The crisis facing the UK water industry

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘The crisis facing the UK water industry’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Gill Plimmer
You can’t ignore the serious failures. The fact that lots of the beaches around England have been closed several times in the past year is absolutely appalling, really. We paid for services and they haven’t been delivered.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher, the FT’s Whitehall editor. You heard there the FT’s Gill Plimmer talking about the mess in the water industry. Well, this week we’re racing towards summer recess. There isn’t much going on in the Commons, but the news has been nonstop. Thames Water looks like it could go bust. Plus, the government’s got a new plan to boost the NHS workforce. Meanwhile, the PM’s been told by the Court of Appeal that his flagship plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is illegal. And then, as if there wasn’t enough going on, there are all the by-election campaigns.

Here to discuss some of the big themes this week, we’ve got the FT’s UK chief political commentator and columnist Robert Shrimsley.

Robert Shrimsley
Hi Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
Hi, Robert. And the FT columnist Miranda Green. Hi, Miranda.

Miranda Green
Hello, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
So, Robert, what’s been on your mind this week?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, apart from the things that we’re gonna be discussing anyway, I think one of the stories that’s really interested me has been the demise of the Conservatives’ leading candidate to be mayor of London, Daniel Korski, who dropped out of the race this week to be the person who stands against Sadiq Khan after he was essentially reported publicly for groping the producer, Daisy Goodwin, many years ago in Downing Street, something he denied. But he’s decided that his position is untenable. And that’s interesting story in itself. But the other thing that I find fascinating about what’s going on with the Conservatives in London is that they are really struggling to find a serious candidate to put forward in the biggest and most important city in the country. You know, a quarter of the population, roughly speaking, and they’ve essentially given up. And Daniel Korski was considered the best choice because he was young, bright; he’d be modernising and interesting. And they’re really struggling to find somebody. And they’ve said in his absence they’re not gonna put a new third choice into the pot to be the three contenders. They’re gonna persist with the remaining two who are hardly household names, even in the political ferment. And it just, to me, it speaks to Tory despair in London. And giving up on a city like this seems to me a state and an indication of their malaise generally.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, and what I find interesting about that is that given a lot of anger, particularly in the suburbs, the kind of blue doughnut that circles Greater London. I think that there is anger about the ultra-low emission zone, the Ulez. I’ve been to Uxbridge and we’ll talk about that a bit later in the podcast. But it seemed to me this could have been, if any year they had a chance, this could have been it.

Miranda Green
Also, I completely agree with you, Robert, that actually all the parties seem to see mayoral candidacies as a sort of really low-tier issue, and they only pay it attention the last possible minute. And often it’s a very uninspiring choice for Londoners, which is really inadequate, I believe.

Lucy Fisher
And bizarre, given it’s a good platform.

Miranda Green
Absolutely. It’s a good platform. It’s a great power base. Actually, it’s a stepping stone if you wanna be party leader and potential candidate for prime minister, actually.

Lucy Fisher
And Miranda, what’s been capturing your attention?

Miranda Green
Well, on Wednesday night in the House of Lords, there are a bunch of crucial votes on the government’s controversial illegal migration bill, which they were in fact defeated on some key amendments. And a sign of the government’s panic about these potential defeats was the fact that Lord Evgeny Lebedev of the Evening Standard was spotted there in the House of Lords. He is quite a controversial peer. His appointment by Boris Johnson is a matter being picked over in many news stories about various concerns being overridden to get him into the House of Lords. He’s spoken once, he’s never voted, but even he was hanging around the House of Lords in his jeans was a somewhat shocked comment from a correspondent about seeing him there. But there we are. The government’s really worried about the power of the House of Lords to overturn some of these pieces of legislation that they think are populist. But a lot of the legal experts and human rights type people in the House of Lords think are undermining the UK’s international obligation towards refugees.

Lucy Fisher
Does make you think, with all the controversy surrounding UK’s second chamber, whether actually Labour, if they do get into government next year, might actually have the impetus to finally get some reform through?

Miranda Green
Well, accept that they’re gonna have to stuff it with their own people, aren’t they, to get their own bills through.

Robert Shrimsley
I know . . . 

