To the incoming Prime Minister,
As I write this, the office is changing hands but is not yet occupied. Keir Starmer has stood aside, and the person most likely to read a letter like this is Andy Burnham, who arrives, as every new leader does, on a promise of change: to make the country feel as though it works again, to give people reason to hope. I take that promise seriously. This letter is written in support of it, which is precisely why it is a warning.
You will be, by the popular count, the seventh prime minister in a decade. That figure is usually told as a story about political instability. I want to tell it as something else: as evidence that we keep changing the driver and wondering why the journey never changes. The machine is not the person at the wheel. And the machine, left as it is, will do to your best intentions exactly what it did to your predecessors'.
I do not write as an opponent or an ally. I write as someone who spent fifteen years running a crisis support charity in Bristol, and who then watched, over a decade, what happened to a piece of work I am still proud of. That experience taught me one lesson above all others, and it is the only thing I have worth saying to you now.
The change you can count, and the change you cannot
In the spring of 2014 I sat on the Bristol Fairness Commission, set up by the city's then mayor and asked a deceptively simple question: what would it take to make this a fair city? Over six months we heard evidence from across the city and beyond it, and we published a report with around fifty recommendations. A decade on, I think the analysis holds up. Which is exactly why what happened next should interest you.
One recommendation was delivered, quickly and well. The council became a Living Wage employer within months, and thousands of people were better off for it. But it was the exception, not the rule. We had also called for a standing body to hold the whole agenda: to bring council, business and the voluntary sector together, year after year, and drive it forward. It was never built. And without it, the deeper work, the prevention, the slow repair of communities, the things that change the shape of a life, quietly faded. Not rejected in any dramatic moment. Simply not held.
For years I read that as a failure of will. I no longer believe that, and the distinction matters to you more than to me. Look at what survived. The Living Wage was a single, legible decision the council could take about itself: one lever, one budget line, one act of leadership you can announce and count. The rest required sustained coordination across many organisations over many years, to produce benefits that are diffuse, delayed and hard to measure. How do you count the crisis that never happened? How do you put a number, this financial year, on the child who did not fall through the gap?
The cost does not disappear. It moves.
This is the pattern you will meet in every department you now oversee, and the one I would most urge you to understand before anyone persuades you otherwise.
When a system under pressure cuts something preventative, it records a saving. The saving is real on the page. But the cost does not disappear. It migrates, to A&E, to emergency housing, to a mental health crisis team, to the criminal justice system, and it arrives there several times larger than it would have been to prevent.
I can put a figure on it from my own work. Sustained, early, relational support of the kind we delivered in Bristol cost around £4,268 per person. Allowing the same person's situation to deteriorate to the point of homelessness, and responding then, cost in excess of £20,000, before the compounding costs of ill-health, family breakdown and repeated system contact that follow. The money was never saved. It was moved to the most expensive possible destination, at the most damaged possible moment, attached to a life that by then had far less chance of recovery.
You will see the same logic in the £18 billion of road repairs the country has deferred into existence, one cheap patch at a time. The saving was never a saving. It was a bill, posted forward, compounding all the while.
Why this will happen to you too
None of this happens through anyone's bad faith. The council in 2014 did the visible, deliverable thing, and did it well. The structural agenda dissipated not because anyone stood up to oppose it, but because nothing existed to carry it once the report was filed and the room had emptied.
Your government will face the same gravity, only larger. The moment preventative work has to compete with this year's pressures for the same money, the pull towards what can be counted before the next budget round becomes overwhelming. Resistance to patient, structural investment is not a risk to be managed. It is a certainty. And anything without the power to push back against it will be worn away, however brilliant the strategy behind it. The brilliance of the analysis will not protect it. Nor will a body that can only advise.
The test that matters
So here is the test I would ask you to set yourself, and the one I will be watching for. Not the announcements of the first hundred days, which the system is built to deliver. But whether you build something to hold the work the system is built to lose.
Not a report. Not a taskforce that can only recommend. A standing body with a named owner, a memory, and real authority: the standing to push back when prevention is asked to justify itself against this year's crisis, every year, for longer than a single electoral cycle. The analysis of what this country needs is the easy part. We have had good analysis for decades. What we have never reliably built is the architecture to hold it. Build that, and you will have done something none of your six predecessors managed. Decline to, and the rest is theatre, however well staged.
The thinking behind this letter is not only my own. Much of it I owe to The Spirit Level, the book that first made the case to me that more equal societies tend to do better across almost everything that matters: health, trust, safety, the life chances of children. It named the destination. But naming the destination was never what we lacked. What we lacked was the means to stay on the road once the journey got hard.
We have run this experiment before
There is a definition of foolishness I have always kept close: to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. I offer it not as a rebuke but as a description. We have changed the person at the top of this country six times in ten years and expected the direction of travel to change with them. It has not, because the direction was never set by the driver. To do it a seventh time and change nothing in the machinery beneath would be that definition made flesh.
And you do not take the wheel in settled weather. You inherit a moment when almost everything is moving at once: a climate already presenting its bill, conflict abroad and a world order tilting towards new powers, trade turning inward, the cost of living still pressing on ordinary households, artificial intelligence remaking work faster than any institution can absorb, and an inequality that the last several governments have all promised, and all failed, to close. These are not separate emergencies competing for your attention. They are the same test arriving together, and each one obeys the same rule: it rewards the society that invests early in resilience, and punishes, at compound interest, the one that defers the cost to a more expensive moment. Every one of them is a 50p lettuce, its real price waiting quietly to be paid.
Under pressure of that magnitude, the pull towards the cheap, the countable and the announceable is not merely strong. It is very nearly irresistible. Which is exactly why the discipline to resist it has never mattered more than it does in the government you are about to form.
One question to govern by
I have spent my working life trying to answer a single question, and I will leave it with you, because it is the one that finally matters in the office you are about to hold:
What is this really costing, and who is paying for it?
Not just at the checkout. Not just in this financial year. Not just on the budget line where the saving is recorded. The full price. The real cost. Honestly accounted for.
Govern by that question, and you will find yourself protecting the things that are hard to measure and easy to cut, which means building something strong enough to defend them, from your own pressures and from those who follow you. Govern without it, and the announcements will land, the headlines will turn, and a decade from now someone will write the next prime minister this same letter, with the same figures, about the same divided country.
You inherit a people who have run out of patience with being managed and are waiting to be led. The distance between the two is the whole of my argument. It is the difference between the change you can announce and the change that holds.
Build something that holds.
Mark Goodway MBE
Founder, Goodway Advisory Ltd