Will the government be able to hit its new targets?

The prime minister highlighted an existing target for the NHS in England that 92% of patients waiting for planned treatment should be seen within 18 weeks of being referred.

It was a manifesto pledge and the government has pledged to achieve it 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.

When Labour took power in July, the share was 58.8%, so it has barely changed.

The last time the 92% target was hit was in November 2015.

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.

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.

However, Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents managers, has warned that achieving the 40,000 appointments and operations target will not be enough, on its own, to hit the broader 92% waiting list target.

“The NHS needs reform, not just ever more activity,” Mr Taylor said.

Starmer made a new pledge to increase the amount of money that households have.

The government will use two measures to track this.

The first is real household disposable income (RHDI) per person. This is what people have left of their pay and benefits once they have paid tax.

In October, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which does the government's forecasts, predicted that RHDI per person would rise by around 0.5% per year over this Parliament.

According to calculations by the Resolution Foundation, a think tank focused on living standards, that would be a slightly better performance than the 0.3% average growth in RHDI per person in the previous Parliament.

But it would be worse than just about every other Parliament for decades.

The second measure is GDP (a measure of the size of the economy) divided by the size of the population, which the prime minister says will rise for every region of the UK.

In the last Parliament, overall GDP per capita fell in the UK.

Starmer also mentioned the manifesto pledge to deliver the highest sustained growth in the G7, which would mean having stronger growth than the US, Canada, Italy, France, Japan and Germany.

The latest forecasts from the IMF from October suggest that Canada and the US will have stronger average growth than the UK between 2024 and 2029.

However, it should be stressed that these are only forecasts - and forecasts related to economic growth and incomes are subject to considerable uncertainty.

The government has re-committed to its manifesto pledge to hire 13,000 additional neighbourhood police officers, volunteer special constables and Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs), who work with officers but do not have all the same powers.

The government pledged to raise the proportion of children in England who are “ready for school” at the age of five, to 75%.

Official data from the Department for Education suggests that in 2023-24, 67.7% of children in England had a “good level of development”.

This is based on teacher assessments of children’s development at age five.

This was up slightly from 67.2% in the previous year.

The government is in the middle of a major expansion of state-funded childcare.

From September 2025, the government is pledging to deliver 30 hours of government funded childcare a week for under-fives in England, taking on the commitment of the previous government.

However, the Early Years Alliance, which represents nurseries in England, estimates that the increase in employer National Insurance Contributions announced in the Budget will result in additional annual costs averaging more than £18,600 per provider. That is based on a survey of its members.

The childcare sector warns that, without extra funding to make up for the tax rise, nurseries might withdraw from the free childcare scheme, or some could go out of business.

Also in line with Labour’s manifesto, Starmer has recommitted to building 1.5 million net additional dwellings in England over the course of the Parliament.

At a constant annual rate, that would equate to 300,000 per year,

The most recent official data shows that 221,070 net additional dwellings were delivered in 2023-24, a decline of 6% on the previous year.

The government is bringing in new housing targets for local councils in England, which the previous administration dropped and is reforming planning laws to try to accelerate building.

But many housing experts remain sceptical about the feasibility of Labour’s target given the lack of affordability of new housing, which has put off many buyers and deterred private developers from investing.

Official data also shows that the number of housing projects given the go-ahead by councils in England reached a record low in the final months of the last government, mainly because of a decline in applications from builders.

In November 2023, a Labour press release talked about "leading the world with 100% clean power by 2030".

The party's election manifesto pledged "zero-carbon electricity by 2030".

Starmer now says the government will achieve at least 95% clean power by 2030.

The prime minister was questioned repeatedly about whether this represented a change in the target but denied this.

The National Energy System Operator (NESO), the government’s independent system planner and operator for the energy transition, last month defined clean power as including less than 5% of generation from gas in a typical year.

It recently concluded that “it is possible to build, connect and operate a clean power system for Great Britain by 2030, while maintaining security of supply".

However, it added that achieving this would be “at the limit of what is feasible”.

Additional reporting by Daniel Wainwright, William Dahlgreen, Mark Poynting and Gerry Georgieva.

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