Lucy Fisher
And you’re shaking your head, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
I know Labour are committed to doing this, but I just think if and when they get to power, they’ve got so many fun things that are real importance to voters now. And of course it matters what the status of the second chamber, but of course it makes a difference to the nature of our politics. But I just think they’re going to look at this and think, do we really want to open this can of worms? Because the problem with House Lords from has never been making the argument that it’s an illegitimate chamber. The problem has been, what the hell do you put in its place and what powers do you give it? And I, just a part of me just thinks, I bet we get to the election after next and they haven’t done it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s move on to one of the big stories of the week, which has been around Thames Water overwhelmed by £14bn of debt. And it’s not the only water company causing concern. To give us an update on how we got to this point, we’re very lucky today to have the FT’s Gill Plimmer, the FT’s infrastructure correspondent. Hi, Gill.

Gill Plimmer
Hello.

Lucy Fisher
So, Gill, just to start with, and very briefly, can you give us a little bit of a potted history of how we got here? Thirty-five years ago, Thatcher privatised the water industry. What’s happened since?

Gill Plimmer
Well, one issue is that at the beginning of privatisation, Thatcher, of course, thought debt was a great thing. The idea was that companies would raise debt and equity and that would be put into water infrastructure and paid by customers through their bills over the long term. And the trouble is that they didn’t really impose any checks or balances on that so Ofwat, which was the water regulator, essentially didn’t impose any controls and watch for financial engineering. So almost from the start, they began raising the days as they should have done, but then it accelerated and it wasn’t invested in infrastructure to the extent that we hoped. And here we are today with some of the companies overburdened with debt, interest rates rising, and they’re under pressure.

Lucy Fisher
And now we knew that the government has drawn up contingency plans for temporary nationalisation of Thames Water. But there’s concern across the sector, isn’t there? £60bn worth of debt affecting all the companies. What happens in the immediate next week or two, do you think?

Gill Plimmer
Clearly, it’s an unfolding story. Thames Water is expected to release its accounts next week, so we should find out a bit more either before then or then. And all the companies, in fact, are due to report over the next couple of months. So we should get a clearer picture of where things are. But I think the main thing to remember really is that customer services shouldn’t be affected, whatever happens. We’re not quite clear whether companies will go bust or not. But either way, the government would step in, take control and so’d either temporary renationalise it, and then try and sell it to who we don’t know, or they just keep running them.

Lucy Fisher
Now, you’re right to reassure people that the taps aren’t about to run dry. But who’s to blame for this situation? Is it corporate greed? Is it poor regulation? And I’m, I do know I think you’ve written about how there was a wobble around Southern Water back in 2021. Should more action have been taken in the past couple of years to prevent this?

Gill Plimmer
Well, I mean, Ofwat has taken more action over the past few years. I mean, for a long time it really thought that it wasn’t its remit to look at the companies’ structures as long as they were doing their job, keeping customer bills down, because as the regulator, it sets exactly how high customers’ bills should be and it also defines what they should have invested and how quickly. So it really saw that as its job and it didn’t see it as monitoring the companies themselves. And it has since about 2015 stepped up pressure on the companies substantially. And again this year and last, it is taking more action. I mean, it’s up to you whether you think that they should have been stricter sooner.

Lucy Fisher
And just throwing forward, I’m struck that George Eustice, the former environment secretary, has said there’s now such a toxic political debate around this whole industry, it’s gonna make it a lot harder to raise the capital that’s needed. Is that your take?

Gill Plimmer
I think that’s part of it. But I mean, I think you can’t ignore the serious failures. I mean, the fact that, you know, Blackpool beaches were closed last week, but lots of the beaches around England have been closed several times in the past year is absolutely appalling, really. We paid for services and they haven’t been delivered. We’ve got leaking pipes and the prospect of drought and this is really an outrage. So to sort of blame people for complaining just doesn’t seem fair.

Lucy Fisher
Now, I think that’s a really, really good point. And just finally, give us an international comparison. I mean, it’s often said water in this country is too cheap. Is that true when we look across likewise developed nations?

