sector. His predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was much more critical of weapons spending after a career campaigning against arms exports to countries accused of humans rights abuses.

Baker said: "The businesses I speak to in Aldershot and Farnborough are ready to step up and help deliver the new defence capabilities this moment demands – but badly composed ESG rules are stifling the innovation we need to fire up our industrial base."

Emily Apple, from the UK-based Campaign Against the Arms Trade, said the manufacturers who would benefit from relaxing ESG rules "make vast profits from death and destruction across the world".

The latest I saw on this was major pension funds saying they absolutely wouldn't change categorisation. And I'm not sure they should. It feels like instead of pretending the arms industry is "ethical" we could possibly do with re-thinking ESG more generally rather than a tick or not (this is a bit like the EU's big fights over what does or doesn't count as "green" energy from a finance perspective).

Also the arms industry themselves say this is absolutely a big problem for them broadly for smaller firms or firms within the supply chains in being able to access capital (and in some cases banking services). I'd imagine it's an issue elsewhere, but not sure.

Edit: In other defence news I see the government is hoping to prioritise increasing the reserves because that's cheaper than actually expanding the armed forces. This comes after the government outsourced recruitment in a multi-billion contract with Capita (who have consistently failed to hit their targets) and they've also eliminated all support and funding for any cadet organisations in state schools. I'm not saying the Treasury is a Russian asset but....

[Sheilbh]

I'll wait for Gups' view - but this sounds pretty promising.

I've mentioned before that Starmer is a quick learner and fairly decisive in changing course. I sort of hope this is of a piece (also plans for civil service reform to be announced this week), that they've worked out issues and realised they need ambition and to be pretty radical:

Councillors to be stripped of powers to block planning schemes
In an effort to push more building and development projects, councillors will be prevented from interfering in the majority of planning applications
Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor
Friday March 07 2025, 9.40pm, The Times

Councillors will be stripped of powers to block all but the biggest and most contentious building schemes under plans to turbocharge development.

Ministers will next week set out plans to ban councillors from interfering in the vast majority of planning applications in an effort to push through more houses, offices, factories and other large development projects.

Experts said the changes could lead to tens of thousands more homes a year and offer a "holy grail" to developers exasperated with political delays in building projects. But councils warned the changes risked eroding local democracy because residents would be denied the chance to use the ballot box to oppose unpopular schemes.

Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, will next week publish a planning and infrastructure bill designed to liberalise rules as the government promises to build 1.5 million homes this parliament and speed up infrastructure and other development projects to boost growth.

Sir Keir Starmer has made overhauling planning the foundation of his push for growth, attacking the current rules as "ruinous" and promising to take on "nimbys" who have held Britain "to ransom" and "choked" the economy.

Last year ministers signalled that they wanted to overhaul local authority planning committees, where councillors can take decisions on local applications for development. At present councils can make their own decisions on which projects are decided by such committees, and which by professional planning officers.

Next week, Rayner will promise to go significantly further than originally thought, setting a national rule that would stop committees of councillors playing a role in all but the biggest projects and those that most clearly go against local development plans.

Exact details are still being finalised, but the threshold below which councillors cannot step in is expected to be set somewhere between ten and 100 houses. Once a project has outline permission, councillors will also not be given a say on details of housing style and layout.

Ministers are keen to use the rules to encourage small and medium developers to put forward more mid-sized schemes, and will also set a minimum size threshold for councillors to intervene in commercial development.

"We will modernise how planning committees work, making sure they are focused on key applications for larger developments rather than small scale projects or niche technical details," a government source said. "This is about making sure the right decisions are taken at the right level."

Matthew Spry, of the planning consultancy Lichfields, said that delegating more applications to officials "helps move us towards more consistent, policy-driven decisions: for many, the holy grail of England's planning system. Some councils already delegate a lot to their officers, but in others, committee members expect even small schemes, and those that have been approved previously, to come before them. This means uncertainty — which is an enemy of investment — delays, some poor decisions, and wasted public money."

While in some councils barely any applications go to planning committees, at others 20-30 per cent of decisions are made by councillors, often including almost all schemes beyond simple kitchen or loft extensions.

Spry said the change "could make a real difference" and mean more and quicker approvals, but said the definition of "major" development to be sent to councillors was crucial. "Ten houses might be a big deal in a small rural council, but is almost de minimis in large urban areas."

