Prime ministers are normally very complimentary about the individual civil servants they work with (their office is staffed by the brightest and most able people in Whitehall) but they also normally end up getting frustrated by the civil service as a whole, and by the fact that it does not implement change was quickly as they would like. But usually this takes a while. Tony Blair waited two years before he started complaining about the “scars on my back” he had suffered as a result of his Whitehall reform plans.

Keir Starmer got their in five months. In his speech yesterday he criticised civil servants for being willing to accept decline. He said:

Too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline. Have forgotten, to paraphrase JFK, that you choose change, not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.

I totally get that when trust in politics is so low, we must be careful about the promises we make. But across Whitehall and Westminster that’s been internalised as ‘don’t say anything’, ‘don’t try anything too ambitious’, ‘set targets that will happen anyway’.

This has gone down very badly with civil servants. In an interview on Newsnight last night Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA, the union represting top civil servants, accused Starmer of using “Trumpian” language and said officials felt “a sense of betrayal”.

He said:

In the early days of this government, ministers were walking around departments saying, ‘we’re not going to be like the previous administration, we’ve got your back’. And yet here we are five months in with that Trumpian language that is getting used.

Penman said the reference to draining the swamp was Trumpian. When it was put to him that Starmer in his speech explicitly said “I don’t think there’s a swamp to be drained here”, Penman pointed out that a “but” came immediately afterwards. He said Starmer was invoking a Trumpian idea.

In her Today programme interview this morning Yvonne Gagen, the Labour leader of West Lancashire borough council, said the target for new housebuilding for her authority set by the Labour government, which is more than three times as high as the previous target, was unrealistic. (See 9.01am.)

Explaining why the West Lancashire target could not be achieved, she said:

We have 90% green belt, at grade one agricultural land, and we need to protect this. It’s high quality, and it’s deemed essential in its role for national food security and local employment.

We have very few brownfield sites and very few greyfield sites.

So we feel on that, on that basis, that we will really, really struggle to actually deliver what the governments are asking us to deliver.

As well as problems with the supply of land, Gagen also said “strains on local infrastructure, lack of capacity in planning systems and [in] the construction industry” were also going to make a big increase in housebuilding difficult.

Asked if all of the green belt land West Lancashire had to be protected from housing, Gagen said there were “some parcels” where building might be possible. But she suggested that there was not enough of that to make the government’s target realistic.

Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, was interviewed on the same programme later. Asked to respond to what Gagen said about why she thought the housing target for her council was unrealistic, he said:

We’re very clear … Yes, we want to put in place more stretching housing targets in most parts of the country. We need every part of the country to play its part.

When it was put to him that Gagen said West Lancashire did not have enough land available, because so much of it was green belt, Pennycook said:

What local councils should do is look in terms of allocating land for release and ensuring that permissions come forward. They should look to densify on parts of the land that is available, brownfield land, for example. They should look to review green belt. They should look to work in cooperation with neighboring authorities …

[They] should release, where necessary, those low quality parts of the green belt – we call it grey belt – in the first instance …

We’re saying to all councils across the country, exhaust all your options to meet these housing targets, because we are absolutely determined to have a planning system in place that is geared towards meeting housing need in full.

Gagen suggested she had very little grey belt land available. Pennycook said he did not know how she could be sure, because a final defintion of grey belt has not been issued by the government.

He said councils should look at all their options for housbuilding. He went on:

And then the planning inspector, when you bring a local plan forward, will judge whether you have exhausted all those options, or whether you have hard constraints that mean you can’t release the land.

In his BBC Breakfast interview Keir Starmer also played down the fact that his personal approval ratings have slumped. Asked about his polling figures, he said:

I’ll be judged at the end of the five-year term on whether we deliver what we said we will deliver, and that’s all that matters. That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s why I came into politics, to bring about that change.

In his interviews this morning Keir Starmer stressed that improving public services would take time. He said he would not get everything done by Christmas. (See 9.36am.)

But Starmer also suggested that people would see their living standards rise “straight away”. Rejecting claims that things might get worse before they get better, he told BBC Breakfast:

I want people to feel better off straight away – feel better off in the sense of more money in their pocket, feel better off because they’ve got a secure job that they know is guaranteed to give them the money they need.

Starmer said the government had already given a pay rise to three million of the lowest-paid workers by increasing the minimum wage. He added:

I want others to feel the difference as quickly as possible.

Here is the passsage in the Plan for Change document setting out how the government intends to measures whether or not it has achieved its higher living standards goals.