Gill Plimmer
It’s pretty hard to compare. But I mean, the real point about British Water is Britain is the only country to have privatised its water system. You know, other countries have sometimes given control of private companies on long-term contracts or done quasi sort of arm’s-length bodies. But no one has actually sort of wholesale given all the water infrastructure to private companies and said, look, you look after this and that’s it.

Lucy Fisher
Miranda, Robert, you’re both dying to jump in here.

Miranda Green
Gill, I was just struck by, you know, Defra’s own figures say the cost of actually stopping the sewage outflows, which seem to most upset the public. They reckon it’s between £350bn and £600bn. I mean, is it actually affordable to sort out this mess for either the current government or an incoming Labour government potentially?

Gill Plimmer
To be totally honest, I’m not sure about those figures. I suspect they were sort of made up on the back of a fag packet-type thing. (Miranda laughs) I mean that that’s the cost, I think of separating sewage from water . . . 

Miranda Green
For the whole of England.

Gill Plimmer
Yes. And that would be a good thing. And you could also separate the grey waters that we don’t water our gardens with, treated waters. They were all good ideas and other countries do manage to do that. But there’s a lot of smaller things that could be done that could be, you know, just improving the sewage treatment works would be a good start. And we know that they haven’t had enough investment over the past years.

Robert Shrimsley
Isn’t it also the case that Macquarie, the company that in the end rescued Southern Water, was one of the companies actually made out like bandits on Thames Water . . . 

Gill Plimmer
Absolutely.

Robert Shrimsley
 . . . and then bailed? So I mean, there are questions to be asked about why you’re going back to them?

Gill Plimmer
Yes.

Robert Shrimsley
Giving them another water company albeit that government didn’t have a lot of choice at the time, I suspect.

Gill Plimmer
I agree. Yeah, totally. I mean, debt rose to £10bn that Thames Water under Macquarie’s ownership and then the reward for that is to be given another water company, a majority shareholding in it a couple of years later. And also at Thames, you know Thames received a massive £20mn fine for dumping sewage into the Thames, which the judge decided that was borderline deliberate, as he called it. And then what’s the reward they get to take over Southern Water?

Miranda Green
I mean, politically, I don’t know what the rest of you think. I’ve been really struck this week of, you know, trying to commission for our pages some solutions to this problem. People are unwilling to come forward and write because nobody’s quite sure what the answer is. And it’s very striking that the opposition parties are not necessarily coming forward with a plan which they feel confident about selling.

Robert Shrimsley
Well, it’s over, isn’t it? The point is the damage has been done. The wealth has been extracted.

Gill Plimmer
Yes.

Robert Shrimsley
The money’s been extracted from these companies. So all you can do is pick up the pieces. And the thing that really strikes me about it all is that a government, you know, going all the way back to the Conservative governments that privatised water, which thought it understood the markets and believed in the markets, fundamentally didn’t understand what the companies it gave these assets to were going to do with it. I saw one figure — Gill will tell me if I’m wrong — like £72bn taken out of all the water companies. You know, so the point is the government got played at its own market game.

Gill Plimmer
Yes.

Robert Shrimsley
By people who understood the financial world better than they did.

Miranda Green
But also . . . 

Gill Plimmer
Yes.

Miranda Green
They created a system with no competition. So it’s regional monopolies. So all of the things which should make a market system work for the consumer were not there in the structure they chose.

Lucy Fisher
Is that part of the problem?

Gill Plimmer
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, that’s sort of one of the craziest things is just how hard is it to run a water company? I mean, you know, there’s no great innovation involved.

Lucy Fisher
I mean, I’ve been struck, Gill, by the organigram showing the structures of, you know, the way this industry is aren’t completely Byzantine. But it also makes me concerned that perhaps that’s one reason why the opposition haven’t really come up with any sort of nifty or politically compelling plan to overhaul the industry either so far.

Gill Plimmer
I think it’s hard. I mean, you know, essentially, both Labour and the Conservatives are committed to private sector investment and infrastructure, and we’re all their private sector investors, but in water companies and they don’t particularly want to alienate them all.

Robert Shrimsley
By the way, a side issue is that the second-biggest investor in Thames Water is basically the universities pension fund. So if you wipe out the shareholders, which you might ordinarily do, then the government is on the hook for universities’ pensions.