Developers complain of having to repeatedly ask local councillors for permission, with their decisions far less predictable than those taken by planning officers. "Every time you have to engage with a committee of politicians is an enormous risk that could end up setting your project back years and costing you millions of pounds," said Zack Simons KC, a leading planning barrister.

"The fundamental problem is that the way the system is set up at the moment is that if you're bringing forward a new scheme of development of any sort you have to run it through a democratic process with input from local politicians multiple times.

"In the meantime you can have a change in administration and it's the members who were running in opposition to the [previously approved] plan who are now judging the outline application."

He said the proposed change would be "enormous because it would give us more certainty", potentially leading to tens of thousands more homes. But he said "it will be incredibly important where they set the threshold".

However, the Local Government Association has written to ministers to express reservations, pointing out that it is already "larger or more controversial schemes" that are taken over by councillors.

"This democratic role of councillors in decision-making is the backbone of the English planning system and our reservations about a national scheme of delegation centre on this role potentially being eroded," it warned.

"Many councillors stand for election on the basis of the role they could play in positively supporting the growth or protection of the environment and community in which they stand. Potentially removing the ability for councillors to discuss, debate or vote on key developments in their localities could erode public trust in the planning system and local government itself."

[Sheilbh]

Also important - the unions will obviously fight for their members. But also I think in the last month this is the second time I've seen someone in the Guardian describe Sir Keir Starmer as "Trumpian" (first time in relation to planning reform)

Unions on alert as Labour prepares to unveil 'Trumpian' plan for civil service
Performance-related pay, exit process for poor performers and more digitalisation among proposed measures intended to revolutionise Whitehall
Toby Helm
Sat 8 Mar 2025 22.30 GMT

Highly controversial plans to revolutionise Whitehall by introducing performance-related pay, an accelerated exit process for under-performing mandarins and more digitalisation will be announced this week in what ministers say is a programme to "reshape the state" so it can respond to a new "era of insecurity".

The proposed changes, to be announced by Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden, will inevitably provoke alarm and resistance from civil service unions, and be seen as the government using the current wave of global uncertainty as cover to drive through radical modernisation of civil service methods and culture.

They will also be seen as following Donald Trump's decision to set up a Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) run by the billionaire X owner Elon Musk to reduce spending and increase performance.

McFadden will say that the public does not believe that the British state, as currently configured, is able to fully and efficiently respond to modern challenges and the new need for beefed-up national security. As a result he will say that civil servants' performance and pay will be judged on the extent to which they deliver on key priorities such as national security and key government missions.

While Whitehall departments have substantially grown in recent years – increasing by more than 15,000 since the end of 2023 – McFadden is expected to say working people have not seen improvements in their job opportunities, the safety of their neighbourhoods or the length of time they have to wait for NHS treatment when they are sick.

Indicating the scale of potential reform being considered, sources stressed that "delivering national security" could only be done with a full "renewal of the state".

Most controversially, McFadden will set out a new "pay-by-results system learning from the best civil services globally, making sure the most senior officials responsible for the missions have their wages linked to the outcomes they achieve", a government spokesperson said.

McFadden will also outline plans to speed up the removal from the service of civil servants judged as unable to meet current needs. A system of "mutually agreed exits" will be introduced to bring the civil service "more in line with the private sector".

"Civil servants who do not have the skills or can't perform at the level required to deliver the government's plans will be incentivised to leave their jobs, as an alternative to lengthy formal processes," the spokesperson said, adding that the plans would also allow ministers to "quickly weed out underperformance among the highest paid civil servants – the senior civil service ... those who do not meet the standards required will immediately be put on a personal development plan, with a view to dismiss them if they do not improve in six months".

Echoing the language of Trump, McFadden said the government is willing to "disrupt the status quo as part of its pursuit of an active and productive modern state.

"The state is not match fit to rise to the moment our country faces," he added. "It is a too common feeling in working people's lives that the system doesn't work for them. With our mandate for change, this government will fundamentally reshape how the state delivers for people.

"Our plan for the civil service is one where every official is high performing and focused on delivery. To do this we must ensure we go further to ensure those brilliant people who can deliver are incentivised and rewarded, and those who can't are able to move on."

