Ravinder Athwal might have the least enviable job in the Labour party right now. As the party’s director of policy, it is up to Athwal to pull together Labour’s manifesto, a job he has until 8 February to complete.
The problem for Athwal and others at the top of the Labour party is that key questions about its policy platform remain unanswered, even after the Labour leader Keir Starmer gave his new year speech earlier this week.
So what questions does Athwal – and, more importantly, Starmer – have to answer before the party are ready for the election campaign to come?
What to do on green spending?
Starmer was clearer than ever on Friday that the pledge to spend £28bn a year on green investment was no longer a pledge but instead a “confident ambition”.
Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said last year the target was subject to the party’s rule to have debt falling as a percentage of economic output at the end of a five-year period. But it remained unclear until Starmer spelled it out on Friday that this would mean spending less if the party could not borrow the full amount, rather than finding the money elsewhere.
Given the current fiscal headroom is only £13bn, should the party even be talking about the possibility of spending £28bn at all, especially given it has been subject to repeated Conservative attacks?
Starmer tried to move away from the spending target on Thursday, talking instead about the party’s plan to decarbonise the power sector by 2030. But some in the party want him to go further and abandon the £28bn altogether.
How much to tax?
Reports this week suggested Reeves might include a promise to cut either income tax or national insurance in the party’s manifesto. Starmer appeared to pour cold water on such an idea on Thursday when he said he would look to pull “the growth lever” before cutting taxes, although he did not spell out what that would mean.
One thing has become clearer, however. Starmer said on Thursday that if the Tories cut inheritance tax before the election, Labour would reverse it if it “got the opportunity to do so”.
If the Tories do decide to cut inheritance tax at March’s budget, it would give Starmer room to promise to cancel that and use the money for income tax cuts instead.
What to do about the asylum system?
For much of the past year Labour has been happy to sit back and let the Conservatives tear themselves apart over the issue of immigration and asylum. The party says it will cancel the Rwanda scheme if it gets into government, but questions remain.
The party is reported to be drawing up its own scheme to process asylum claims offshore. But where could they do this? And would it only be for people who haven’t yet reached the UK but want to come here, or could they send claimants abroad once they have already arrived?
Starmer has also said he wants to help solve the asylum backlogs by working more closely with France. While the French government might be willing to take more claimants back from the UK, Britain would almost certainly have to sign up to some sort of quota in return. The question then becomes how many migrants Britain is willing to take – a question the Tories intend to focus on heavily during an election campaign.
One more dilemma could yet face Labour. If the government successfully send asylum seekers to Rwanda, but the courts then deem the scheme illegal, will a Labour government bring them back home again?
Will Labour replace the existing childcare system?
Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, made waves last year when she gave a speech promising to scrap the existing childcare funding model and replace it with something entirely new.
Phillipson argues the current model means providers having to offer almost entirely free places to millions of children without being given enough money by the government to cover their costs. Many childcare providers say they will go bust under the government’s plans to expand free hours to children aged 9 months and over.
Since Phillipson’s speech, however, there has been little indication of what the new system might entail, leading some to speculate that the party is quietly shelving one of its more ambitious reform plans.
How will Labour fix the NHS?
The NHS uses every winter crisis to call for more money, argued Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, during a recent trip to Singapore.
Labour has promised to fund 2m more hospital appointments a year and to double the number of CT and MRI scanners in an effort to get waiting times down. But apart from that, Streeting’s message has been that the health service must do things differently rather than just continuing to demand more money.
Labour says one of the central planks of fixing the NHS is boosting social care so that fewer people end up in hospital in the first place, but this will cost money which Labour would need to find from somewhere. Party sources told the Observer last year they were likely to leave the social care reform package out of their manifesto altogether to avoid scrutiny. Doing so, however, might leave a hole in the NHS rescue plan.
