BBC reporters assess Labour government's performance one year in
A question of growth
Key pledges: The government says its number one mission is to put more money in pockets, which means growth. And for good reason: over the last 15 years, the UK has expanded at a fraction of its previous rate and some people failed to see living standards improve.Status: It was a rocky start for the government as the economy flatlined in the second half of the year and ministers watered down their aim to have the fastest growth in the G7 major economies. Perhaps this was reality hitting over the challenges at hand. A pick up at the start of 2025 meant that GDP per person was about half of 1% higher by April than it had been last summer. So we're better off – but not by much.Analysis: Rachel Reeves says the world has changed, while President Donald Trump's trade wars and greater geopolitical uncertainty make those growth ambitions tougher. But the government's own policies risk weighing down the outlook for the next year or two. The rise in minimum wage has helped millions of workers but that and other policies - such as the increase in employers' National Insurance contributions - are weighing on businesses profits and jobs. There are more than a quarter of a million fewer employees than a year ago; the biggest losses are in hospitality and retail, among the sectors most likely to have seen their wage bills increase. Analysis of job postings by the Institute of Employment Studies suggests the increased hesitancy among employers dates back to the Autumn Budget as they braced for these policies to be implemented.
Net migration levels and small boats
Key pledges: To "reduce net migration" and "smash the criminal boat gangs".Status: Net migration, the difference between people arriving and leaving the UK, has fallen sharply since the election. But the reduction has been driven largely by visa restrictions introduced by the previous government. Even tougher controls, including the closure of a visa scheme to fill vacancies in social care, are contained in new laws yet to be implemented.Analysis: The government wants to reduce the UK's reliance on overseas workers by linking policies on immigration with employment training. However, Home Office advisers caution that increasing the skilled workforce does not guarantee a reduction in migration. Ministers believe tighter rules on worker and student visas, together with increased enforcement on illegal working, will mean significant falls in foreign arrivals - but net migration remains substantially higher than a decade ago.Alongside policies to cut overall numbers, the government promised to restore order to the asylum system, end the use of hotels and "smash" the criminal boat gangs. However, small boat Channel crossings have increased significantly in Labour's first year and statistics suggest more migrants are receiving asylum support than at the election. The backlog of people awaiting an initial decision has decreased but this has been offset by a sharp rise in appeals. Hotel use is also slightly up, according to the latest figures.While irregular migration accounts for only a small proportion of total arrivals, this aspect of immigration has a huge impact on the government politically and economically. The Treasury's spending plans are partly reliant on the promise to save billions by ending the use of asylum hotels by 2029, and the rise of Reform UK in the polls is seen by some as a sign of public frustration at small boat crossings.The government has established a Border Security Command coordinating efforts to reduce illegal migration. Meanwhile, new legislation will treat people smuggling as a crime equivalent to terrorism. Deals with international partners and reports of an imminent returns agreement with France are seen as key to fulfilling the promise to "smash the gangs" too. Much depends, however, on factors beyond the UK's control.
Trump, Ukraine and the EU
Key pledges: Labour promised to "reconnect with allies and forge new partnerships to deliver security and prosperity at home and abroad". That included staying close to the US and resetting the UK's relationship with the European Union. It also promised "steadfast support for Ukraine".Status: Allies say Keir Starmer has managed his relationship with Donald Trump well, securing a tariff deal - and US backing for a politically controversial plan to cede sovereignty of a joint military base in the Chagos Islands. He has also protected the AUKUS security pact with Australia and the US. The UK has sustained support for Ukraine, working with European allies to keep pressure on Russia and help heal the rift between presidents Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky after their Oval Office bust-up. Starmer also led European discussions about plans for a post-war "reassurance force" in Ukraine. The UK has agreed a trade deal with India. It has also reset diplomatic relations with the EU, easing some trade regulations and agreeing a UK-EU defence pact. Analysis: Starmer has discovered that governments can become consumed by foreign affairs and his first year is no exception. The chief criticism levelled at the government is that it is too cautious. Has it put enough pressure on Russia - targeting the $300bn (£220bn) of assets frozen in European jurisdictions, or sanctioning Russian wealth in London? On the Middle East, the government has cut some arms sales to Israel. But it is under growing pressure from MPs to oppose more firmly Israel's deadly operations in Gaza and give formal recognition to a Palestinian state. Critics say changes to UK-EU relations are too modest to boost the economy significantly and should go further. The China audit has been completed but the government is refusing to publish the document, citing security concerns. Critics say ministers are fearful of losing Chinese investment by being too explicit about security concerns.On climate change, some MPs struggle to see the leadership that was promised. In opposition, Labour promised to "rebuild Britain's reputation on international development". Instead, it has slashed foreign aid to pay for defence spending, something some say has damaged relations with developing countries.
