MORDAZ
They say
britain drifts for want of big ideas
In fact
it drifts because nobody stays long enough

Burnham's boldest promise should be the dullest one

Britain drifted because its governments never lasted long enough to finish anything. The new prime minister should promise to keep his ministers where they are.

By Jenson IvesFiled under Politics5 min

UK politicsMORDAZ

Andy Burnham has promised Britain a National Care Service before. On 30 March 2010, as health secretary, he published a white paper of that name and called it “the biggest change to the welfare state since 1948”. Five weeks later Labour lost the general election, and the plan went with it.

On Tuesday, in his first conference speech as prime minister, he promised it again. Holding back tears as he described his late father’s experience of the care system, he said he would stake his legacy on a national care service. He also vowed to move Britain “beyond a decade of drift and division”.

The sixteen years between those two speeches explain the drift better than any speech could. British governments rarely fail for lack of ideas. They fail because ideas do not outlast the people who have them. If Burnham means to end the drift, the most radical thing he can promise is also the dullest: that the ministers he appointed in July will still be in their jobs at the next election.

Start at the top. The 13 prime ministers who served between 1945 and 2016 averaged more than five years each. The five who came between David Cameron and Burnham averaged two. Burnham is the seventh prime minister since the Brexit referendum, and five of those seven took office between elections, installed by their parties rather than by voters. Each new occupant of Downing Street tends to bring a new cabinet, a new slogan and a new plan. Theresa May published an industrial strategy in 2017; Boris Johnson’s government dropped it in 2021 for a “plan for growth”; Starmer’s government produced another in 2025.

Below them, the turnover is faster still. Between 2010 and 2024 Britain had 16 housing ministers, roughly one every ten months, in a country that agrees on almost nothing except that it needs more homes. A minister who needs months to learn the brief, and spends the final weeks expecting the sack, is left with very little time to do the job.

Social care shows what that costs. In 2011 the Dilnot Commission recommended capping what anyone would pay for their care. Parliament legislated for a cap in 2014. It was due to start in April 2016, then April 2020, then October 2023, then October 2025. It never arrived: in July 2024 a new chancellor scrapped it to save money. Six prime ministers came and went while the date slid, and as of this month nobody in England has ever had their care costs capped. Starmer’s answer was yet another review, the Casey Commission, whose final report Burnham has brought forward to next summer. Each delay had its reasons, whether cost, councils’ readiness or a hole in the public finances. But a reform that needs a decade to bed in cannot survive a politics that changes its leadership every two years.

It was not always like this. In 1951 Winston Churchill made Harold Macmillan minister of housing and left him there for three years. Macmillan inherited his party’s conference pledge of 300,000 homes a year. He hit it in December 1953, with the running total displayed in his department like a cricket scoreboard and his chancellor and prime minister firmly behind him. Aneurin Bevan, before him, had five and a half years at the Ministry of Health to build the NHS.

Labour’s 2024 pledge of 1.5 million homes in this Parliament works out at exactly Macmillan’s figure. What differs is not the ambition. It is that Macmillan was given time to deliver it, and nobody expected him to be moved before he had.

To be sure, stability is not competence. Some ministers deserve the sack, and voters were right to punish governments that had lost their way. Burnham himself is prime minister because his party lost faith in Keir Starmer after two years of heavy election defeats, and a rule against change would have kept a deeply unpopular leader in place. Nor can any prime minister promise away events: a war, a market panic or a scandal can force a reshuffle.

But removing a failing government is what elections are for, and holding ministers to account is what Parliament is for. Most reshuffles do neither. They are tools of party management, used to reward allies, sideline rivals and manufacture a sense of momentum. A prime minister who gave them up would lose a little control over his party and gain something far more valuable: departments run by people who know how they work.

Burnham’s own plans show why this matters. He plans to pay for the care service by adjusting the pensions triple lock from April 2030, after the next election. His flagship reform will exist only if the government that starts it lasts long enough to finish it.

Last time, his National Care Service got five weeks. This time it will need the one thing British politics has stopped giving anyone: time. Burnham should start by promising that the cabinet he appointed in July is the one that faces the voters.

The strongest case against

The best rebuttal is that churn is a symptom, not a cause. Governments fall and ministers move because policies fail, money runs out and voters turn. Freezing a cabinet would not have funded the care cap; it would only have delayed the moment someone admitted it was unaffordable.

A defender of reshuffles would add that a prime minister who cannot move ministers has no leverage over them, and that fixed cabinets breed complacency. Some of the most effective ministers of recent decades arrived in reshuffles because a predecessor had failed.

The empirical dispute: whether long tenures cause good results, or whether successful ministers simply survive longer. Macmillan kept his job partly because he was succeeding, so his record cannot settle the question on its own.

Sources

Written by Jenson Ives · 29 September 2026

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