Late last year Dave Penman, the head of the senior civil servants' union (the FDA), wrote to Keir Starmer urging him to rethink his "frankly insulting" criticism of Whitehall for being comfortable with falling standards. Penman suggested Starmer had invoked "Trumpian" language by saying that "too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline".

Responding to the government's latest announcement on the reshaping and renewal of the state, Penman said: "If the government is serious about transforming public services they must set out what the substance of reform looks like, not just the retreading of failed ideas and narratives. In the absence of big ideas, we have seen previous governments peddle the narrative that public services are being held back by a handful of poor performers in the senior civil service."

Incidentally this from the Guardian is part of the problem I think identified in that Ben Ansell piece I posted - it cannot be allowed to be "Trumpian" to want change. If it all boils down to basically status-quo preserving conservatism v Trumpianism then we're fucked

[Josquius]

Pay based on performance sounds all well and good in theory, but from my experience with private sector companies that have big bonus structures... In practice this means lots of people being really inflexible and prioritising their personal targets over all else, and an entire month of the year where basically nothing gets done as everyone is all about performance reviews.

"This democratic role of councillors in decision-making is the backbone of the English planning system and our reservations about a national scheme of delegation centre on this role potentially being eroded," it warned.

I'm not sure this is the defence they think it is.

[Gups]

No particular insights into the planning reforms. It's a straightforward political/constitutional question. Should local authorities be able to decide which decisions should be made by officers and which by elected members or should central Govt impose a national scheme of delegation on them?

Generally, I'm in favour of the former but unfortunately, a lot of local authority members have shown themselves unable to perform their duties properly in making planning decisions, which is after all a quasi-judicial function.

The Economist had an interesting article this week arguing that Labour should stop tinkering with the system and rip it up altogether and replace with zoning and a building code.

[Sheilbh]

No particular insights into the planning reforms. It's a straightforward political/constitutional question. Should local authorities be able to decide which decisions should be made by officers and which by elected members or should central Govt impose a national scheme of delegation on them?

Generally, I'm in favour of the former but unfortunately, a lot of local authority members have shown themselves unable to perform their duties properly in making planning decisions, which is after all a quasi-judicial function.

I'm always torn. On the one hand I think we're massively over-centralised and it causes loads of problems, on the other local councils don't fill me with confidence...

The Economist had an interesting article this week arguing that Labour should stop tinkering with the system and rip it up altogether and replace with zoning and a building code.

I think that'd be a good idea - and probably the sort of thing they should do.

I've always banged on about it but I think the lack of certainty/predictability is a huge obstacle to small developers or other entrants - in particular Japanese and German modular building companies have tried to sell in the UK and said that basically there is not enough of a clear, predictable, pipeline for their business model to work. All of which I think is driving down quality and driving costs up.

Totally separate - I feel like a lot of the more weird/batshit court decisions I read about are coming out of the tribunals which are probably the least reported or examined. I feel like the government should take a look at how they've developed. But this one is going to launch a million claims from disgruntled law firm partners
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/mar/10/giving-senior-staff-a-desk-linked-with-junior-role-is-breach-of-uk-workplace-laws-tribunal-rules

[Sheilbh]

Separately - I think I said on here that Farage has a record of not really working well with others so it'd be interesting to see how he handles an actual political party with MPs. I thought it'd last longer than a year:

Rupert Lowe says Reform forcing him out because he poses threat to Farage
Great Yarmouth MP says 'a poppy that stood up too tall has been chopped down' in lastest escalation of bitter row
Eleni Courea and Ben Quinn
Mon 10 Mar 2025 19.32 GMT

Rupert Lowe has accused Reform UK of suspending him for being a "tall poppy" who threatened to overshadow Nigel Farage in the latest escalation of the bitter row that is tearing the party apart.

Lowe said it was highly unlikely he would be ever allowed to return to the party, which he accused of trying to "blacken" his reputation.

In a YouTube interview with the rightwing commentator Dan Wootton, Lowe left the door open to joining the Conservatives or Ukip but said he had not taken any decisions about his future.

He suggested he was being forced out of Reform because he posed a threat to Farage, saying that "as in the past, a poppy that stood up too tall has been chopped down".

"You've got to look at the pattern of relationships with Nigel throughout his career ... Almost anybody who is in his view either threatening him or is capable enough to take over from him, he tends to fall out with them."