Teacher targets and VAT on fees
Key pledges: A drive to recruit 6,500 new teachers in England, and to start charging VAT on private school fees to pay for it, among other things.Status: The government hasn't met its teacher target, according to the latest official headcount - though that dates from November. VAT has been introduced on private school fees across the UK - and there are concerns about private school pupils leaving the sector as a result.Analysis: Training teachers takes time. The number of new trainees rose by 6% this academic year, but remained below target. The latest figures from November show the number of secondary school teachers rose 1,400 in a year, while teachers in special schools and pupil referral units were up by 900. However, primary school and nursery teachers fell by 2,900.In May, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson specified that the aim was to recruit 6,500 expert teachers "across secondary and special schools". That prompted fury from Conservative shadow education minister Neil O'Brien, who accused the government of "moving the goalposts" by excluding primary school numbers.Labour said it planned to fund the recruitment drive by adding 20% VAT to private school fees. The Independent Schools Council said private school fees were 22.6% higher on average in January compared with a year ago - £7,382 per term for a day school, up from £6,021.Figures out last month suggested the number of private school pupils fell by 11,000 in a year. The government said that was "within historical patterns", but private schools say more pupils are leaving than normal. There have been concerns that smaller private schools are being pushed towards closure and about the impact on students with scholarships, for example.Given the controversy, there will be close scrutiny of whether the money raised will have the desired impact.For many parents in the state sector, the need for more school staff is pressing. Government proposals to reform the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (Send) system - which has 1.7 million pupils, up 5.6% since last year - are due this autumn and parents will want to know whether staffing will match demand.
Reforms and U-turns
Key pledges: Welfare reform to support more people into work and to champion the rights of disabled people, plus a National Care Service that delivers consistent, high-quality support across the country.Status: There have been significant U-turns on welfare reform and efforts to restrict the number of pensioners receiving the Winter Fuel Payment. An independent commission into reforming adult social care started work in April 2025.Analysis: When Labour came to power, many of those who work with the most vulnerable in society were hopeful. In conversations, they would tell me that even with the nation's finances tight, surely neglected services and support for older and disabled people would be prioritised?The government would argue that is exactly what it is doing, but 12 months on, the more printable judgments of the same people would be "disappointment" and "confusion." That disillusionment is rooted in three policies – all in part shaped by saving money.First, the surprise decision to limit the £300-a-year Winter Fuel Allowance to only pensioners in the greatest need, meant the universal payment was taken away from ten million older people. After pressure from Labour MP's, the government reinstated the allowance for three quarters of pensioners, but the U-turn raised questions about its authority and priorities.Second came the welfare bill. The aim was to save nearly £5bn a year by 2030 on spiralling benefits costs. It tightened the criteria for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and Universal Credit - the latter is paid to both working and non-working people on low incomes. Again, pressure from MPs led to another government U-turn and plans were watered down. It has potentially wiped-out long-term Treasury savings, according to some economists, and the whole saga has left many disabled people worried.Finally, there is disappointment over what the government has not done. Reform of the overstretched, understaffed and financially squeezed adult social care system has effectively been pushed into the long grass. The Casey Commission, the latest review to look at how to fund social care in the long-term, will produce recommendations next year, but its final report is not due until 2028.There is a financial and human cost to every policy and in the last year the government has discovered how difficult it is to find the right balance.
