The campaign is over, but it’s only now that the really hard work begins. Every new prime minister faces a bulging in-tray of issues, decisions and potential mishaps, but this one will be arguably more laden than most.
Security and Ukraine
This would be a first task, and one of the most pressing. The prime minister will barely have time to raise a glass of champagne before being whisked off to Washington for a Nato summit starting on Tuesday, one likely to be beset with more anxieties than usual.
Among the attenders will be Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who is facing the prospect of not just the rise of the populist right in Europe, but the idea of a Putin-sympathetic Donald Trump potentially winning the US election.
Prisons
Perhaps the most urgent domestic issue for the prime minister and one that has been largely neglected during the election campaign.
Governors have already warned that the prison estate in England and Wales will be effectively full within the next week or so. This would most likely trigger a fallback plan in which some prisoners are kept at courts and trials are delayed, while some short-serving inmates are released early.
This is, however, all sticking plaster stuff. Action will be needed. Cassia Rowland, a senior researcher at the Institute for Government, said the new administration will not have “the luxury of time” to decide how to respond to the crisis in prisons.
“Current emergency measures are both risky and insufficient. Implementing these short-term options – perhaps within days of the general election – is absolutely critical to avoid a looming emergency and to win the breathing space needed to develop longer-term solutions.”
Migration
Over the last three months people have been arriving in England on small boats at the rate of 92 a day – over 31,000 people in the last year, according to Home Office figures. The next government will need to get to grips with this problem and the criminal gangs that put lives at risks.
Close to 120,000 people are meanwhile waiting for an initial decision on their asylum claims – three times the number five years ago, according to analysis of Home Office figures by the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. The backlog has been falling since the middle of last year, but two-thirds of those in the queue have still been waiting for more than six months. Running the system currently costs the public finances £4bn a year – over four times the amount at the last general election in 2019.
Cutting historically high net migration into the UK (685,000 people in 2023) is seen as necessary by Labour and the Conservatives. It affects policy on everything from labour markets to housing. But finding the right level and maintaining adequate labour supply and skills for business and public services is a fine balance. It depends, in part, on which, not just how many, people are coming and going from these shores.
Junior doctors’ strike
The most recent walkout by junior doctors, at the end of last month, was the 11th in a dispute over pay that began almost 18 months ago and has caused significant disruption to NHS services.
Settling this dispute is a key priority for any government wanting to cut waiting lists. After this week’s latest walkout junior doctors have been on strike for 44 days since the start of the industrial action in March 2023. They want a 35% pay rise to achieve full pay restoration for the fall in the values of their incomes since 2008/09. But more than 1.4m appointments have been rescheduled because of industrial action, and £1.7bn has been spent to cover the disruption to services and the cost of covering strikes, according to the King’s Fund thinktank.
Most governments will balk at authorising a single 35% rise. But something close to full pay restoration could be achieved if it was phased in over many years.
Housebuilding
The challenge is to build at least 1.5m homes in the next parliament. Levers to pull include relaxing planning rules restricting building on the greenbelt, boosting the construction workforce, designing a new generation of new towns and pumping government money into a new era of social housing. The first is likely to be unpopular, the second takes time, the third has been unsuccessfully tried by governments led by David Cameron and Gordon Brown, and the fourth seems unlikely given the fiscal restraint the main parties are promising.
Nevertheless, the pressure is on to act. Wednesday bought news of record average private rents as they hit £1,300 a month, a 7% hike on last year, according to Rightmove. Monthly rents are even higher in London, hitting £2,600. And over the last 15 years, rising house prices mean the average wait for a first time buyer to afford to get on the housing ladder has increased by more than two years.
Council funding
Despite increases to council funding in England during the last parliament, increasing demands and a legacy of deep cuts in the 2010s mean major pressures for town halls, which bankroll everything from youth clubs to social care. Further cuts are predicted, based on spending plans for priorities including the NHS and defence implied by the main parties’ manifestos.
Even council tax hikes might not prevent further local austerity, warns the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Amid a wave of effective town hall bankruptcies from Birmingham to Thurrock, 19 councils in England were this year handed government bailout agreements totalling £2.5bn to prevent them also collapsing.
Social care
An ageing population and medical advances keeping people with severe disabilities alive longer means pressure to increase the £28bn a year councils spend on adult social care is growing. Demand for care from working-age adults has increased 22% since 2015/16 and over 400,000 people are waiting for an assessment of their needs, payments to begin or a review of their plan.
Shortfalls in paid support has increased strain on unpaid carers, more of whom are pleading for help from councils owing to burnout. Tight budgets mean three out of four councils fear they won’t be able to make the right care available at the right time this year.
Meanwhile the workforce is unstable, having relied heavily on migrant labour to fill gaps since the pandemic, with half a million hours of homecare unable to be delivered across England due to lack of social care staff in 2023.
Environment
Floods, heatwaves and droughts around the world mean the climate crisis is ever more present in people’s minds. Some radical action will be needed to fully decarbonise the UK’s grid while also, ideally, lowering demand: a new government should take action on issues such as expanding grid capacity, training workers and planning system reform from day one.
Sewage has also been a pivotal election issue, revealing just how much people care about their local rivers and beaches, and causing real fury. The water companies must be dealt with, although neither of the main parties appear to be considering renationalising the industry.
