The Starmer story so far: what has Labor done in its first 100 days?

Labor has been frustrated by commentary suggesting it has not achieved enough since winning the election, pointing to a series of decisions and pieces of legislation it has pushed through. We look at what the new government has done in its first hundred days.

Economy

One of Rachel Reeves’ first actions as Chancellor was to stand before the House of Commons and accuse the previous government of leaving a £22 billion hole in this year’s public accounts. Each year, government spending deviates slightly from what was budgeted, but this was an unusually high amount, driven by both the higher-than-expected costs of housing asylum seekers and public sector wage agreements.

Reeves’ solution to this was to immediately halt several projects, including the road tunnel under Stonehenge and the A27 Arundel bypass. Boris Johnson’s pledge to build 40 new hospitals has also come under scrutiny, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer accusing his predecessor of making the pledge without committing the money.

Energy

When Michael Gove was asked at the Tory conference to name the most effective Labor cabinet ministers to date, one of those he listed was Ed Miliband. The Minister of Energy has returned with great activity to a position he last held fourteen years ago.

On July 8, the first Monday after winning the election, Miliband announced he would lift the previous government’s de facto ban on onshore wind power. A day later, Reeves unveiled the national wealth fund, a £7.3 billion plan designed to invest in green infrastructure such as clean steel and carbon capture.

Later that month, Miliband introduced a bill to create Great British Energy, a national energy production company that the government has made central to its net zero strategy. The bill gives the company the power to produce and distribute clean energy and spend money on energy efficiency programs.

Keir Starmer announced in his speech at the Labor conference that GBE would be based in Aberdeen.

Transport

The first bill passed by the House of Commons under the Labor government was the Rail Nationalization Bill. The bill automatically brings rail networks back under public control once their existing franchise contracts expire, or sooner if they breach their contracts.

The transport secretary, Louise Haigh, has also passed a bill to create a new company called Great British Railways, which will manage both rail and rail traffic. However, some wonder why the rolling stock is not also brought under national control.

Last month, Haigh reversed another bit of privatization in the transport sector, allowing local authorities across England to run their own bus services again. The transportation secretary has also said she wants to make it simpler and easier for local leaders to implement the franchising process.

Education

Labor has promised to introduce free breakfast clubs in every primary school in England, but this is slow to come. Reeves announced at the Labor conference that 750 English schools would be invited to take part in a pilot programme.

Housing

Labor has pledged to liberalize the planning regime and started doing so shortly after taking over the government, not only removing restrictions on onshore wind energy but also re-imposing population-based housing targets on local authorities.

The Conservatives had given local planners a series of loopholes to prevent these targets being met, a move that housebuilders said had hampered new development, sending the number of housing permits down to their lowest level in a decade.

Other reforms are planned, including making it easier for government agencies to issue mandatory purchase orders and making it easier to build on green belt land.

Meanwhile, Matthew Pennycook, the Housing Secretary, has introduced a package of tenant reforms, which passed its second reading in Parliament this week, despite Conservative objections. That package adopts some of the ambitions Gove originally championed when he was housing minister, including immediately ending no-fault evictions and forcing landlords to make timely repairs to properties.

However, campaigners are unhappy that the Labor government has so far failed to introduce a new package of protections for tenant farmers, who they say are slipping away from the government’s agenda. The government has promised to introduce a bill to limit leasehold rights and strengthen tenants’ rights, but so far has not even adopted the measures passed by parliament under the previous government.

Employment

Starmer promised his government would deliver a package of workers’ rights in its first 100 days, a deadline just met when Angela Rayner, his deputy, published the Employment Rights Bill on Thursday.

Her reforms include offering workers protection against unfair dismissal and the right to paternity leave from the first day of employment, instead of having to wait two years. The bill also bans employers from forcing workers to sign zero-hour contracts and prohibits them from firing staff and then rehiring them at lower wages, unless the company is threatened with bankruptcy.

Although the bill was published in its first hundred days, it will take another two years before it comes into effect. Civil servants and ministers will spend that time consulting companies and unions about the exact measures and how they can be monitored.

Some promises made before the elections did not make it into the bill. There will be no legal right for workers to switch off outside working hours, and the government will now consult on having one worker status. Unions have long campaigned for a single employee status to replace the distinction between employees and the self-employed, partly to tackle exploitation in the gig economy.

Immigration

As promised, Labor has ended the previous government’s Rwanda program, which had not sent a single asylum seeker to Rwanda but was already costing the government money. Demolishing it saved more than £2 billion in two years.

Instead, Starmer and his home secretary, Yvette Cooper, have introduced a border security command to focus on people smuggling gangs. However, the Prime Minister is still trying to sign return deals with European countries, deals that could mean Britain would have to accept migrants in return.

Nearly 12,000 people have crossed the Channel in small boats since the election, slightly fewer than the same period last year.

Justice

A week after the election, Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood announced an early release scheme under which some offenders who had committed less serious crimes would leave prison after serving 40% of their sentences. Mahmood blamed the prison crisis she inherited from the previous government, which left prisons in England and Wales almost entirely full.

The early release plan was controversial, but its purpose was underscored later in the summer when riots swept parts of the country. Speaking to journalists from the Downing Street garden after the riots subsided, the Prime Minister described the decisions he had had to make as they unfolded.

“I shouldn’t be sitting in the Cobra room from day to day with a list of prisons across the country, trying to figure out how we deal with disorder,” he said. “But that’s the position I was put in.”

Health

If Starmer wants to show progress in one public service by the time he contests the next election, it will have to be the NHS. His health minister, Wes Streeting, tasked Ara Darzi, a former labor minister, with outlining the scale of the challenge. Lord Darzi’s report, published last month, found that long delays at hospitals, GPs and mental health services led to thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Darzi proposed a series of changes, including a greater focus on prevention and imposing ‘health taxes’ on items such as alcohol and tobacco.