In its 2024 manifesto Labour promised no rise in National Insurance for working people. In her first Budget that October, weeks into office, Rachel Reeves raised the employer rate from 13.8 to 15 per cent and cut the threshold at which it starts from £9,100 to £5,000, a change the Office for Budget Responsibility costed at around £25 billion a year. The government said the pledge had covered employee contributions only; the OBR expected employers to pass most of the increase on to workers regardless, through lower wages, about 60 per cent of it at first and roughly three-quarters by 2026-27. It was the first and sharpest of a run of departures from the manifesto that has defined Labour's first eighteen months in office.
On immigration Labour went further than it had promised. The manifesto committed to scrapping the Rwanda scheme, setting up a Border Security Command and clearing the asylum backlog. The white paper published in May 2025, "Restoring control over the immigration system," was not in the manifesto: it doubled the qualifying period for settlement from five to ten years, ended overseas recruitment for social-care workers, and raised the skilled-worker threshold. These were choices added after the election, on ground the party had earlier left to Reform.
Welfare ran the other way, and then reversed. The manifesto made no commitment to lift the two-child benefit cap and did not propose cuts to disability benefits. In March 2025 Liz Kendall set out around £5 billion of working-age cuts, including a tightening of Personal Independence Payment. It provoked the biggest revolt of Starmer's premiership: 126 Labour MPs had signed a reasoned amendment against an earlier version of the bill, and Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP who tabled it, told the Commons the plan still meant "£2 billion of cuts on disabled people that the Labour party has chosen to make." Mid-debate on 1 July 2025, Sir Stephen Timms, the minister for social security and disability, announced that the PIP clause would be pulled from the bill, with any change to eligibility held back until after a review he is leading. Even so, when the bill passed 335 to 260, 49 Labour MPs voted against it, the largest rebellion of the parliament. At the Budget of 26 November 2025 Reeves scrapped the two-child cap that Starmer had defended for eighteen months, a change the government estimated would lift 450,000 children out of poverty.
Defence money was brought forward while the aid pledge was dropped. The manifesto said overseas aid would return to 0.7 per cent of national income "when fiscal conditions allow." On 25 February 2025 Starmer accelerated defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, funded by cutting aid from 0.5 to 0.3 per cent over the same period.
On Europe the movement was quieter but real. The manifesto ruled out rejoining the single market, the customs union or free movement. In December 2025 the UK and EU agreed terms for the UK to rejoin Erasmus+ in 2027, alongside a longer-term fisheries agreement. Neither crosses the manifesto's red lines, but both go beyond the caution it set.
Set against these shifts are the promises the government has stopped mentioning: 40,000 extra NHS appointments a week, 6,500 new teachers, 1.5 million homes, 13,000 more neighbourhood police. Eighteen months in, the party publishes no running tally against them. Whether that reflects quiet delivery or quiet shortfall is not something the record yet settles.
The welfare reversal is the sharpest illustration of the cost. After the July concessions, the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that the package would raise no net savings for the Chancellor in this Parliament: the £5 billion Kendall had announced in March was, in effect, undone by July. Sir Stephen Timms's review of PIP is still to report, and until it does the government has not said what, if anything, will take the place of those savings.