The Week 19 July 2024

The second week of the new Government revolved around the State opening of Parliament and the King’s Speech on Wednesday. A steady drip feed of briefings gave most Westminster-watchers a detailed preview of what to expect.

Given the Government’s clear messaging of “build build build” and “taking the brakes off”, we are surprised at how cautious this programme for the first session of the new Parliament is. Many of the 40 bills listed are rebrands, returns or repackaging of legislation from the last Parliament. Measures like the Terrorism Protection of Premises Bill, Mental Health, and Football Governance will all be familiar.

Some attention-grabbing new legislation from Labour’s manifesto is set to feature as well. The Employment Rights Bill, and Draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill. Our own Simon Kaye gave a running?commentary ?on new legislation affecting local government, including positive sounds on English Devolution, though of course the devil will be in the detail.

The Budget Responsibility Bill, and a?draft charter ?published by the Treasury, fulfils Labour’s commitment to empower the OBR to forecast government fiscal decisions outside of traditional fiscal event. More transparency about fiscal risks is good, but alone it is really just a gesture towards being more fiscally responsible than their predecessors. It does nothing to directly improve the sustainability of public finances, or deal with the tough choices Labour will need to confront.

While this programme is debated, we can expect much of the session will be spent drafting higher-profile political bills to introduce in the next one. For example, the Government seems to have changed its mind at the last minute on including an AI Bill in this King’s Speech, and will now consult on the scope of future legislation instead. In a week where tech giant Meta have announced they will withhold their next generation of multimodal models from deployment in the EU, for fear of regulatory uncertainty, the Government may have been concerned about a similar outcome for Britain affecting the prospects of Britain’s growing tech sector.

Read of the week...

Years in the making, the first report of the Covid-19 Inquiry was released yesterday, reminding us of the string of failures that undermined the government’s pandemic preparedness. Many of its recommendations reflect our paper ‘A state of preparedness ’ from March 2021 — proving you don’t, in fact, need to take years and spend millions to identify the issue and come up with implementable solutions.

So what did the interim report identify? A lack of leadership and accountability in the Department of Health and Social Care, despite being the ‘lead department’ for crisis preparedness. “Groupthink” and a lack of challenge to the consensus scientific views which dominated pre-pandemic planning (and a failure of politicians to probe). And little interest in delivery from leaders across Whitehall — despite running Operation Cygnus, a pandemic preparation exercise in October 2016, by the start of the Covid-19 pandemic only eight of the 22 recommendations the exercise made had been carried out.

It is hard to believe that, as the report notes, many in Whitehall felt the UK was not only prepared, but amongst the best prepared countries in the world. Looking ahead to the next pandemic, which the Inquiry described as “’not a question of ‘if’… but ‘when’”, such failures need stark corrections. Of course, we could have been correcting them over the past few years.