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Sir Keir Starmer will on Thursday vow to reshape public services by taking on a “cottage industry of checkers and blockers” and embracing AI to drive through efficiencies, though Downing Street insisted he would not take “a chainsaw” to the state.
The prime minister wants to cut the number of regulators and will claim that the country needs an agile state where “every pound spent, every regulation, every decision must deliver for working people”.
But Starmer is not setting a target for cutting the civil service headcount, and has so far identified only one out of around 130 regulators that he intends to axe.
The Conservatives claim the prime minister has also set up or promised more than 25 new quangos and task forces since coming into office, including a new football regulator and an Office for Value for Money whose own efficiency has been questioned by MPs.
However Starmer will insist that a revolution is under way. On Tuesday Britain’s top two financial services regulators axed plans to impose stricter rules for diversity and inclusion, as ministers push them to remove barriers to growth.
Downing Street also pointed to plans to get rid of the Payment Systems Regulator, which oversees the UK’s main payment networks, by merging most its activities with the Financial Services Authority.
The PSR was an easy target for Starmer, given it is already closely integrated with the FCA, with which it shares a headquarters, IT systems, staff contacts and senior leadership.
Starmer has written to all ministers urging them to find other watchdogs to merge or scrap though one Whitehall official said: “It has proven harder than he thought.”
Downing Street insisted it wanted a nimbler state, rather than an Elon Musk-style purging of the current apparatus. “There’s no approach where we take a chainsaw to the system,” a spokesman for Starmer said, in reference to President Javier Milei in Argentina and Musk who have both wielded chainsaws to illustrate their cost-cutting zeal.
Starmer will say in a speech in Yorkshire that he is “determined to seize” the opportunities created by AI, adding: “If we push forward with the digitisation of government services there are up to £45bn of savings and productivity benefits, ready to be realised.”
He will announce a new “TechTrack” apprenticeship scheme to bring 2,000 digital specialists into public sector departments by 2030, and will promise that one in 10 civil servants will work in digital roles within five years.
Last weekend Pat McFadden, Cabinet Office minister, caused consternation in Whitehall when he said parts of the civil service “would and can become smaller”, and that he would create incentives to remove underperforming officials from their jobs.
Starmer then wrote to civil servants to reassure them they were valued and would be “empowered” by the reforms. In December Starmer had to calm Whitehall after he said too many officials were comfortable “in the tepid bath of managed decline”.
The prime minister’s allies say Starmer is passionate about reforming the state. “The thing that bothers Keir is the growing gap between politicians and the public,” said one. “We have to close that gap and make sure the populist right doesn’t fill it.”
The ally said previous Conservative ministers created quangos to avoid having to take tough decisions themselves, adding: “Keir’s view is that if you want to be a minister, you should take the accountability that comes with the role.”
