In May 2024, a High Court judge ruled that the British government’s plan for meeting its own climate targets was unlawful. The plan relied on assumptions the court found incomplete and overly optimistic. Ministers were ordered to go back and produce a credible one within twelve months. When the ruling landed, roughly seven million people were waiting for planned hospital treatment across England. No court had jurisdiction over that number. No law required ministers to fix it. The question of which failures the British state is built to enforce, and which it leaves to dashboards and promises, is the question that now sits underneath almost everything voters are angry about.
How the priorities nobody voted for get written into law
I have considered three cases from the past two years, which show how this works: a climate plan struck down by a court; an NHS waiting list that no court can touch; and a water network that no one is legally required to fix. Each tells a different part of the same story.
The Climate Change Act 2008 did something unusual. It gave a single policy objective (reducing carbon emissions) the force of law. Carbon budgets are legally binding. If the government’s plan for meeting them is not credible, campaigning organisations can take ministers to court. ClientEarth, Friends of the Earth, and the Good Law Project did exactly that. They won.
The consequence is straightforward. On emissions, ministers face legal sanction for falling short. On energy affordability, NHS waiting times, water infrastructure, housing supply, and economic growth, they face political pressure. Political pressure can be managed, deferred, reframed, or absorbed by a change of spokesperson. Legal sanction cannot.
This is what an accountability asymmetry looks like in practice. One set of objectives sits inside a legal framework with teeth. Everything else sits inside a political framework that produces targets, dashboards, and reviews. The targets are ambitious. The dashboards are updated quarterly. The reviews are published with forewords by ministers. The enforcement behind all of it is close to zero.
The NHS performance data for March 2026 shows exactly what this produces where people actually experience the system. The Nuffield Trust dashboard reported 7.2 million cases on the elective waiting list. Almost 63 per cent of patients were seen within 18 weeks, against an interim target of 65 per cent. In A&E, 23 per cent of patients waited over four hours, narrowly missing the target of 22 per cent. Ambulance category 2 response times averaged 26 minutes and 18 seconds, just inside a 30-minute target.
Read those figures quickly and the picture looks like a system inching toward recovery. Read them from the perspective of someone within that 23 per cent sitting in an A&E corridor at two in the morning, and they describe something else entirely. While the dashboard reports progress, the waiting room tells a different story. The difference between the two is that no one can be taken to court over the waiting room.
The water sector completes the picture. The National Audit Office concluded that Defra and three water regulators had failed to secure the investment needed to maintain basic infrastructure. At the current pace of replacement, England’s water and sewerage network would take 700 years to renew. Ten of 16 major water companies face financial resilience concerns. There is no ‘Climate Change Act’ for clean water. No NGO or Quangos can (or will) sue the government for failing to replace Victorian pipes. The result is predictable. Where the law enforces, the state responds. Where it does not, the state produces reports and consultations.
I am not suggesting that the answer to this is more legislation. Britain already has enough law. The problem is that the law protects some objectives and leaves others to the goodwill of whoever happens to be in office. What would change the dynamic is simpler and harder than passing another Act. It would mean putting decisions back in the hands of people who face the voters, stripping away the layers of arms-length bodies that allow ministers to make promises they cannot be held to, and requiring that every binding statutory duty on one objective is accompanied by an equally binding obligation to account for what it costs on every other.
A government that can be sued for its carbon targets but not for its waiting lists has already decided which problems matter.
That decision was made in the design of the legal and institutional framework that sits around every elected government, not in a political manifesto. The Climate Change Act binds whoever holds office. The NHS targets do not. Ofwat’s powers do not compel adequate investment. The accountability for healthcare, water, and energy affordability is dispersed across departments, Quangos, and review panels whose members bear no electoral cost for the outcomes they oversee. I recently heard someone recall one of my favourite quotes from Thomas Sowell at a panel discussion I attended: ‘It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.’
Where the asymmetry shows up
This dynamic is not unique to government. Anyone who has sat in a budget meeting where compliance spending was approved without debate while a growth initiative was sent back and forth for further analysis, has seen the same asymmetry operating at corporate level. The thing the organisation can be fined for gets funded. The thing the organisation needs in order to grow gets a business case and a steering committee. The legal obligation wins every time, and over enough budget cycles, the organisation becomes exceptionally competent at the things regulators measure and progressively worse at the things customers actually want.
In the public sector, this has been running for long enough that voters can feel it even if they cannot name it. Four consecutive governments in the past seven years have entered office promising to fix the NHS, build houses, control immigration, and grow the economy. Each has discovered that the institutional framework around them was built to enforce a different set of priorities. The room for genuine trade-off management (spending more here means spending less there, building faster means relaxing certain standards, lowering energy bills means adjusting the pace of decarbonisation) has been narrowed by laws, judicial review, Quangos’ intervention, and statutory duties that were each individually defensible and are collectively paralysing.
The voter in a Red Wall constituency who switched to Reform UK in May 2026 may not use the phrase “legislative elimination of trade-offs.” But they can see that their energy bills went up, their GP appointment takes three weeks if they are lucky, and their local river is full of sewage, while the government was taken to court for not decarbonising fast enough. The priorities are visible. They are built into the legal architecture. And they explain, more precisely than any story about culture wars or populist demagoguery, why the centre is losing ground.
The dynamic this case exposes is examined in full in my book, The Re-Alignment Era.
The government kept caring about waiting lists, water, and energy bills. It just stopped enforcing any of them. It built a system where the things it can be sued for get fixed, and the things voters actually live with get a dashboard and a promise. The dashboard keeps improving. The promise keeps being made. The queue keeps growing. And the voters, one local election at a time, keep delivering their own verdict on the difference.