Whoever becomes prime minister this week – most likely Rishi Sunak or Boris Johnson – will face the most daunting in-tray of anyone in No 10 for decades. These are the pressing issues they will have to make decisions on in the coming months ahead.

Fiscal plan

Sunak has declared that fixing the economy is his priority. The Treasury is facing a £40bn black hole and the interim chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, is working on a plan to make the sums add up by 31 October but this will mean swingeing cuts. A new prime minister will have to make a call on how big the cuts will be – or whether to opt for tax rises instead.

Benefits

One of the biggest decisions on this front is whether to uprate benefits in line with inflation. Most of the centrists within the party believe this is essential and that any attempt to swerve this would not get through parliament.

Public sector pay and strikes

Public sector pay is similarly problematic when it comes to inflation. Nurses, healthcare staff, ambulance drivers, teachers, train drivers, civil servants, university lecturers and many others are considering strikes this winter in the face of real-terms pay cuts. The government may have to reconsider their settlements if it wants to avoid large-scale disruption to society.

NHS winter crisis and waiting lists

The NHS is in a dire situation heading into winter with the threat of a “twin” Covid and flu season, demoralised staff and long waits for operations, GP appointments, A&E services and ambulances. A new prime minister will have to take a decision on whether NHS spending should be ringfenced from cuts, as well as how to deal with the existing pressure on services.

Energy

The government has provided energy bill support until April but now will not say how much if any subsidy it will give people after that point. There is also the threat of winter blackouts if gas supply remains tight across Europe as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine. One of the first actions of a prime minister could be to announce a major energy-saving campaign – a move resisted by Liz Truss previously.

Larry was only four years old when he was adopted from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home to begin his new life in politics and has served as a trusted companion to three prime ministers: David Cameron, Theresa May and the outgoing PM, Boris Johnson.

A tweet from Larry’s Twitter account with a picture of the billboard, featuring the cat in a union flag tie below his slogan, quickly accrued more than 14,000 likes on Saturday.

“Dream come true,” it was captioned, along with the hashtags Larry4Leader and YesWeCat.

Users were quick to spot the billboards that have popped up

The Labour Party can only win as a truly national party, supporting people’s hopes and dreams. Individual aspirations can only be built in a stable nation where we equally care for ourselves, each other, and the natural environment. The future is bleak if our children have no prospect of being prepared for graduate level jobs in their own communities. We need to see jobs we aspire to in our own neighbourhoods, not in a distant city or virtual reality.

Secure local employment should also make housing affordable. It is not sustainable if only a few parts of the country, the economy, our politics, or our cultural life are thriving; and if those successful areas are having to bail out those we are failing. For Labour, success will mean that the answers for the “red wall” seats are also the answers for coastal and market towns. All share the same sense of being left behind by the economy and being on the periphery. Rural communities and former industrial towns both feel taken for granted by politicians.

Labour must be wary of different messages to different voters in different parts of the country. That spreads division. While that worked for the Tories and the nationalists, I believe that post-pandemic Britain will be ready for a vision of hope and unity. What are the steps to finding that vision? It needs to be more than a slogan. People have heard of “levelling up” but now recognise that it is empty of policy.

We must be embedded in, and listening to, the places we want to represent. Labour is the biggest political party and has members in every party of the country, the coast and the cities. Our members need to be encouraged and supported to be visible, as well as to be a source of ideas and understanding of the nature and state of their communities.

We must then commit to a better deal for those communities to have more delegated power, wealth and opportunity in their hands, out of Whitehall. The problems places have can only be solved locally by the people who live there. Giving power back to people over housing, skills, and infrastructure allows for bespoke solutions and strong local leadership.We have seen from the success of First Minister Mark Drakeford in Wales, Mayor Andy Burnham in Manchester and Sadiq Khan in London that place-based leadership works. Let us build that nationwide.  

Labour will pledge to create a minister for rural affairs in every government department on Monday, as the party pitches itself to Conservative voters in the countryside. Sir Keir Starmer is concerned his party has lost support in the Red Wall and Scotland  and will need to win back constituencies in the south of England not held by Labour since the 2001 election if it is to win a majority at Westminster. The party believes it can win back areas in the countryside by nominating a minister in every department to oversee the impact of the Government’s work in rural communities.

