Our new Government Tracker is live - and it shows the government must be clearer about how it will measure delivery
Today’s an exciting day for the Full Fact team—we’ve just launched a major new project to track the government’s progress delivering Labour’s manifesto pledges.
Our Government Tracker initially looks at 43 pledges, from dental appointments to defence spending, National Insurance to crime. We’ll be adding more pledges in due course, and keeping it up to date on a rolling basis as new announcements are made and new data comes in.
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Our initial findings
Initial results from the tracker suggest that the government should make its commitments clearer, more measurable, and more accessible to the public.
While many of the 43 commitments we’ve assessed so far have shown positive progress, we found 12 pledges were difficult or impossible to rate, either due to unclear wording or lack of information about the details. These include:
- Pledges to not increase taxes on working people, and about National Insurance—lack of clarity in the original manifesto commitments has left Full Fact unable to say whether these pledges have been upheld.
- A pledge to train thousands more GPs—unclear manifesto wording with no further explanation from the government has left Full Fact unable to track this pledge.
- Six further pledges which Full Fact has attempted to rate but with difficulty, due to lack of information about how they will be measured or other key details being unclear. Examples of these include the pledges to deliver an extra 40,000 NHS appointments per week, achieve the highest sustained economic growth in the G7, and raise confidence in the police.
Government departments have indicated that further information and metrics on some of these pledges will be published in due course. Yet recent criticism and accusations of broken commitments that followed the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions demonstrate how unclear definitions can damage public trust in the government.
Full Fact's policy tracker
Full Fact’s tracker is designed to encourage politicians of all parties to apply higher standards of transparency and accountability to their manifestos and pledges. It aims to build public trust in the political system by increasing understanding about the government’s plan for meeting these objectives and confidence that delivery is being accurately and meaningfully reported.
As our chief executive, Chris Morris puts it:
Every voter has a right to judge their government’s progress based on clear and simple commitments made at an election. But decades of disillusionment have left many people sceptical that any politician wants to invite that kind of scrutiny.
Earning back public trust requires politicians to leave the safety of news-friendly soundbites in favour of meaningful explanations of what, how, and when they will deliver. People aren’t expecting miracles, they know these things are complicated. But the least they deserve is clear explanations of what the government has promised to do and when they can expect to feel the difference.
With our tracker project, Full Fact is leading by example—these initial results are the first step that shows exactly how we intend to keep our promise to hold the government accountable for delivery in the coming years.
Our approach to tracking government policy
Full Fact has assessed 43 pledges from the Labour manifesto so far, refined from an initial list of nearly 300 commitments that appeared to be trackable. Of this first tranche:
- 5 were rated as ‘achieved’
- 12 were rated as ‘appears on track’
- 12 were rated as ‘in progress’
- 2 were rated as ‘appears off track’
- 0 were rated as ‘not kept’
- 3 were rated as ‘unclear or disputed’
- 9 were rated as ‘wait and see’
For more on how we chose which pledges to track, how we’ve rated them and how we’re planning to add to it, see our FAQs page. And please do let us know what you think of it—we want to hear how to make it better.
Images courtesy of AFP