Our Government Tracker’s four months old - and it shows we need far greater transparency to win back trust in politics

It’s been four months since we at Full Fact launched our Government Tracker—a major ongoing project tracking the government’s progress in delivering some key pledges, made both in the Labour manifesto and in the last eight months since Labour took office. 

We’re now monitoring progress on 51 pledges. And while the government’s made clear progress on a range of commitments, we believe it still needs to do much more to explain what some of its pledges mean and how progress on them should be measured.

Our findings so far

While many of the government’s promises are clear, or have been clarified since Labour formed a government, we’ve found it difficult or impossible to meaningfully rate 12 pledges, due either to unclear wording or insufficient information about the details of the pledge. 

That represents nearly a quarter of the pledges we're tracking so far, selected from an initial list of almost 300 trackable commitments in Labour's election manifesto and some of the commitments the government has made subsequently.

We’ve been unable to give any meaningful verdict on three pledges—including the commitment to “not increase taxes on working people” and to deliver “thousands more GPs”—because of a lack of clarity and essential information about what Labour originally pledged. 

We think a further nine pledges lack important information to determine how success should be measured. Examples include: 

• a promise to recruit “6,500 new expert teachers in key subjects”
• a commitment to halve serious violent crime 
• and a pledge to deliver “productivity growth in every part of the country”.

We’ve so far rated eight of the 51 pledges we’ve examined as ‘achieved’, including high-profile commitments to set out a path to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence, create a Border Security Command and establish a National Wealth Fund. 

We’ve rated 16 as ‘appears on track’, including pledges to conduct a Strategic Defence Review within a year of entering government, carry out a review of sentencing and ensure “the next generation can never legally buy cigarettes”. 

Three pledges are currently rated as ‘appears off track’ however, including the commitment to “secure the highest sustained growth in the G7” and the promise to end the use of “asylum hotels”.  

The government recently declared it had achieved one manifesto pledge—to deliver an extra two million NHS appointments—even though that pledge appears to have originally been set in the manifesto as an annual target, which means we won’t be able to say for sure if it has been achieved until the first year of the parliament is complete. For now, we’ve rated that pledge as ‘appears on track’.

The government is undoubtedly making progress across a number of issues it said it would prioritise. But if it wants to rebuild public trust, the government must work harder to ensure the public can understand what it’s delivering.

Soundbite-friendly ‘announceables’ might make headlines but they risk pushing an already sceptical public further from the complex reality of policymaking.

No voter thinks real change is easy, but most already don’t believe what they hear from politicians. If our expert fact checkers are still in the dark about what a pledge means and how it should be measured then much of the public is likely still unsure about when they can expect to feel the difference.

We’re proud that our tracker project continues to challenge politicians to raise the standard of transparency—because it’s the only way to translate winning votes into winning trust.

Why does this all matter?

Unclear manifesto pledges and a lack of information about how they should be measured risk directly affecting public participation in politics and trust of politicians. Polling conducted by Savanta for Full Fact during last year’s general election campaign found that approximately half (54%) of the public said they tended to ignore what parties and politicians say because they don’t know if they can be trusted. 38% of adults and more than half of 18 to 34-year-olds (52%) said they had been put off voting by the level of false or misleading claims made by politicians.

In addition to providing robust, evidence-based ratings of each trackable pledge via the Government Tracker, we’re gathering insight into how political parties communicate about commitments—and where they can and should adapt to improve trust amongst a disillusioned electorate. 

Our analysis reveals that the Labour government has often utilised eye-catching numbers—such as its pledge to train “thousands more GPs” or to fix “an additional million potholes per year”—but in order to restore trust in politics and politicians it is essential that pledges are fully and transparently explained. 

As of 20 March, of the 51 pledges assessed: 

• 8 were rated as ‘achieved’
• 16 were rated as ‘appears on track’
• 13 were rated as ‘in progress’
• 3 were rated as ‘appears off track’
• 0 were rated as ‘not kept’
• 3 were rated as ‘unclear or disputed’ 
• 8 were rated as ‘wait and see’

Image courtesy of Kirsty O'Connor / No 10 Downing Street