Waiting lists and structural change
Key pledges: Cut hospital waiting lists, end 8am scramble for GP appointments, scrap NHS England.Status: Some modest progress on waiting lists but more work to be done.Analysis: Health Secretary Wes Streeting shocked many in the health world by saying on day one that the NHS was broken. His aim was to acknowledge what many patients felt - and now he is trying to demonstrate that he can fix it.Near the top of that list is hospital waiting lists. The government says it has delivered a pledge for two million extra NHS appointments in England in its first year. But as of April, the waiting list for an operation or another planned appointment stood at 7.39 million - which has fallen since the election.As things stand just under 60% of those patients are seen and treated within 18 weeks, well under the NHS's 92% target. That number has improved by less than a percentage point since Labour took office.The government has promised to hit that target by March 2029, something doctors and patient groups have warned will be an uphill battle.Elsewhere, a new contract has been agreed with GPs, with more money for surgeries, a promise to cut red tape and a 5.4% pay rise for resident - formerly known as junior - doctors. Staff are now again balloting for strike action, spelling possible trouble ahead.Ministers have been eager to show a Labour administration is not afraid to reduce duplication and cut what they claim to be bureaucracy. In the process, NHS England, the administrative body responsible for managing the health service, has been scrapped along with hundreds of other agencies. But there is a risk that NHS managers will be distracted by the reorganisation above improving performance for patients, while reallocating savings to frontline services may not be simple.And the publication this week of a long-awaited ten-year plan for the NHS may promise a new network of neighbourhood health centres, but how long will it take for them to make a difference?Health is a devolved power so the Labour government only has responsibility for England, not other parts of the UK.
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BBC News
34 minutes ago
- BBC News
Keir Starmer told me he'd met every challenge. But things look bad right now
Will Keir Starmer allow himself to celebrate his first anniversary as prime minister this weekend? Or will he be taking a long, hard look in the mirror and asking himself what went wrong?That is what is in my mind as he greets me in the Terracotta Room on the first floor of 10 Downing Street for a long-planned conversation about his first 12 months in office, this looks surprisingly relaxed, given that his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had been in tears sitting behind him in the Commons just hours earlier. That triggered fevered speculation about how long she would last in the job, moving markets to sell the pound and increase the cost of that is the impression he wants to convey to me as he shares a story about his photo opportunity with Formula One cars parked outside his front door - the most famous door in the is determined that the problems of recent weeks - and boy there's been a long list of those - will not overshadow the achievements he believes deserve just as much attention."We have done some fantastic things," he tells me, "really driven down the waiting lists in the NHS, really done loads of improvements in schools and stuff that we can do for children - whether that's rolling out school uniform projects, whether it's school meals, breakfast clubs, you name it - and also [brought in] a huge amount of investment into the country. And of course we've been busy getting three trade deals."It's clear that, given the chance, his list would go on. And yet, I point out, there is another long list - of things he's recently admitted to getting the last year, he's said hiring Sue Gray - Starmer's former chief of staff who left Downing Street in October - was wrong. He's also held his hands up about plans to end winter fuel payments, about rejecting a national grooming gang inquiry, and cutting benefits for disabled people. That's not even the full list, yet it's quite a number of things that he's admitting to being a prime minister thinks I've rather crudely summarised his personal reflections on what he might have done better. He challenges the idea, which is prevalent in Westminster, that changing your mind represents weakness, or a "humiliating U-turn".Listen: The inside