Growth is great, but what’s the actual plan?

Like my colleague William Hague, I am willing this government to succeed. I’m a Labour-inclined voter who believes the party at its best offers a thriving economy, greater economic equality, more public investment and more concern for how ordinary people can lead decent, honourable and satisfying lives than the Conservatives ever do. This summer I hoped this largely unknown and untested administration could pull Britain out of its decline.
Now I’m starting to worry they may not be up to the job.
Labour has at least, belatedly, responded to the tide of national dismay at its gloomy predictions. Its pre-conference briefings promised to offer hope again. Rachel Reeves delivered most of her speech this week with a fixed smile. Sir Keir Starmer talked of change and national renewal, and ended on a recital, rapturously received in the hall, of the glories to come under Labour: safe streets, clean cheap energy, secure borders, new houses and hospitals, no anxieties while paying for the supermarket shop.
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Optimism is badly needed. But something vital is missing from much of what Labour is telling us: the connection between the Britain it promises and how it intends to get there. That’s alarming. We don’t want vacuous boosterism; the Tories scarred us with that. We want a government that understands and can explain just how it will deliver its goals. So far the evidence is slender.
Take the economy. The drive for growth is Labour’s central commitment. Before the election Reeves assured a nervous City that she would lead “the most pro-growth, pro-business Treasury our country has ever seen”. Instead, Labour’s dire predictions, threats of tax rises and emphasis on new workers’ rights are hurting business confidence. Job vacancies are down by 28 per cent in a year. James Reed of Reed Employment, one of Britain’s largest employment agencies, warns: “We may be witnessing a slow-motion car crash in the labour market.”
Wishing for growth isn’t a commitment of any kind. Every government wants it. A desire for it is little more than a cliché. We need more from Labour’s chancellor and leader. Listen to Reeves on Today this week. Her answers to Nick Robinson’s gentle questions were alarmingly light on detail. “What I’m setting out today in my conference speech,” she said, “is the prize if we can bring stability back to our economy, and do the pro-business, pro-growth reform to bring investment back to Britain. But the prize if we can do that is strong growth, wealth in all of our communities, good jobs paying decent wages, more money in people’s pockets, and more money for our frontline public services, particularly our health service.”
Reeves went on to promise 1.5 million new homes, data centres, research labs, energy infrastructure and a national wealth fund to bring good jobs to all parts of Britain. How is she going to deliver the safe and pleasant houses she wants, at scale? This week Labour pledged new “planning passports”, allowing housebuilding to go ahead as a default in brownfield zones as long as plans meet local standards for quality and design. It sounds fine, but there are several glaring omissions. Britain has a huge shortage of construction workers; hundreds of thousands are already needed and demand will be far greater under Labour’s plans. How will we fill that gap? With the immigration Labour has said it’ll cut? With workers we’ll take years to train? Nobody knows.
Nor is there any mention of how those high standards will be monitored. Grenfell and the cladding crisis highlighted how widespread cheating is in the housebuilding industry and how poor its regulation has become. Britain’s builders are getting away with shoddy construction on a grand scale. Last year, Inside Housing reported that “the average number of defects per new property is as high as 157, almost double what it was in 2005”. We’ll require an army of astute inspectors unless a new tide of short-lived and cheaply built box homes is what Labour intends to bequeath.
Then there’s the national wealth fund, launched with great fanfare by Reeves within days of July’s election and flagged as a vital initiative to kick-start and underpin Britain’s investment in green industries. Eleven weeks later it doesn’t seem to have a chief executive. More worrying is its limited scale. Reeves presents it as transformational but its budget of £7.3 billion over five years is pitiful compared with the investment that Britain could call on in the recent past — when it was in the EU. Then, as Stephen Hunsaker of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe points out, the European Investment Bank was investing that sum in the UK’s big projects every year, funding schemes such as the Channel Tunnel, the Elizabeth line and Scottish onshore wind.
Reeves also wants new high-tech labs and energy infrastructure, but what will Labour do to unblock the bottlenecks that have prevented all these things from being built in recent decades? A recent essay by three academics and think-tankers, Foundations: Why Britain has stagnated, laid out the stark facts of our predicament. Here are some: Hinkley Point C, Britain’s first nuclear power plant in 30 years, is four times more expensive than those being built on the Continent; HS2 is costing between four and eight times more per mile than high-speed projects in France and Italy; Britain has not built a new reservoir in 30 years; nor built a tramway in Leeds, a city of 800,000, while the French have built 21 in the past 25 years.
Neither Reeves nor Labour can solve these sorts of problems overnight. But we are two and a half months into a government that has spent two years preparing for power, and yet in so many key areas Labour’s plans are absent or unclear. Starmer said he’d smash the boat gangs; there’s no sign of a new strategy, and hundreds of migrants are landing every week. Our poisoned rivers, which Starmer keeps condemning as a Tory monstrosity, will continue to die under Labour because the government doesn’t intend either to fund new infrastructure or force the water companies to do so. There is no sense No 10 is being well run. Starmer’s ratings have fallen sharply, and Labour is already as unpopular as Johnson was in December 2021 as the partygate scandal built.
History is littered with governments who mistake speeches for strategy, and declarations for delivery. We need substance, structure and a sense of direction. Labour, please prove the country’s doubts wrong.
Daniel Finkelstein is away