Keir Starmer is to outline a “plan for change” on Thursday in a speech in which he will set targets in key areas. This, the prime minister is expected to say, will allow voters to judge the government’s performance. We don’t know what all the targets will be. But BBC Verify has looked at the six key areas Starmer is expected to focus on and assessed what the government has already pledged to do, as well as how likely it is to achieve these goals.
The NHS in England has an official target that 92% of patients waiting for planned treatment should be seen within 18 weeks of being referred. Labour’s manifesto pledged this and the government is expected to commit to doing so by 2029. The latest NHS data shows that in September 2024 only 58.5% of operations, or other procedures people were waiting for, occurred within 18 weeks.
In order to meet this goal, the government has said it wants the NHS in England to get through an additional 40,000 appointments and operations each week. And to help fund this, Chancellor Rachel Reeves increased the inflation-adjusted day-to-day cash resources of the health department by 3.8% in both 2024-25 and 2025-26 in her Autumn Budget.
The economy is expected to make a new pledge to increase the amount of money that households have. In October, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which does the government’s forecasts, predicted that real household disposable income (RHDI) per person would rise by around 0.5% per year over this Parliament.
As part of its commitment to substantially decarbonise the UK’s electricity grid by 2030, the government is expected to pledge, in line with its manifesto, to triple the UK’s solar power capacity, double onshore wind capacity and quadruple offshore wind capacity. The previous government presided over an auction for offshore wind contracts in September 2023 which attracted no bids for new projects – blamed on the setting of the price too low.
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