Preparing for new policy approaches under a Labour government

Our politicians have learnt to communicate in short, clip-able chunks. Whether it’s photo ops in hard hats, key phrases that are used over and over again (think strong and stable) or even a personal TikTok account, much of what we hear and see from politicians is relatively high level.

This applies particularly to the Labour party – partly because they’re not in government and partly because of where they sit in the polls right now. In simple terms, the risk to reward just isn’t there now to justify expansive policy announcements – they’d be trading very minor political gain against real risk of embarrassment or disagreement in their electoral coalition.

That will all change if the Labour party wins the next election. After 12 years out of government, they will be looking to deliver real change as quickly as possible, and for that to happen they will need to have the next layer of policy detail.

In fact, almost as important as the policy ideas themselves is the theory of change that informs them – that is how will these things happen. There are many areas of public policy where both sides agree broadly on the outcome they want delivered – better healthcare, better schools, lower unemployment (in contrast to something like immigration where there’s more of a debate). The key thing in these areas isn’t the what but the how, and understanding that is therefore key to planning for a change of government.

For example, under a traditionally centre-right view of the world, public policy reform might typically be done by:

• Increasing competition and reducing state support so better services thrive and worse ones don’t
• Empowering the consumer – making services more directly accountable to the end user and giving them freedom to choose which service they use
• Lowering taxes – allowing people to keep more money in their pockets to spend it as they want (driving the previous two points)
• De-regulation – freeing services from bureaucracy and red tape, and avoiding state delivery of services where possible
• Using the nuclear family as a platform – encouraging and incentivising ‘traditional’ family structures

Indeed, many of the major reforms we’ve seen under Conservative led governments since 2010 have utilised these theories of change. Think school academisation (which stuck) and privatising the probation service (which didn’t).

So what if the polls are to be believed and the next government is a Labour one? While they may not be talking about it in detail yet, you can be sure that their default approaches for delivering public policy reform will be different. Even if they share Tony Blair’s ability to reach across the aisle on some issues (again school academisation is a famous example) they will have a different set of approaches they will more naturally reach to to fix public policy problems, for example:

• Regulation – protecting the public from the excesses of the free market
• Mandation – a version of the above, forcing (through legislation) companies or individuals to do something that’s in the public’s interest
• Economies of scale / nationalisation – utilising the power of central government to reduce costs and ensure wider access to core services
• Prevention / early support – investing taxpayer money into ‘non-necessary’ interventions that can save money later down the line
• Higher taxes as disincentives – for example sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco

Of course, as Tony Blair did, so too the Conservatives have utilised some of the approaches above when it has suited them, for example on the sugar tax. And there are also a suite of public policy approaches that neither the left nor right can lay claim to, such as devolution.

But what’s certain is that the default approach of an incoming Labour government will be different – a Labour Minister will be more naturally receptive to policy changes that match their default approaches, the same as Conservative ones have been.

So while you enjoy (or despair at) the current political drama, get ready too for the substantive changes coming in the policy areas relevant to you, because while you might not get a lot of notice, under a Labour government they could be just around the corner.