Starmer warns UK that ‘broken’ public services will take time to fix

Sir Keir Starmer has warned that it will take time to fix Britain’s “broken” public services as he addressed the nation from Downing Street on the first full day of the new Labour government.

The prime minister said that he was “restless for change”, but warned that reforming national institutions such as the health or prison service was not an “overnight exercise”.

He said that he had told ministers at his first cabinet meeting on Saturday morning that they had to hit the ground running: “We’re going to take the tough decisions and do that early.”

Starmer said he believed that Labour’s landslide in Thursday’s general election — putting the party into power for the first time in 14 years — means that he has a mandate to deliver change.

The NHS and the prison system are among parts of the state which are visibly broken, he warned.

Pledging to address issues with “raw honesty”, he said: “Everyone who works in the NHS or uses it knows that it is broken . . . prisons is another obvious example of how parts of the system are broken. I can’t pretend we can fix everything overnight.”

Starmer pointed to how the previous Conservative government had only completed a fraction of its prison-building programme: “I can’t build a prison in 24 hours.”

The prime minister confirmed that one of his first acts in power would be to end the Tory plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda in central Africa to be processed. “The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started, it’s never been a deterrent,” he said. “I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks.”

Starmer said he was delighted to appoint several prominent experts to ministerial posts in an attempt to bring deep policy expertise into the heart of his government.

They include James Timpson, a businessman known for rehabilitating former prisoners, who is now prisons minister, and Sir Patrick Vallance, who served as the government’s chief scientific adviser during the Covid-19 pandemic and is now science minister.

Timpson has previously criticised the running of the prison system, saying that far too many people are being locked away.

Starmer passed over his former shadow attorney-general Emily Thornberry for the same post in government, instead appointing Richard Hermer KC, a human rights lawyer. Timpson, Vallance and Hermer will become peers.

On Friday Rachel Reeves, David Lammy and Yvette Cooper were named as chancellor, foreign and home secretary respectively, and Wes Streeting became health secretary.

The new government is facing immediate challenges including concluding a pay negotiation with doctors. It is expected to set out an overhaul of the planning system within days, in a bid to spur a badly needed increase in housebuilding.

The new premier said that on Sunday he would set off on a tour of Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales, where he would meet first ministers.

On Tuesday he will convene a meeting of regional metropolitan mayors, including those from other political parties as no party has “a monopoly on ideas”, he said. 

The prime minister, who said the first duty of his government was “security and defence”, will then fly out to the Nato summit in Washington on Tuesday evening where he will meet other world leaders, including Joe Biden.

On Friday the US president phoned Starmer to congratulate him on his election victory and to reaffirm “the special relationship between our nations and the importance of working together in support of freedom and democracy around the world”, the White House said.

Starmer also spoke to Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, and on Saturday had further calls with the prime ministers of India, Japan and Australia.

During the press conference Starmer refused to say how long it would take for the new Labour government to meet its pledge to lift defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP.

He confirmed that he would set up and chair new “mission boards” to drive policy through the civil service and aid cross-departmental work, a policy first revealed in the Financial Times.

Starmer pledged “country-first politics” and said that “tribal politics” had been a major cause of Westminster’s dysfunction in recent years.