Lucy Fisher
Very good point. Gill, thanks for joining us.

Gill Plimmer
Thanks so much.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Rishi Sunak’s facing trouble on another front this week, of course. His flagship Rwanda policy has been deemed unlawful in the Court of Appeal. Robert, how big a problem is this for the prime minister?

Robert Shrimsley
I’m not sure. I think this was going to go up to the Supreme Court pretty much regardless. But I think it is difficult for Rishi Sunak in the sense that it is the policy that he’s putting forward as a solution to the small boats and he can’t bring it forward yet. I think they were hoping that if they won in the court, they might be able to get a first flight to Rwanda sometime before the end of this year. (Inaudible) is going to Supreme Court. That’s gonna dredge it out a bit longer so it’s all gonna drag on. On the other hand, it does give him a bit of an alibi to say, you know, well, I would like to do this, but lefty lawyers in the European Convention of Human Rights have stopped me doing it.

Lucy Fisher
I wonder if it’s even better than that for him and that he’s now got a sort of the bogeyman to sort of set his face against, you know, not just an excuse, but a foil to sort of fight the next election.

Robert Shrimsley
I don’t know if it’s big enough to fight the next election, but the problem is, I think, that he’s got these five pledges. I know even though the pledges themselves are slightly more delicately worded than people think. The way they’re understood by the public, these are the five things I’ll do, and by doing them, you will see that I’m a prime minister worth keeping. The problem is, for whatever reason, be it his fault or other faults, these pledges are not going to be met. And his efforts to stop the boats by deporting people to Rwanda have been frustrated. So, yes, he’s got some excuses. On the other hand, the country isn’t really looking for excuses. So, I think if he can’t meet his targets, that’s more problematic in the end.

Lucy Fisher
And of course, Miranda, the whole point of the Rwanda policy is to deter people from making that Channel crossing and therefore bring down the numbers eventually that way. But certainly what I pick up from MPs, you know, their post bags are chockablock full with is anger about the hotel bills and the existence in their constituencies throughout the UK of people living in what, you know, their voters or some of them think, sounds like the lap of luxury and things that they would ordinarily save up to do as a treat. It doesn’t seem to be any chance that by the end of this year that £7mn a day hotel bill is going to be tackled either.

Miranda Greem
No, absolutely not. And I think that your point reinforces Robert’s, which is that actually, on this policy, the thing that matters is can Rishi Sunak actually deliver and can he solve the problem? I think, I mean, it may be slightly useful to him for some sections of the Tory vote to be able to say, oh, the courts, enemies of the people, replay that kind of old-theme tune of the populist Brexit years. But actually, Rishi Sunak is supposed to be selling something completely different to Boris Johnson. He’s supposed to be selling competence and managerialism, and if you can’t therefore manage a problem, you’ve got a much, much bigger issue with the electorate.

You’re quite right about those postbags. You know, Andrew Mitchell, who’s back in government now, but he had actually criticised the Rwanda plan on the basis that the costs were so great it’d be cheaper to put everyone up at the Ritz, you know, and you’ve got a new government estimate saying that it would cost £170,000 per person to, you know, ship them off to Rwanda anyway. You’ve also got the question that Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa with a regime of questionable reputation. There are so many problems with this policy. And if it doesn’t help with the his stop-the-boats pledge, then he’s got a far wider problem with the electorate than some sort of clever-clever culture war scheme to try and brand the courts as a block on delivery.

Lucy Fisher
And Robert, it’s not just Sunak who’s troubled by the latest development. It’s Suella Braverman as well, isn’t it? Does it feel to you like her star’s on the wane a bit as a sort of alternative power base for the right to the party, a potential future leader?

Robert Shrimsley
It’s quite hard for me to judge because under no normal metric would her star have been on the rise in the (Lucy laughs) first place. I suppose I would say, she still looks like the candidate of the sort of the angry right. And I don’t see who else there is. Yeah, I mean, others like Kemi Badenoch, who I think is a more obvious candidate because she’s got a foot in both camps of the angry right, and also a bit more pragmatic right. So I don’t know who there is who ousts Suella Braverman. And unless it’s somebody like, I don’t know, Simon Clarke, one of the sort of trust backers who throws their hat into the ring in a future contest. One of the other points is Rishi Sunak doesn’t want to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, otherwise he’d have structured policy that way. His whole premise is I want to do everything but pull out of it. So I think Suella Braverman is on a downward slope probably but whether her party sees that way, I don’t know.

