Courts and NHS 'will not recover until 2030s'

IPPR study says next government will inherit huge challenge to restore public services

- Rowena Mason

Public services will not recover until the 2030s, even under a Labour government, with a decade-long wait to clear the backlog in the NHS and the courts, a report says.

The study from the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive think tank, outlines the challenge that an incoming Labour government would face, with voters impatient for change within a first term.

"The next government will inherit one of the most challenging contexts in terms of public services of any new government since the Second World War," said Harry Quilter-Pinner, an IPPR director, saying reform and higher spending would be necessary.

Some of the IPPR's ideas for reform include rolling out AI tools such as ChatGPT to the public sector to save an estimated £24bn a year, with a "right to retrain" for workers whose jobs are affected.

Labour is set to fight the next election promising reform of public services, and Keir Starmer is expected to seize on the topic of renewing the public sector this year-but the party will have little money to promise a major spending programme.

In its paper, Great Government, the IPPR said it would take nearly 10 years to get NHS waiting lists back down to 2010 levels. Its analysis of the court service was equally sobering, with a prediction that it would take until 2033 for case backlogs to reduce to pre-pandemic levels.

In education, the IPPR found it would also take more than one parliamentary term for secondary schools to reduce the attainment gap between richer and poorer students to 2017 levels.

Its polling in the report also reveals the majority of people surveyed believe many public services are getting worse but that they have not abandoned their belief 12 → in state-run services, with half of the public willing to pay more tax if the money is spent on areas such as hospitals.