story of Starmer's stormy first yearInDepth: Why Sir Keir's political honeymoon was so short-livedThis is the fourth time we've sat down for an extended and personal conversation for my Political Thinking podcast."You know this from getting to know me," he says. "I'm not one of these ideological thinkers, where ideology dictates what I do. I'm a pragmatist. You can badge these things as U-turns - it's common sense to me."If someone says to me, 'here's some more information and I really think it's the right thing to do', I'm the kind of person that says, 'well in which case, let's do it'."There is, though, no doubt that scrapping so much of his welfare reforms was a U-turn - a costly and humiliating one. Starmer and his chancellor have not only lost authority and face, they've lost £5bn in planned savings, something that will have to be paid for somehow, through extra borrowing, lower spending or, most likely, higher taxes."I take responsibility," he says, "we didn't get the process right". But somehow he implies that it might have been someone other than the leader of the Labour Party's responsibility to persuade Labour MPs to back his plans. He doesn't spell out what he means by getting the process right and, perhaps more importantly, he dodges my attempts to get him to spell out clearly what story he's trying to tell the country about Labour be on the side of disabled people and people like his own mother, who had a crippling disease that meant she eventually had to have a leg amputated? Or should they adopt her unwillingness to be written off, which he described to me the last time we spoke? When told by her doctors that she wouldn't walk again she refused to listen. Wounded by the events of the past week, Starmer refuses to even address that choice. But surely, I suggest to him, the nation doesn't just want a problem-solver, or a chief executive of UK plc? Voters surely want a leader who has a story to tell?Starmer clearly knew this question - or a variation of it - was coming. I've pushed him on it every time we've spoken at length. "It's about a passion, if that's the right word," he says. "But certainly a determination to change the lives of millions of working people and, in particular, to tackle this question of fairness.""It's almost like a social contract," he adds, "that people are getting back what they're putting in, that there is a fairer environment for them that supports them and respects them."That's a bit long to sew on to an election banner, to chant in the streets, or write in a post on X, but it is a theme. He is a self-proclaimed pragmatist who doesn't want there to be something that can be labelled as "Starmerism", but at least we can now say that his guiding principle is fairness. In truth, what matters more than anything else to him is not losing, something he tells me he hates, whether in politics or on the five-a-side pitch playing football regularly with his mates - as he still does and has done for decades.I tell him people think he is losing now - some say he is the most unpopular prime minister since records began. He reacts with the defiance of a man whose football-playing friend recently described him as a "hard bastard". A man who served in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet and then had him thrown out of the party; who stood to be leader on promises to keep much of Corbyn's agenda before tearing up those promises to win power; and someone who hired then fired Sue Gray as his first Downing Street chief of staff. "Every challenge that's been put in front of me I've risen to, met it, and we're going to continue in the same vein," he says.I end our conversation by reminding him what they say about failing football managers who have "lost the dressing room". Has he lost the Labour Party dressing room? His reply is emphatic."Absolutely not," he says. "The Labour dressing room, the PLP, is proud as hell of what we've done, and their frustration - my frustration - is that sometimes the other stuff, welfare would be an example, can obscure us being able to get that out there."Almost as an afterthought he adds: "I'm a hard-enough bastard to find out who it was who said that, so that I can have a discussion with him." Knowing Starmer I suspect he's much more likely to deliver a crunching tackle on the pitch than a quiet word off the prime minister's message is clear to me: Don't count me out, however bad it looks now. To pretty much everyone other than him it currently does look bad. Very bad.