And the other point, by the way, is we’re talking about small boats, I mean, legal migration is what’s agitating a lot of people now. I mean the net number last time was around 600,000, wasn’t it? And obviously there were exceptional circumstances, but actually a lot of the people who are most agitated about small boats are also getting more and more wound up about legal migration. So I still think she’s heading for a conflict with Rishi Sunak on that before the end of this parliament.

Miranda Green
I must say this topic does make me despair though, because when I first went to work in politics in 1995 as a humble researcher, one of the main things you had to deal with in an MP’s office was the absolute inadequacy of the asylum system. And it’s been chaos for decades, and it’s still chaos.

Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s just move on finally to Uxbridge. We know we’ve got three by-elections coming up in the next three weeks. We’ll do a little bit of a spotlight on each of those. And on Thursday, I went with Audrey, one of the producers of this podcast, to Uxbridge to speak to the, some of the good folks there. Here’s what they had to say.

Uxbridge Woman 1
I’m fed up with the whole bunch of them, to be perfectly honest. That’s how I actually feel. I’ve never felt like that. I’ve always felt strongly about a particular party.

Lucy Fisher
Is Ulez important to you?

Uxbridge Woman 1
Very. Very important, yeah.

Lucy Fisher
Would that stop you voting Labour?

Uxbridge Woman 1
Yeah, 100 per cent. I mean, all of my children are struggling. No one can move out. No one can buy a house. They’re struggling to afford the cars. My daughter needs her car. Everything is like struggle at the moment, you know.

Uxbridge Man 1
I haven’t made up my mind yet. I don’t think it would be Conservative.

Lucy Fisher
On what basis? Boris Johnson?

Uxbridge Man 1
Boris Johnson, yeah. I’m not particularly happy about the way he carried on. He lied, continually lied.

Lucy Fisher
And miss, have you voted Conservative in the past?

Uxbridge Woman 2
All year, I say.

Uxbridge Man 1
I did belong to a Conservative club when my father was alive. So yeah.

Lucy Fisher
And at the moment you’re not decided, but you’re swaying one direction?

Uxbridge Man 1
Definitely not Labour. But I don’t know at the moment which way I’m gonna go.

Uxbridge Woman 3
Actually, just tactically, I probably will vote for Labour because something needs to be done to get rid of this government.

Lucy Fisher
You mentioned when we walked up to you, you had strong opinions on Boris Johnson.

Uxbridge Woman 3
Yeah, he’s an absolute fool. He’s absolutely desecrated this poor country, responsible for so much damage, division. And I haven’t got any time for him. Very happy to see the back of him.

Uxbridge Woman 4
Well, I must admit I used to like Boris. For all his faults, you know, he kept me voting for him. (Laughs)

Lucy Fisher
So that’s just a flavour of what we had. Boris Johnson was exciting opinions both for and against. We didn’t find anyone who took the middle ground on that. But there was one theme throughout as well that actually throws back to something you’ve written about this week, Robert, in a brilliant column about the lack of hope being offered by any party. There wasn’t a great appetite for Labour either among most of the people we spoke to. There was just this sense that things feel a bit bleak at the moment.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, and I think it’s a worry for the nature of politics in general, but you have this clear sense that we’re going into an election where the voters don’t believe it’s gonna get better whatever happens. So it’s very clear that the public mood has shifted, I think, decisively and irrevocably against the Conservatives who do not believe they can get it back in and stay in power. But there just isn’t this excitement or enthusiasm for the Labour party. And obviously it’s very unfair to keep harking back to Tony Blair. But we can remember how excited people were about Blair coming in. Now, the economy was far better. There were more grounds for hope than there are now. But the truth is people are looking at Labour and there’s some sort of resignation that says, well, if we want the Tories out, this is what we have to do. But you just do not find people saying, I’m enthused by Labour’s plans for this, or I believe Labour will fix that. And I think that’s a worry because I think there’s a fatalism that’s seeping into politics, which is dangerous.

