Six commissions without a clear mission

Unlike the majority of Labour members, I was tasked yesterday with reading the Party’s recently published NPF report. Given that the dates in which the fourteen week consultation were held line up almost exactly with the final period of Keir Starmer’s tenure as Prime Minister, the report can be broadly interpreted as a review on his time leading the government.

Its broad conclusion is hard to dispute. Across a remarkable range of policy areas, the party was moving in broadly the right direction.

READ MORE: Ten key takeaways from Labour’s NPF report (Aug 2026)

There is progress to point to on clean energy, devolution, social care, the NHS, youth employment, criminal justice, immigration and defence. The report identifies programmes that were already delivering, reforms that had begun and others that were still being developed. It is, in that sense, a substantial outlining of the policy work undertaken by the Starmer government.

But there is something striking about reading the report as a whole. The six policy commissions largely feel like six very separate bodies doing very separate work.

That is understandable. Each area matters in its own right, and the NPF is designed to give members, trade unions and others across the Labour movement a serious opportunity to scrutinise and shape policy. Yet beyond a broad and continuing dissatisfaction with the condition in which the Conservatives left the country, it is difficult to find a single narrative that connects all of the policies together.

That may have been one of the biggest weaknesses of the Starmer project.

The problem was not necessarily that Labour lacked policies. If anything, the NPF demonstrates the opposite. The problem was that there was never a sufficiently clear answer to the question of why all these policies belonged together.

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Clean energy was about jobs, bills and security. Devolution was about growth. NHS reform was about prevention and bringing care closer to home. The Youth Guarantee was about opportunity. Defence spending was increasingly presented as industrial strategy. All of these ideas can be connected. But the Starmer government struggled to turn them into one compelling political narrative.

I think back to hearing Starmer state Labour was “fixing the foundations” every time he spoke. This seems like the closest attempt to try and place all the Government’s policies under one compelling narrative, but it wasn’t one that really passed the doorstep test.

And without that narrative, individual policies risk becoming just that: individual policies.

This is where the contrast with Andy Burnham becomes particularly interesting.

Burnham has chosen a simple proposition – “growth in every post code and hope in every heart” – to sit above his policy programme. Whether that phrase ultimately proves durable is another question. But politically, it does something Starmer’s mission often failed to do: it provides a clearer answer to that question of why. It does that through making you feel something, connecting on a human level first and foremost.

Growth and hope become the purpose that connects economic policy, public services, devolution, skills, housing and opportunity. The policies are no longer simply a collection of interventions. They are more easier seen as a means towards a recognisable end.

If questioned regarding any policy, whether by the presenters on ‘This Morning’ or by the journalists at a reputable publication that focuses on political journalism like, say, LabourList, Labour politicians of all ranks should be able to justify Labour’s policy decisions by explaining how it links to growth and hope for the nation.

The NPF report therefore gives the new PM plenty to work with. Much of the policy infrastructure is already there. The question is whether he can take this inheritance and make it part of that single story about what his government is trying to achieve.

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