Keir Starmer has told voters not to expect rapid public service improvements. As Kiran Stacey reports, in interviews broadcast this morning the prime minister said he could not promise immediate change, blaming the previous Conservative government for leaving behind problems which could take years to solve.

In his Times article Keir Starmer says his government will introduce “a golden era of building”.

Generations before us built the infrastructure the entire nation was proud of — from civic buildings to train stations, hospitals to schools. So we will introduce a new golden era of building. That’s why we’re fast-tracking 150 planning decisions on major infrastructure by the end of parliament, more than double those decided in the previous parliament. We’ll build the schools, the hospitals, the railways and roads, the towns and villages, that will shape our national landscape for years to come and fuel growth in every region and nation.

And, reviving an argument he has made countless times before, he also argues that planning regulations need to be relaxed. As an example of where current laws are too tight, he says the rules that led to HS2 having to set aside £100m for a shed for bats are “absurd”.

In the past 14 years, the Tories decided fewer than 60 infrastructure projects. We haven’t built a reservoir in 30 years, not least because the time it takes to secure planning permission for major infrastructure projects has almost doubled in the past decade. Every road, pylon and mast — which connect people with opportunity — must jump through endless hoops, only to be opposed, dragged out, before eventually, if lucky, approved. That’s how we ended up with the absurd spectacle of HS2 building a tunnel for bats that cost £100 million.

The £100m bat shed story is so extreme you might assume it’s made up. But it’s not. Here is Gywn Topham’s story about the HS2 chair talking about it at a conference last month.

Good morning. Yesterday Keir Starmer committed the government to six “measurable milestones” – a mixture of some new targets and some existing ones, wrapped up in a package intended to show people that the government is focusing on things that will make a tangible difference to their lives. They are in a Plan for Change which is an implicit admission that the previous headline performance indicators that Starmer said he wanted to be judged by – his five pre-election missions, and his six “first steps for change” – were a bit woolly.

One of the new milestones is:

Building 1.5 million homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions on at least 150 major economic infrastructure projects - more than the last 14 years combined.

Arguably this involves two targets, but the most important is the 1.5m new homes one. It is not new – it was in the original five missions – but it is receiving fresh attention because Starmer has recommitted to it, and in an interview on the Today programme this morning, Yvonne Gagen, the Labour leader of West Lancashire borough council, said the specific targets set for councils as part of this ambition were “impossible”.

Gagen said the current housebuilding target for her council was 166 new homes per year, and West Lancashire was delivering above that. But she said the new target was 605. That was “unrealistic” and the council would “really, really struggle” to hit it, she said.

Gagen said that “the vast majority of councils” felt the same way and that the government should start listening to them. She went on:

I feel that we are going to be on a collision course with Labour. And it’s not just Labour councils. It’s Liberal Democrats, it’s Conservatives, they’ve all said the same thing.

When asked to confirm that, as a Labour council leader, she expected to be on a collision course with her own government, Gagen replied:

Absolutely, absolutely, over these planning targets. They are absolutely impossible and unrealistic.

The government has been consulting on the new housing targets for councils in England, announced by Angela Rayner in July, and on Monday the BBC published a report saying that most councils that have responded to the consultation are telling the govenment in private what Gagen was saying on Today this morning: that the targets cannot be achieved.

But Starmer has signalled that he won’t back down. In an article for the Times this morning about his Plan for Change, he says he welcomes the chance to win the argument with the “blockers” obstructing change. He says:

I know, with trust in politics so low, the public are sceptical of promises made by politicians. And who can blame them, after years of inaction by successive Tory governments. But that can’t be an excuse for low expectations and easy ambitions, a culture that isn’t brave enough to even try for fear of failure. I know some councils have come out this week to challenge our plans for housing reform. I always knew there would be resistance to our planning reform. Let me say this — I won’t shy away from this argument. In fact, I welcome it.

Where there are blockers putting the brakes on, it’s a sign you are delivering real change. And change is what the British people voted for this summer — a government that is willing to take on the obstacles and break down the barriers that prevent us from reaching our full potential.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: MPs start debating the European Union (withdrawal arrangements) bill, a private member’s bill tabled by the TUV’s Jim Allister that would remove checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. It has no chance of becoming law, but the debate will allow Allister and other MPs to criticise the current Brexit arrangements for Northenr Ireland.

10.30am: Keir Starmer attends the British-Irish Council meeting in Edinburgh, with Irish and devolved government leaders. There will be a press conference at 12.30pm, and Starmer is also doing interviews.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Afternoon: Starmer is on a visit in Newcastle.

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