One of the things that particularly strikes me — I know it’s a small thing in — Labour’s campaign on “broken Britain”, and we can have an argument as to whether Britain is actually broken or just struggling. But it seems to me to feed into the hopelessness a bit and I know it’s a good attack line. I know it works as a message, but actually, at some point, people will want Labour to say we can be better, we can do better than this. “Broken Britain” doesn’t help me in all of the problems I’ve got with my NHS waiting lists or, you know, my schools or the cost of living. You know, if it’s broken, how are you gonna fix it? And I think the challenge for Labour in the next year is to find a way to put some legitimate hope into the grounds of the people they expect to vote for them.

Miranda Green
And they’ve got to do that whilst keeping within the really tight spending restrictions set down by Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor. So it’s an incredibly tricky, fine line for Labour to try to walk. I totally agreed with Robert’s column. I looked at that polling data as well a few weeks ago and it’s really striking on, for example, the cost of living. People have no faith in the ability of any party to actually sort it out for them. So there is that fatalism that you talk about. And so Labour’s got to try and inject. Do you remember that famous disparaging remark of Sarah Palin about Obama? How’s that hopey changey thing going for you? But, you know, you need the hopey changey thing in politics, particularly if you’re a party of the progressive centre-left and you’re actually hoping to come and be allowed to transform the country, to change people’s lives.

Robert Shrimsley
We talk about offering hope as if it’s like positively rainbows and whatever.

Miranda Green
Yeah, that’s real (overlapping talk).

Robert Shrimsley
Sometimes it just has to be a plan. If you think back to David Cameron in 2010, of course he didn’t go all the way and win the election outright. But one of the things they were saying is we’re gonna fix this mess and it will be hard and it will be painful. You know, God knows it was. But that message was, there’s a mess, we’re going to fix this. So I think Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer are going to have to unveil some extra tax rises, some extra revenue raises. They’ll probably wait till after the Budget next year, but they are gonna have to do this because there have been, you know, years of under-investment in public services and however much reform you want to offer, you are going to have to spend somewhere along the line and people want to know where that money is gonna be.

Lucy Fisher
Do you think they’re gonna tackle some of the sort of tax reliefs that, you know, are very much sort of targeted at vested interests and, frankly, quite regressive?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, there have been some, like carry interest, they’ve already announced I think they’re going to do. The private school things — a lot of these don’t raise very much money, but I think there are a range of areas. I don’t know that any of these, their policy, but it seems to be obvious to look at. They will look at capital gains tax, equalising it with income tax. They might look at the exemption that stops you paying national insurance once you reach pension age if you carry on working. They might look at some kind of wealth taxes. They might look at the tax relief you offer people saving for their pensions, or they might bring it down to the lower rate of tax, not let you claim it at the higher rate. I mean, there are lots of things they could do which might generate money and won’t hit the poorest. And I just think they’re gonna have to do some of them, and I suspect they know this, and I think next year we will see at least a couple of these announced.

Lucy Fisher
See, my guess would be they’ll wait till after the election and then with the majority, go ahead and do it.

Robert Shrimsley
Well, that’s what Gordon Brown did with his . . .

Lucy Fisher
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
Dividend tax rate.

Lucy Fisher
Well, actually, when you mention Gordon Brown, one grandee I was talking to this week said that they thought Rachel Reeves was following the Gordon Brown playbook in exactly the right way, to some extent with the sort of prudence with purpose, with on the prudence side of it, really fixing those fiscal rules, as you say, Miranda.

Lucy Fisher and Miranda Green
But what’s the purpose?

Miranda Green
Exactly so! And I also was talking to a former Labour cabinet minister who was saying there’s this big hole. And also there are sort of party grandees also starting to say, how can you actually be pointing the way to greater prosperity for the nation and the funds to pay for, for example, improving the NHS, without starting to talk about the disadvantages of being outside the single market and that Brexit conversation that they still don’t really want to have. So there’s also a kind of conversation in some Labour circles about how sustainable it is to totally ignore the topic of Brexit forever.

