Starmer echoes Liz Truss on reform of government

It is a comparison neither would likely welcome, but look closely and the arguments of Sir Keir Starmer and Liz Truss about why government doesn't work well enough are remarkably similar.

Neither are the first to grumble about the machinery of government.

More than 20 years ago, Sir Tony Blair gave a speech much of which Sir Keir could give today.

"Sometimes we can be so frightened of the process of accountability, we opt for inertia," Sir Tony said in 2004, adding that too often the civil service had acted as "a shock absorber in order to maintain the status quo".

So claims about a lack of nimbleness and pace are not new.

But a core strand of Sir Keir's argument overlaps with Liz Truss's.

Perhaps the person the prime minister has to thank the most for his whopping majority has been making the case he is now making for a while.

Their language and emphases may be different, but the diagnosis is the same.

Sir Keir Starmer says the state has become "overcautious" and "flabby" and government has become bigger, but weaker.

By weaker, he means a growing inability to make stuff happen and a big reason for that, he reckons, is the proliferation of arm's length bodies – taxpayer funded organisations with independence from the government and considerable power.

There has been a growing sense in Downing Street as the prime minister and his team have adjusted to life in government that organisations dreamt up as a wheeze by previous governments so they don't get blamed for this or that all too often now stand in the way of a minister being able to do what they want.

The recent row about the Sentencing Council in England and Wales is seen as a case in point.

And now, scrapping NHS England is, ministers will argue, the ultimate case study in scrapping unaccountable bureaucracy.

So what did Liz Truss argue after her time in government?

She talked of the "tyranny of the technocracy", the "power of the administrative state" and argued that "there is something rather undemocratic about this".

She said that "Blair and Brown had imposed a web of legalistic architecture that added process and put more power in the hands of technocrats", which granted is a point where you might think Truss and Starmer would depart and no doubt do in many instances.

But strikingly, given that recent row about the Sentencing Council, when was it set up?

In April 2010, when Gordon Brown was prime minister.

"For any challenge faced, for too long the answer has been more arm's length bodies, quangos and regulators which end up blocking the government," Sir Keir writes in the Daily Telegraph, without reference to any particular such body.

It is also true that this new-ish government has itself created new arms-length bodies, such as GB Energy and Skills England.

Perhaps it is human nature - that your own arm's length bodies don't feel as pernicious as ones dreamt up by a predecessor.

Beyond the comparisons, the reason all this matters is the government is up against a pervasive sense that nothing works any more.

Think the 8am scramble for an appointment with the doctor and the waiting lists for an operation for a start.

Some senior Labour figures fret privately that their talk of "missions" and a "Plan for Change" might seem puny to many in comparison with the scale of that challenge.

The prime minister said: "Every pound that we spend, every regulation, every decision must deliver for working people. And I don't just mean efficiency...I mean something else which is allowing the state, the government, to operate what I call maximum power."

The prime minister's speech is both a symptom of his early frustration at the capacity of government to get stuff done - and an acknowledgement of the urgency to do just that.

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