How do we mend the UK’s broken economy? Fixing UK PLC has outwitted our political leaders, but that’s not surprising. We love the status quo, have an ingrained risk aversion, and our politicians too quickly resort to pickpocketing the electorate with more taxes, and saddling us with debt. What we need are some KPIs, or key performance indicators, to get back on track.
KPIs are time-bound goals with clear numerical targets, and critically the person who is responsible for their delivery is identified and on the hook. To enhance transparency, our government’s KPIs should be overlaid with a traffic light system, to squeeze the managerial pips – green for success, amber for near miss, red for failure. Good performance against the KPIs will deliver the results and the economic benefits that the country is crying out for.
This lack of government accountability and rigour is why the Adam Smith Institute and I have built a publicly available KPI tracker, which reviews the performance against 16 targets deduced from this government’s manifesto, minister’s speeches and departmental policy documents.
To make this table immediately useful, we broke down some of the loose five-year targets to show where the government should be after one year. Regardless of when a pledge was made, we measured its progress from day one of the Labour government.
Of the 16 KPIs, six are green and seven are red, with the rest being mixed or lacking adequate data. The reds include many of the main economic drivers. Monthly growth has averaged just 0.09 per cent since July 2024, well below the rate needed to achieve the goal of 2.5 per cent annual growth by 2029. May saw another contraction.
What’s more, inflation, which the government pledged to stabilise at 2 per cent, was 3.6 per cent in June. The Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey, unlike the Chancellor, remains conspicuously out of the public eye despite missing his core KPI by 80 per cent.
Looking at the rest of the KPI portfolio, there are a few bright spots – particularly when relating to spending more. The government is on track to meet its proposals on delivering new NHS appointments, hiring more mental health staff and is likely to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP.
But this pattern of our government being world class spenders and second division growers is not sustainable. Unaddressed, it will only put more pressure on our highly strained public finances.
Fixing UK PLC is challenging but doable. Delivering on the above KPIs would be a good thing, and would boost the electorate’s confidence. Ministers whose KPIs continue to flash red should be replaced. The consequences of failure or defeat are far reaching, and will sell out the next generation, including my children, who will be left to fix this economic dog’s dinner and pay for a catalogue of broken commitments.
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