How is Britain doing under Keir Starmer?

Economist

3 days ago

Government-performance tracker, 100=best
Our index covers the eight metrics voters say matter most to them
After a year in office, Sir Keir Starmer's Labour government is in rough waters. On July 1st the prime minister abandoned cuts to Britain's welfare budget, after a large rebellion of Labour MPs forced him to gut his proposed legislation. The government's standing in opinion polls is poor. Sir Keir's promise to bring stability after the years of tumult that followed the Brexit referendum of 2016 looks hollow. He would doubtless ask voters to ignore the drama in the House of Commons, and look at the progress he has made on improving their lives. We have done just that. To monitor whether the government is on track, we have devised an index based on several measures that resonated most with voters.
Sir Keir entered Downing Street in July 2024 promising to 'stop the chaos' and begin a 'decade of national renewal'. He identified a list of government missions that, if achieved, would improve the lot of ordinary people. There are three problems with his approach. First, the targets are too modest. Second, in its first year the government has made very slow progress. Third, Sir Keir's goals do not have much resonance with voters. The Economist commissioned a survey from More In Common, a polling firm, to find out the kind of metrics that people think would improve their lives and increase their propensity to support the government at the next general election. People told us, for example, that they are more concerned about their own incomes than about GDP, and about lower bills rather than clean energy. And they really dislike potholes.
Our metrics cover eight domains: immigration, income, housing, health, energy, crime, transport and the environment. By normalising every metric on a scale from zero to 100 and taking the average we get an overall government-performance score (read our methodology for further details). It is not a perfect measure—for example, it equates changes in NHS waiting lists with increases in housebuilding—but it serves as a useful gauge which we can track over time. And on this basis, things do not look rosy for Labour. Although the index has risen slightly from its nadir in 2023, the improvement has been very slow. Between now and the next general election—which is not expected until spring 2029—we will update the metrics each month to see whether the government is making progress. Explore the eight indicators in detail below.
Sir Keir promised to 'smash' the gangs of people-smugglers that ferry migrants across the English Channel from France to Britain. He created a new £150m ($200m) border-security command and worked more closely with the French authorities. But the smugglers have adapted their methods to avoid detection and interference. Small-boat migrants increased to 43,309 in the year to June 30th, a 38% increase on the same period a year ago.
Income
The government rightly identifies that Britain has a growth problem. In the five years before it came to power, GDP increased by a mere 4%, compared with 13% in America. But most people do not pay much attention to GDP figures. It is the size of their pay-packets that matters most to them, with 30% of respondents to our survey saying that rising take-home pay would increase their propensity to vote Labour at the next general election. On this metric, Labour can point to some success. Inflation-adjusted average pay in the year to April 2025 increased by 1.8% compared with a year earlier and is firmly above its long-term average of 0.8%.
The state of Britain's housing market is one of voters' biggest preoccupations. Although they might disagree over where to locate them, both the government and most of the public recognise that more homes must be built. Following on from previous Conservative administrations, Labour has adopted a target that 1.5m new homes should be built over the course of a five-year parliament. Sir Keir said he would 'back the builders, not the blockers' and has made planning reform a priority, but it will be years before its full effects are felt. In the meantime, additions to the housing stock in England (housing policy is devolved to the United Kingdom's four constituent nations) decreased in the year to the end of March to just 201,000, a nine-year low.
Energy
Household energy bills, % of take-home pay*
*Average spending on gas and electricity as % of household disposable income†Q1 2000 to Q2 2024
Sources:
Department of Energy Security and Net Zero
Office for National Statistics
The Economist
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sent domestic energy bills soaring. The Conservative government spent £60bn to shelter households from the highest prices, but that was just a sticking plaster. To insulate the country from volatile natural-gas prices, Labour wants the country to become a 'clean-energy superpower'. Its ambitious goal is that 95% of electricity be generated from low-carbon sources by 2030.
