Re:View 9 January 2026
Chief Executive
Happy New Year! And welcome back to the Re:View for what will, I am confident, be another fascinating (crazy?!) year in policy.
The PM’s New Year address began “Things have been tough in Britain for a while”. A bold opener, I assume he was going for empathy. But perhaps even bolder was his next assertion that “even more people will feel once again a sense of hope, a belief that things can and will get better, feel that the promise of renewal can become a reality, and my government will make it that reality.”
The “even more” implies a hefty proportion of us are already feeling hopeful — enthused by the change that is just round the corner — and yet if recent polling is to be believed, this is not the prevailing sentiment. New research out this week from FGS Global found almost three quarters of people believe that “life will be harder for the next generation” — the very opposite of hopeful. This is consistent with poll findings last year. In November Ipsos found that 80% of Britons believe that country is getting worse as a place to live.
I desperately want Labour to deliver on the “promise of renewal”, but doing so will require the PM to be far more radical. A favourite country song of mine has the line "Some day I hope you get the chance to live like you were dyin'" (Tim McGraw if you’re interested); some day (ideally today), I hope Starmer starts governing like he only has one term. Setting aside the fact that his current approach is making that a very real prospect, what might he do if he wasn’t worrying about getting re-elected?
He might scrap the unaffordable triple lock and introduce a new funding model for social care that requires us all to pay in (for our care not current recipients) and older adults to use their assets to fund more of their care.
He might set out, and start executing, a radical new phase of devolution that establishes an at scale regional tier across the country, accompanied with genuine freedom of decision-making on spending and matched with fiscal devolution. He might back regional regulatory sandboxes to enable experimentation with radically different approaches to everything from employment law to environmental rules.
He might fundamentally reconstitute the machinery of government, scrapping and merging departments and creating entirely new entry routes into the civil service with radically different terms and conditions. In fact, he might finally grasp the public sector pension nettle and end defined benefit pensions for new starters and cut the employer contribution to boost salary levels.
He might announce plans, with correspondingly ambitious regulatory reforms, to dramatically cut the time it will take to build new runways, small modular reactors, munitions factories, homes and other key transport infrastructure — going beyond the (positive but insufficient) planning reforms. He might slash the massively onerous and excessively costly compliance reporting on professional service firms.
He might radically rethink the ‘mental and behavioural disorder’ category for sickness and disability benefits, test personalised approaches to conditionality, and create a single, flat-rate out of work benefit.
You may disagree with all, many or some of the above — I am not saying this is the right list. You may have your own set of ideas. But the need for a dramatic disruption to the current approaches and institutions that form the State is unarguable, and to achieve that we need big ideas, and to be willing to take on vested and special interests and, yes, upset some people.
PM, 2026 is the year to take risks, the prize is your much promised renewal.