Lowe said he owed a "huge debt to Elon Musk because without my X account which gives me a voice this may well have ended very differently".

He also suggested that the Reform UK chairman, Zia Yusuf, who is Muslim, may have not liked the way he talked about "mass deportations" or "Pakistani rape gangs".

"Is it because Nigel thought I was getting too powerful? Is it because Zia Yusuf thought I was talking too much about deportation or mass deportation, or the Pakistani rape gangs? I simply don't know," he said.

The Great Yarmouth MP, who has tacked to the right of Farage on migration, revealed that the party had asked him to excise a reference to "mass deportations" he planned to make at a rally in Kemi Badenoch's North West Essex constituency.

The all-out war inside Reform UK erupted on Friday when Lowe was suspended from the whip over bullying complaints made by two female staff members and separate allegations that he had threatened Yusuf with violence.

Lowe has strongly denied the claims, saying the bullying complaints did not relate to him personally and involved staff members who themselves faced disciplinary proceedings. He has also denied threatening Yusuf with violence and questioned why a police complaint was only made three months after the alleged incident. The Metropolitan police have said they are assessing an allegation of "'verbal threats".

Lowe called on the party to retract and apologise to him on Monday after pointing to a social media post by the former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, who said that one of the women alleged to have made claims of bullying was his former parliamentary aide.

Bridgen wrote on X: "She has told me that her original complaint had nothing to do with Rupert personally and was related to the actions of another member of his staff. I have her permission to post this tweet."

The Reform UK chief whip, Lee Anderson, responded by saying that a KC appointed by the party to investigate the allegations "has already publicly rebuked Mr Lowe for making false claims".

The row has also laid bare the tensions within Reform's grassroots membership over the direction of the party. Sources close to Lowe said that as many as 7,000 members had resigned over the weekend in protest at his treatment, though the party denies this.

Opponents of Farage's leadership are urging Lowe to lead a rival party on the hard right. "We had been having bets about when Rupert would be ousted," said Alex Stephenson, one of 10 councillors who split from Reform in Amber Valley in January and who are working with other groups.

"It was surprising that he lasted so long but hopefully now we can continue building up a new organisation. Rupert's very popular with the Reform grassroots and it's clear why, he tells it as it is."

Party members have been trading barbs on Facebook groups, with a moderator on the Reform UK Clacton group – which includes members in Farage's own constituency - complaining of Yusuf being subjected to "veiled and overt religious and racial discrimination" in recent days.

Daniel Finkelstein pointing out his tweet from two weeks before the last election

Daniel Finkelstein
@Dannythefink
Reflecting on the prospects of Reform UK, it occurs to me that Nigel Farage should hope that he is the only Reform MP elected. Because if there are two or more of them, the Reform parliamentary party will split at some point during the next parliament. That is a firm prediction.
10:04 AM · Jun 21, 2024

It is reassuring that it's not just the left-wing that could somehow manage to have a civil war in a party with five MPs. But I think this flags two slightly related difficulties for Reform.

They would not be where they are and I don't think there's any route to them growing significantly without Farage as leader. But we don't have a presidential system. In a parliamentary system Farage needs to win and work with hundreds of MPs including a significant number who will be sharp-elbowed and ambitious in their own right. I'm not sure he's capable of that.

Also - and part of why Farage is successful - is he does stick to the edge of the mainstream of British opinion. For example, he gets that the public are very pro-Ukraine and annoyed with Vance's comments on "random" European troops, so calls Vance "wrong, wrong, wrong". He's got into public rows with Elon Musk and Steve Bannon over Tommy Robinson because the British public think he's a thug even if the online far-right think he's a put upon working class hero. Similarly he's opposed a hijab ban because it would be perceived as "Islamophobic" which would lose votes in the UK. There's a challenge for a party like Reform that what they need to say to win seats in the UK is what will get the online far-right to attack them as "woke" metropolitan elites; and vice versa, what will get attention from the online far-right will turn off voters (which in a FPTP system presents a challenge).

Not sure how either of those problems resolve themselves.

[Jacob]

Not sure how either of those problems resolve themselves.

Hopefully they don't.

