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Undeliverable policies became very much of ‘a thing’ in the 2019–2024 parliament under the leadership of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Our article chronicles the scope and nature of key manifesto pledges which proved to be undeliverable in this period: ‘levelling-up every part of the United Kingdom’; High Speed 2 (HS2); ‘build and fund 40 new hospitals over the next ten years’, ‘take back control of our borders’ and ‘to fix our immigration system’. The reports of the National Audit Office (NAO), along with reports from a range of UK parliamentary committees, are used to address the question of what constitutes policy undeliverability. The question of what explains policy undeliverability is addressed by examining the interactions of: i) policy promises, ii) the nature and complexities of UK governance; and iii) the vagaries of often unforeseen or immediately uncontrollable occurrences.
Some policies are born undeliverable
In recent times there has been a noticeable inflation of ‘empty promises’ during election campaigns. In the UK, between 2019-2024, the populist narratives and associated rhetorical hyperbole of Johnson, Truss and Sunak fuelled this inflationary trend.
The very boosterism of key manifesto promises – in their over-ambition, over-optimism, and over-generality – arguably compromised their deliverability from the outset. Such over-optimism particularly plagued the delivery of HS2. This was observed in the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s 2020 inquiry into the delivery of major levelling-up infrastructure projects, which noted a consistent theme of ‘over-optimism in project planning’.
Similarly, the NAO noted from the outset ‘inherent uncertainty’ in government ‘about whether all the [new hospital] schemes could be afforded and completed on time’.
The Home Affairs Committee, in its investigation of the conjoined issues of channel crossings, migration and asylum, started from the grounded proposition that there is ‘no magical single solution’ to dealing with such issues. Instead, what was most likely to achieve sustainable outcomes were ‘detailed, evidence-driven, properly costed and fully tested policy initiatives’. The clear, if judiciously phrased, implication was that the initial promises made by Johnson and Sunak did not match these criteria, and their response had, if anything, exacerbated these problems and undermined public confidence.
Some policies attain undeliverability
A basic checklist of positive factors contributing to effective implementation includes: clear policy goals and objectives; adequate resources; stakeholder buy-in and co-production of policy development and delivery; comprehensive monitoring and evaluation of programmes; clear communication and transparency; commitment to individual and organisational capacity-building; coordination, collaboration and cross-government working; flexibility; consistent political support; and recognised public legitimacy.
The extent to which the performance of central government diverged markedly from this basic checklist was revealed across each of the policy areas under study.
Successive reports of the NAO and PAC, on levelling up funding to local government, revealed the extent to which performance of central government effectively ‘prevent[ed] effective planning’. In the case of HS2, although Johnson in his 2021 ‘levelling-up speech’ identified HS2 as a vital part of ‘strengthen[ing] the sinews of the whole United Kingdom’, by 2023, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) had rated the chances of HS2 achieving its aims and objectives as ‘red’, indicating that ‘successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable’. Even the decision to cancel the latter stages of HS2, and to rescope the development of Euston station taken by Sunak in October 2023, did little to assuage fears of undeliverability, and echoed the NAO’s observation, made a decade earlier in relation to major projects, that ‘too often, government commits to a “solution” without fully understanding the context and exploring alternative options to determine which solution matches the real need’.
As for the New Hospital Programme, by mid-2023 the NAO had already concluded that ‘[b]y the definition the government used in 2020, it will not now deliver 40 new hospitals by 2030’. Correspondingly, the PAC also confirmed in November 2023 that it had ‘no confidence’ that the original target was achievable. This despite changing what counted as a new hospital to include the replacement of seven existing hospitals.
As for immigration and asylum policies, Sunak within months of becoming PM reaffirmed commitments to ‘stop the boats’, to end the use of hotels to house asylum seekers and relocate them in ‘a range of alternative sites … in the coming months’, and ‘to abolish the backlog of initial asylum decisions by the end of next year’. By the time Sunak left office in July 2024 these promises remained undelivered.
Thousands of migrants continued to cross the English Channel in small boats. There had been no forcible removals of migrants to Rwanda. As for the promise to end the use of hotels: the Home Office’s own analysis suggested its plans for large accommodation sites were ‘high risk or undeliverable’. This mirrored three ‘unachievable’ ratings by the IPA in successive reviews of the Home Office’s work on alternative asylum accommodation. Not surprisingly, therefore, the PAC concluded that the Home Office’s ‘assessment of the requirements for setting up alternative accommodation in large sites fell woefully short of reality and risked wasting taxpayers’ money’.
As for abolishing the backlog of initial asylum decisions: in January 2024 the Home Office issued a press release that Sunak’s 2022 commitment to ‘clear the backlog of asylum decisions by the end of 2023’ had been delivered. Yet, there were still 1,891 pre- Nationality and Borders Act (NABA) backlog cases awaiting an initial decision in June 2024, and by the time Sunak left office, there were a further 83,948 post-NABA backlog cases.
Some policies have undeliverability thrust upon them
Events: ‘the facts have changed’
Trace elements of undeliverable policies may be found in adverse changes in the societal and economic environment. Indeed, ‘events’ have a particular singular justificatory power in the eyes of governments – in their capacity for the absolution of blame. Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic; the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the consequent energy supply and cost shocks; along with rapidly rising inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, adversely impacted policy delivery after 2020. Certainly also, ministers and departments willingly and persistently cited these events as part-mitigation for non-delivery of promised policies.
Lessons learned? Different party trajectories
The essence of policy undeliverability was clearly exposed in the official reports of the NAO and other parliamentary enquiries. Yet, it is one thing to identify why policies were left undelivered, it is another thing to take steps to mitigate undeliverability in the future. Notably after the 2024 election the two major UK political parties took strides of different lengths and in different directions in their mitigation strategies.
Conservative trajectory
In the ‘period of reflection’ immediately after the 2024 electoral tsunami, one former Conservative MP argued that the lesson to be learned was that the government’s failure ‘was not so much the failure to deliver the promises but that the promises were undeliverable in the first place’. In the subsequent 2024 leadership contest all candidates seemingly accepted the need ‘to get back to the politics of delivery’. Certainly, Kemi Badenoch on becoming leader willingly conceded that in office ‘we made mistakes … overall we did not deliver’, with later specific acknowledgment that – on Brexit, Net Zero, and immigration – ‘we told people what they wanted to hear first and then tried to work it out later’. Yet, in the face of the spectacular rise of Reform UK, Badenoch, continued with ‘populist adjacent’ rhetoric, and boosterish promises and offers ‘to shoot for the stars’.
Labour trajectory
Clearly a key theme of Keir Starmer’s nascent premiership was that ‘delivery, delivery, delivery is what matters’. The Labour government, in its first months in office, was insistent that it had learnt the lesson that policy delivery matters in the long term. In the short term, however, it was less clear that it had learnt the lesson that policy design and delivery was underpinned by an inextricable interconnection of political nous and narrative and process-related factors. While Labour clearly demonstrated that it had learnt that failure to deliver policies could lose elections, it was less clear that a positive message had been developed to show that it also understood that delivery alone could not win elections.
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