This mammoth King’s Speech could make or break the Starmer government

The pageantry looks good and the number of planned bills is supposed to sound important, but delivery – particularly on the NHS, housebuilding and small boats – is what will make or break Starmer, writes John Rentoul

The King will deliver the first Labour speech from the throne since November 2009 on Wednesday (PA Wire)

The King’s Speech will set out a lot of unnecessary legislation for show. It will resemble a worthy to-do list for the new government – mostly creating new bureaucracies, setting targets in law and making things that are already illegal more illegal. These measures are mostly designed to “send a signal”, or to make ministers look busy, but the real tests for Keir Starmer lie elsewhere.

The King is expected to announce the setting up of bodies with names that go down well in focus groups, but which will do what existing organisations already do: Border Security Command, GB Energy and GB Railways. There will be targets set in law for housebuilding, which are more of a statement of intent than a workable law. Equally, some things that are a good idea, such as consulting the Office for Budget Responsibility before mini-Budgets, will be codified in law, which is mainly an excuse for Labour to say “Liz Truss” and “Kwasi Kwarteng” a lot.

Then there is the business of tightening up a handful of specific laws. It is already illegal to spike drinks but we are promised that this will be made a specific offence. Shoplifting, antisocial behaviour and knives carried as weapons are all set to be made more illegal than they already are.

There is also the legislation left over from the last government: the renters’ reform bill; the gradual smoking ban; and Martyn’s Law to require venues to have a plan for a terrorist attack.

Of course, there is some actual new legislation in there as well. The tax on private school fees and the further restrictions of non-dom status are needed to raise the modest sums of money to pay for Labour’s modest election promises. “Other measures will be laid before you,” the King will add, not wanting to give away the more substantial stealth taxes to come in Rachel Reeves’s first Budget this autumn.

The workers’ rights laws are important, although some of those are going to be subject to consultation, as the original plan to legislate within 100 days has been junked.

The wittily named Take Back Control bill – I am not sure the parliamentary draftspeople will allow that title – will try to push directly elected mayors on those parts of the country that don’t yet have them. This is the brainchild of Ed Balls, now a professor of economics at King’s College London, supported by his podcast partner George Osborne, and enthusiastically taken up by Angela Rayner, hoping to make a success of English devolution where her predecessor as deputy prime minister, John Prescott, failed.

There will be another small piece of unfinished business from the Tony Blair years: a bill to remove the right of the rump of hereditary peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords. Blair kicked most of them out in 1999 but, in return for a promise by the Tories to go quietly, he allowed 92 of them to stay – and they have stayed ever since, topping themselves up with the most ludicrous by-elections in the history of British quasi-democracy whenever any of them dies.

Other constitutional legislation is likely to be unobtrusively postponed: the plan for an effective age limit of 85 in the Lords was a little embarrassing for Starmer when he held a joint news conference last week with Joe Biden, who would be 86 at the end of a second presidential term. At the other end of the age scale, my sources suggest that votes at 16 is “not a first-year priority” for the new government.

The King’s Speech is at the “bread and circuses” end of government. The pageantry looks good and the sheer number of planned bills – 30! 35! – is supposed to sound important and energetic. But what will make or break the Starmer government is its delivery, particularly on the NHS, housebuilding and small boats.

What matters in cutting waiting lists is not legislation but efficient administration. And, in the first instance, a pay deal with the junior doctors that ends their strikes. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has taken a risk by saying the NHS is “broken”. The politics is obvious, blaming the previous government, but it could demoralise staff rather than inspire a culture change.

As for housebuilding, statutory targets will not lay a single brick, and we have not yet been treated to much detail about how planning law is going to be changed to make building easier. Rayner urgently needs one big, controversial housing development to be under construction by the time of the next election, but her vague talk about new towns – on which no real work has been done – does not suggest a plan that is ready to go.

Finally, the Channel boats. A new organisation with “Command” in its title is not going to make the difference. What counts is what Nick Thomas-Symonds, the EU relations minister, and Angela Eagle, the immigration minister, can negotiate with the EU and especially with the French government.

The prime minister on Tuesday thanked the cabinet at its second meeting for its work on the King’s Speech. But the real work that will decide the fate of this government will happen in anonymous parts of the departments for Health and Social Care and for Housing, Communities and Local Government, and in equally anonymous meeting rooms in Brussels.