In the meantime, Britons simply want lower energy bills. The cost of energy is the most decisive metric among our eight measures, with more than half of respondents saying that they would be more likely to vote for Labour in the next election if energy prices came down. Household energy prices have fallen in recent months, but are still above their long-term trend of 2.5% of take-home pay.
The National Health Service (NHS) came under severe strain during the pandemic. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, says the NHS is 'broken, but not beaten'. The government's main target is to reduce the referral time to see a specialist consultant doctor, but most respondents to our survey said that they would like to see accident-and-emergency (A&E) waiting times decrease. The NHS has a target that 95% of patients arriving in A&E should be seen within four hours: that has not been met for a dozen years. In the 12 months to May just 59% of the 17m patients arriving at major A&E departments were seen within that time.
A perennial complaint is that crime rates are too high. In truth the total number of incidents in England and Wales has fallen by three-quarters over the past three decades. In fairness to the complainers, that figure excludes fraud and computer misuse—a new category of crime for which historical data are not available—and is likely to undercount certain types of petty crime, such as shoplifting. Labour wants to increase the visibility of policing as well as halve knife crime and violence against women, and also tackle anti-social behaviour. But respondents to our survey said they would simply like to see lower overall levels of crime. According to a national survey, in the year to the end of December 2024 there were 4.8m crime incidents, 10% more than a year earlier.
When travel and other restrictions caused domestic tourism and wild swimming to rise during the pandemic, Britons were appalled to discover that after heavy downpours the country's coastline, rivers and lakes are used as an open sewer. When asked about environmental targets, two-fifths of respondents to our poll pointed to sewage reduction, whereas one-fifth wanted the country to focus on net-zero. Last year there were an average of 32 spills at each of the country's 14,000 storm overflows, 4% fewer than the previous year. That is still too high: the water companies have devised a £12bn plan to reduce sewage spills to 18 per storm overflow by 2030.
Transport
*12-month moving average†Jan 2017 to Jun 2024
Source:
AA
Forget trains, planes or buses: there is nothing that irks Britons more than the state of the country's tarmac. Potholes pepper the nation's roads, which a committee of MPs have labelled a 'national embarrassment'. In December 2024 the government announced £1.6bn of funding to fill potholes, but the Asphalt Industry Alliance, an industry body, says that ten times that amount is needed for the backlog of repairs. Monthly data from the AA, show that the number of vehicle breakdowns caused by potholes—typically damage to wheels, steering and suspension—in the year to June averaged 51,095 per month, 7% fewer than a year earlier. As transport spending is limited for the remainder of the parliament, motorists are likely to have a bumpy road ahead.
Methodology
Our index incorporates data across eight domains: immigration, income, housing, health, energy, crime, transport and the environment. To aggregate all of these data into a single composite index we 'normalised' our data on a scale of zero to 100, where zero is 'worst' and 100 is 'best'; and where all other values are indexed relative to those possible minima and maxima. The overall index is a simple average of the eight sub-indices.
The minima and maxima vary for each metric, as follows:
Small-boat migrants, Jan 1st 2019 to present (daily data). Zero index points = maximum value in series (48,760 on 31st Oct 2022); 100 index points = zero small-boat migrants.
Average weekly pay, % change from a year ago, Jan 2010 to Apr 2025 (monthly data). Zero index points = minimum value in series (-2.6%, March 2023); 100 points = maximum value in series (4.2%, August 2021).
Housebuilding, Q1 2010 to Q1 2025. Zero index points = minimum value in series (133,000 new homes in Q4 2010); 100 index points = 300,000 homes (the government's target).
NHS A&E, % seen within 4 hours, Jan 2012 to May 2025 (monthly data). Zero index points = minimum value in series (56.7% in Mar 2023); 100 index points = 95% (the NHS target) .
Crime incidents, Q1 2010 to Q4 2024. As crime has been declining for three decades, the index is calculated as a deviation from the long-term linear trend. Zero index points = maximum value in series above trend (Q1 2012); 100 index points = minimum value in series below trend (Q1 2017).
Energy costs, potholes and sewage: zero index points = maximum value in series as presented in charts above; 100 index points = minimum value.
As the timeliness of each metric differs (from daily to quarterly), we have taken the quarterly average for each before calculating an overall average score. The overall index series begins in Q1 2019 (the first period when all eight metrics are available).