[Sheilbh]

On the last point - Guardian commentator on it. I think this is probably a challenge for far and radical right parties everywhere - but also it's slightly different in a PR v FPTP system:

'Dog-whistle v fog horn': why Rupert Lowe's reach on X may not cut through
Peter Walker
Senior political correspondent
Lowe's online presence, helped by Elon Musk, dwarfs that of Nigel Farage, but may not bring him new Reform voters
Mon 10 Mar 2025 17.14 GMT

If you were looking for answers as to why Rupert Lowe, a relatively little-known Reform UK MP, thinks he can lecture Nigel Farage about running a party and winning an election, there is one place you should probably start: X.

In person Lowe can sometimes resemble a slightly embarrassing uncle at a wedding, but on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, the Great Yarmouth MP is a big name – and by some metrics, a notably bigger one even than his party leader.

There is another difference immediately obvious from Lowe's presence on the platform. He is also notably more hard right than Farage, with his feed heavily focused on pledges to mass-deport a million-plus illegal migrants, or complaints about criminals from "alien cultures".

In the most recent register of MPs' interests, Lowe set out that his income from posting on X, where some users are paid a share of advertising revenue based on how many people their content reaches, is currently more than £3,000 a fortnight, about four times as much as Farage makes.

In part this is about the much greater frequency with which Lowe posts. But unlikely online influencer as he might seem, he is very much an influencer, with his posts routinely "liked" tens of thousands of times. At the time of writing, the previous 24 hours of Lowe's tweets had been viewed more than 2.5m times.

In part this reach is down to occasional amplification by Elon Musk, with the X owner and Donald Trump right-hand man endorsing Lowe's robust views in January.

Do Lowe's X statistics make a case for this? Experts argue probably not. As many other politicians have learned to their cost in recent years, social media is not real life, and endless adulation in a likely echo chamber does not always help at the ballot box.

Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, described Farage's more careful language on areas such as migration as "the difference between the dog-whistle and the fog horn – and it feels to me like Rupert Lowe has been tooting on the fog horn".

For all that Lowe's method brings likes on X, a stream of comments about deportations, "wokery" and Islam has appeal to a niche electoral audience, Bale said.

"There is an extent to which Lowe is addressing the extremely online part of Reform's potential audience, whereas Farage is going way beyond that, talking to all sorts of people who wouldn't dream of spending any time on Twitter.

"They might care about some of the issues that both of them talk about, but would probably find some of what Lowe and those who he retweets talk about as too extreme."

Research by the advocacy group Hope Not Hate backs up this idea. It has found that the fastest-growing group of new Reform recruits are more positive about multiculturalism, with the Lowe-style "core anti-immigrant" vote likely to peak at about 15%.

The X feed that has brought Lowe huge audiences and a healthy income is seemingly unlikely to appeal to such people, with its Musk-echoing talk of inclusivity policies as a "wicked, malicious, viperous cancer", and descriptions of illegal migrants as "unvetted foreign males" loitering "where your daughter walks home".

Ben Habib, who was ousted by Farage as Reform's co-deputy leader last year and has since been a critic of him, argues there is a simpler explanation for Lowe's online approach – this is just what he believes.

"The difference between Nigel and Rupert [...] is that Rupert is an ideologue," Habib said. "He is in politics because he believes the country is facing very serious threats.

"Now, whether you agree with Rupert's politics or not, that's a separate debate, but the man is demonstrably in it for what he believed to be the good of the country. Nigel, on the other hand, is not an ideologue. A lot of people think Nigel is a rightwing firebrand, but he's actually very pragmatic. He'll go where it's expedient to deliver himself into the public eye and into office."

Incidentally a friend of mine is a Saints fan who has shared some of the (many) anti-Lowe chants from when he was Chairman of Southampton. Not popular on the south coast

[Sheilbh]

Planning reform bill out - the YIMBY types I read seem broadly happy. They seem to say there's one or two areas where the government could be more radical but overall it's a big step forward. Haven't yet seen a detailed article on it.

Wes Streeting is looking at cutting NHS England in half (I'd be tempted to abolish it and totally unwind Andrew Lansley's reforms) to remove duplication of roles and teams in the Department of Health and NHS England - and to move power back to government. And read out from today's cabinet:

Stop 'outsourcing' decisions to quangos, Starmer tells cabinet
Prime minister's comments come ahead of speech on state reform and expected Whitehall job cuts
Jessica Elgot Deputy political editor
Tue 11 Mar 2025 15.01 GMT

Keir Starmer has told cabinet ministers they should stop "outsourcing" decisions to regulators and quangos and take more responsibility for their own departments.