South Wales Guardian
38 minutes ago
- South Wales Guardian
Migrant policies ‘creating more barriers to child safety', says charity
Young children hide under tables when they think they hear the sound of sirens because they are commonly scared of the police, according to organisation Project Play, who raised concerns of teargas and evictions. Advocacy coordinator Kate O'Neill, based in northern France, told the PA news agency there has been a rise in police violence which is disproportionately harming children. She said: 'Ultimately the children we're meeting every day are not safe. 'They're exposed to a level of violence, whether it's they are directly victims of it or the witness. 'We're ultimately at all times putting out fires… the underlying issue is these policies of border securitisation… that are creating more and more barriers to child safety and child protection.' She said there was hope when the Labour Government took office a year ago that there would be some improvement, adding: 'This is not at all what we've seen. 'They continued to make conditions more difficult and more dangerous.' She said: 'The smash-the-gangs narrative is not effective and it's harmful because ultimately the only way to put the gangs out of business is to cut the need for them.' It comes as the grassroots organisation published a report that said at least 15 children died trying to cross the English Channel last year, more than the total of the past four years combined. The charity that offers play services, parental support and safeguarding casework to children aged 0-18 living in sites around Calais and Dunkirk, documented rising violence, trauma and child deaths linked with UK border policies and funding to the French to ramp up enforcement in 2024. In February this year, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper agreed to re-purpose £7 million of cash to French counterparts to bolster enforcement action on the nation's coastline to tackle Channel crossings. 'What we really need to see is some cross-border accountability for the incidents and the fatalities in the Channel,' Ms O'Neill said. The campaigner said one of the main calls as a result of the group's research is for an official source of the number of deaths and information on these deaths to be recorded. Figures for the report came from International Organisation for Migration, Calais Migrant Solidarity and other networks in northern France. 'We don't have the identities of all of them. 'In fact, these deaths are going unrecorded and unreported,' she said. One in five crossing the English Channel between 2018 and 2024 were children, according to Project Play. Meanwhile, Ms O'Neill said tactics for French police to intervene in crossing attempts in shallow waters is already happening despite the changes needed to the rules to allow this having not yet come into force. She said: 'This is not a new tactic… it's something that has been happening for a long time in Calais and surrounding areas. 'My feeling is that this is increasing based on the number of testimonies we're receiving from children and their families recently.' 'It's really dangerous because the children often are in the middle of the boats.' But on Friday, Ms Cooper said intervention in French waters was 'critical'. 'That's one of the big things that has changed, the way in which the boats operate in shallow waters,' she said. 'We have to have the action on those because that's that is where the prevention needs to take place.' Ms Cooper also pressed the case for introducing the new criminal offence of endangering life at sea under the Government's Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, after seeing 'awful cases' of children being crushed to death in the middle of overcrowded boats. Project Play worked with more than 1,000 children in 2024, and believes in the last few weeks there have been a 'very large amount' of children they worked with who were born and went to school in a European country, such as Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Ms O'Neill said families' visas granted five or 10 years ago in other European countries for refuge have since expired and they have not been allowed to stay, which she said is behind the increase in crossings to the UK. She said since Brexit meant the UK left the Dublin regulation, the country is a 'viable option'. The European Union law set out that the first EU country an asylum seeker entered was responsible for processing their claim, and the UK can no longer send asylum seekers back to other member states since leaving the bloc. Ms O'Neill said: 'Most people we're speaking to, that is why they're going. 'They're not going to claim benefits from the UK or to do anything for free, but it's the next nearest safe place they can be. 'This needs to be addressed… as a European-wide issue instead of just a UK-France thing.' A Home Office spokesperson said: 'We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security. 'Through international intelligence sharing under our Border Security Command, enhanced enforcement operations in Northern France and tougher legislation in the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill, we are strengthening international partnerships and boosting our ability to identify, disrupt, and dismantle criminal gangs.' The Pas-de-Calais Prefecture was contacted for comment.
BBC News
39 minutes ago
- BBC News
University of Lincoln staff hold one-day strike
Staff at the University of Lincoln will strike on Friday over plans to cut University and College Union (UCU) said it would form a picket line and hand out flyers to prospective students visiting the campus for an open branch chair, Dr Owen Clayton, said industrial action was taking place because "the university hasn't ruled out compulsory redundancies".In a statement, the university said it aimed "to mitigate the need" for compulsory job losses. The dispute is over the university's proposals to cut up to 285 staff across a number of areas, including the Lincoln International Business School and the history Clayton said the university was "saying that they need to do this for financial reasons yet, at the same time, is hiring people and opening up new areas".He said the university was "pushing to have larger and larger class sizes", which the university denied. The university previously said the 285 figure was a "worst case scenario" and the UK higher education sector was "undergoing significant change".In a statement, it said it had "reduced costs" to "protect average class sizes" and was aiming "to mitigate the need for compulsory redundancies"."The changes we are making now respond to growing areas of student demand and the changing needs of our communities," it said."This includes the development of our healthcare provision which will deliver a highly skilled NHS workforce in our region." Listen to highlights from Lincolnshire on BBC Sounds, watch the latest episode of Look North or tell us about a story you think we should be covering here.
