Labour is fast discovering that Britain needs more than a Band-Aid to restore it to health

Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for work and pensions, wants to change the DWP from being an administrative department of welfare to being a department of work. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

When Keir Starmer was just the lowly leader of the opposition, he made one of his themes “sticking-plaster politics”. It was a critique of the way that Westminster tends to focus intensely on something for a short while, before flitting off to another crisis and solving nothing along the way. It made a lot of sense for Starmer to complain about short-termism in politics: the Tories were bouncing from one problem to another, and, besides, every leader of the opposition likes to opine worthily about broken politics from the convenient distance of not being in power and having to fix it. Well, now he is in power, and is faced with all the temptations to leave the Band-Aids firmly in place.

One Labour figure describes the DWP as “the bucket into which all the failures of other departments are poured”