He said they "must go further and faster to reform the state, to deliver a strong, agile and active state that delivers for working people".

The prime minister's comments at the weekly cabinet meeting come before an important speech this week on reforming the state, which is expected to result in significant Whitehall job cuts.

The comments will raise the possibility that Starmer and the Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden intend to cut a number of quangos – though Labour has been criticised for creating at least a dozen during its first months in office.

Starmer said departments should be "assessing processes and regulations that play no part in delivering the Plan for Change", and that meant government taking responsibility for major decisions "rather than outsourcing them to regulators and bodies as had become the trend under the previous government".

McFadden said in cabinet that the government believed in the power of the state to provide security and stability, but said the previous government had taken an outdated approach to "forever hiring more people and spending more money".

Under the plans, expected to be announced this week, underperforming officials could be given incentives to resign and senior officials would have their pay linked to performance. The scheme forms part of a wider efficiency drive, with ministers planning to cut about 10,000 civil service roles.

Starmer's spokesperson declined to say which bodies he was referring to but said the prime minister thought the state had become "passive".

The spokesperson was asked if the government was planning a "bonfire of the quangos", but said he would not get ahead of the announcement on Thursday. He said: "The state in Westminster has grown larger but it has not become more effective, and as [the PM] said in cabinet we have seen examples over time of government becoming more passive when it comes to decisions."

The number of non-departmental public bodies has been in decline for decades, and stands at about 300, down from about 700 in 2010 when David Cameron took office. In the 1970s, there were as many as 2,000.

Among the 14 public bodies set up by the government since Labour won the election in July are GB Energy, Skills England, National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, the Passenger Standards Authority, the Regulatory Innovation Office, the National Jobs and Careers Service and the Independent Football regulator – though some of these are mergers of existing bodies.

The Institute for Government suggested last weekend that McFadden could consider compulsory redundancy rounds in the civil service, whereas previously job losses have been voluntary redundancies or by attrition. Alex Thomas, from the thinktank, said it would lead to a "mindset shift" among civil servants, saying voluntary schemes and hiring freezes often choked off talent.

Starmer's comments come amid a row between the Ministry of Justice and the Sentencing Council over what has been called a "two-tier" approach to sentencing trans people and people from ethnic minority and other minority backgrounds. The justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has said she was prepared to legislate to reduce the Sentencing Council's power if it would not amend the guidelines.

Mahmood is said to be preparing to use the sentencing bill, expected this summer, to do this if she consider that the council, by its guidance, is in effect making policy decisions that should be made by government.

However, Lord Justice Davis, chair of the council, suggested Mahmood did not have the power to change the guidelines. He said if the government tried changing the law to give itself powers to rewrite the guidelines, it would be undermining the independence of the judiciary.

All good stuff in my view but they need to go further. After returning decision making to democratic control they should bring back the operational stuff too and get rid of the outsourcers like Capita, G4S, Serco etc. Bring back the decision-making to elected politicians, accountable to parliament, then bring the operational responsibility for those policies back to the state who report to those ministers.

Also on the point about the 15 quangos that Labour set up or merged in the first 6 months - I think this gets to Starmer's virtue as a politician. He doesn't really have particularly fixed views. That can be a problem on the "what is this for" point, but also means that he moves on very ruthlessly if something isn't working.

I think it's striking that he started with the very common, mainstream centre-left views that Britain's problems were caused by "populism". He won power and set up 15 new quagos, expanded the remit of others (a lot of Rachel Reeves' problems are because of how she strengthened the OBR), wanted to follow the right process etc - and is, within six months, of trying to get the British state to do things sounding like Blair at his most radical (and he's right) - and I think "strong, agile and active state" is exactly what the goal should be in the current environment.

Edit: I think planning is another example - my understanding from what I've read is that where the government's ended up on planning seems further than they'd initially indicated.

[Admiral Yi]

Where in London do you tend to avoid?

[Richard Hakluyt]

I never go to Croydon, even though I lived there for a couple of years, Londoners will understand.

[Josquius]

Generally anywhwere  outside zone 1.