Lucy Fisher
I think the big change might come when Sue Gray comes in and there’s a growing expectation now, we’re gonna hear quite soon about when she’s allowed to start work. Whispers I’ve heard is that, you know, there’s a suggestion there’s been a slight go-slow to wait until she’s in place and then we might see rocket boosters put up some of the . . . 

Miranda Green
But you know what’s very different?

Robert Shrimsley
We’re still waiting for Sue Gray.

Lucy Fisher and Miranda Green
(Laughter)

Miranda Green
We’re still waiting for Sue Gray. Like Godot. But, you know, having a competent chief of staff is not the same thing as having a policy plan as what you’re gonna do for your first hundred days and your first year in power, where you can show to the nation that you’re making some change that they can feel.

Lucy Fisher
But the thing a lot of people say is Labour doesn’t have a lot of expertise around the policy side of things, the people actually writing the manifesto. And I think there’s this idea that Sue Gray knows where the talent is hiding and will be able to put some of that in place. I’m still sceptical, but . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
I mean I think you’re right. They don’t have a lot of expertise, for obvious reasons. And I would add, I don’t think I’m not in the camp that says Keir Starmer is making terrible mistakes. I think actually he’s got most things right. But I do think there is this question as to whether what we’re seeing is brilliant strategic caution or a bit of indecision. At times, most of what he’s doing strategically seems to me to be right, but I just think they need to infuse this with some evidence to people that their lives will get better.

Miranda Green
They need a few policies that are kind of touchstone policies that are deliverable and also tell you something about the kind of country they want to sort of live in with Labour in power. Like, for example, Blair’s minimum wage promise showed you something that you could deliver that was measurable, but also had a kind of sense of a more equal nation where things were fairer. They don’t really have those touchstone policies to offer at the moment. They need one or two, three, four, ideally a whole platform. But you know, you need that.

Robert Shrimsley
And they have to speak to ordinary life. What people actually want to hear about is GP waiting times.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
And you know, my kid’s at school and how I can’t afford things. And Miranda’s exactly right, but it’s got to speak to those points.

Lucy Fisher
Well, let’s see how we get on. So at the moment I think they’ve been concentrating on the very abstract five missions.

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Let’s finish up with Cultural Fix. What are you excited about this week that you’ve done or are doing this weekend?

Miranda Green
Well, I feel a bit ridiculous saying this after the conversation we had about sewage, but I’ve been swimming in the rivers. (Laughter)

Lucy Fisher
Oh god, which one?

Miranda Green
I had a one . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
Well, that explains it.

Miranda Green
Oh, dear, no. I had a lovely swim in the Serpentine early one morning. Gorgeous. And I also spent the weekend swimming in the Thames upstream, which was fabulous. I can’t recommend it highly enough but I did shower afterwards. Lucy, what about you?

Lucy Fisher
Well, I’m going to a wedding this weekend where one of the grooms is German and I’m very excited to get involved in — and I hope I pronounce this correctly — the Polterabend, which is the traditional German custom of smashing porcelain the night before the wedding with the shards bringing good luck. I didn’t know the Germans did this.

Miranda Green
Expensive.

Lucy Fisher
Well, actually, well, they’ve asked every guest to bring their own. And I’ve got a particularly ugly (Miranda laughs) gravy tureen that I inherited that I can’t wait to smash.

Miranda Green
Fantastic. I can donate if you need more.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, how about you?

Robert Shrimsley
OK, so I always feel inadequate in this when Stephen is here because he’s a human arts council and he’s always done everything you can possibly do in a city. On Saturday I’m going to see Pulp at Finsbury Park, which I’m very excited about. So I mentioned it to my daughter who said, oh, but yeah, they’re on with Wet Leg; that’s much more interesting. So now I’ve been on a Spotify list trying to find out about Wet Leg.

Lucy Fisher
It’s quite funny, isn’t it? Wet Leg are kind of a much bigger deal now than Pulp, at least to some quarters of the . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
(Overlapping talk)

Lucy Fisher
Of the population? Well, let’s leave it there.

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That’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. If you like the podcast, do subscribe. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. We also appreciate positive reviews and ratings. It really helps spread the word. Political Fix is presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Anna Dedhar and Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer, original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. We’ll meet again here, same time, same place next week.

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