The Conservatives have ordered a shake-up of NHS leadership in England on the eve of their party conference, with Sajid Javid saying that with more funding must come “change for the better”.

The health secretary said he wanted to see the most far-reaching review of NHS bosses in England for 40 years, appointing a former vice-chief of the defence staff, Gen Sir Gordon Messenger, to lead the work.

However, some NHS bosses were furious about what they described as a political move to shift blame on to trust, hospital and social care leaders as the health service struggles with a big backlog.

Under the terms of the review, Messenger will be asked to look at the best hospitals, GPs’ services and social care delivery to work out how this can be replicated across the country.

Tory sources said it was not about a reorganisation of leadership structure or apportioning blame for failure but “identifying the best leadership, finding out why it’s so good and looking at how we roll it out more widely”. They said it was a key plank of “levelling up”.

No structural shake-up is expected in social care, it is understood, but the government could be open to more national leadership in the sector.

NHS bosses criticised the review as a “slap in the face” after the pandemic. Some said they saw it as a deliberate attempt to shift the blame for the health service’s fragility. In recent days Nottingham’s main acute NHS trust has had to cancel planned chemotherapy sessions due to a lack of nurses and East Surrey hospital declared a “critical internal incident”.

Mr Tanner, a former adviser to Theresa May, has become an influential voice in Conservative circles after his Onward think tank identified the red wall seats in the run up to the last election. 

They were the once rock-solid Labour seats which fell into Conservative hands at the 2019 general election.

In a report shortly before the election, Mr Tanner described “Workington Man” – from the West Cumbrian constituency – as the sort of lifelong Labour voter who would switch to the Conservatives. 

This voter was pro-Brexit, sceptical of globalisation and wanted a government that would protect cherished local institutions such as pubs and post offices from closing.

In an interview with Newsnight ahead of the publication of his new report, Mr Tanner says: “Absolutely we came up with the Workington Man concept at the last election. We identified that as the archetypal voter that swung towards the Conservative party and delivered all those seats in the north of England – like Workington, like Walsall, like Warrington – those seats that the Conservative party had often never held before.

“It is precisely those seats that would benefit from a more localised approach, a bottom-up approach where communities take control of local assets like libraries and sports clubs and community hubs. Using them as the lynchpin for regeneration is likely to be successful in regenerating those local areas.” 

Newsnight visited Workington to gauge opinion about the government’s “levelling up” agenda. Some shoppers thought the government was too focused on larger metropolitan areas.

But Mike Johnson, the Conservative leader of the local Allerdale Borough Council, did not recognise the criticisms in the report.

A fifth of Whitehall’s non-executive directors appointed to oversee the work of government departments have “significant political experience or party alignment”, according to new evidence that ministers are using the posts to bolster their own support.

It comes as demands grow for a complete overhaul of the appointment of Whitehall’s army of non-executive directors (Neds), who have come in for greater scrutiny since Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, was found to have appointed his aide and lover, Gina Coladangelo, to the role at the Department of Health and Social Care last year.

Coladangelo has since left the post following the public exposure of their affair. However, Hancock’s decision to appoint her highlighted the fact that ministers across Whitehall have appointed figures known to be close to them personally. Neds are meant to scrutinise both ministers and their department as part of the role, but there are concerns that they are increasingly being used to bolster ministers and effectively act as special advisers.

About 20% of the 94 non-executive directors currently in post have political experience or allegiances, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Government (IfG) thinktank. It called for a complete overhaul of how they are appointed. Under current rules, their appointments are not regulated in the same way as other senior Whitehall posts, “making it impossible to know whether candidates are genuinely being appointed on merit, or if advantage is being given on grounds of political affiliation”.

Of the 19 Neds identified as having significant political experience or ties, the analysis found 15 exclusively supported the Conservatives, while two – Tory donor Ben Goldsmith and former Conservative and Ukip MP Douglas Carswell – have campaigned for the Conservatives alongside other parties, and one, Gisela Stuart, worked with Conservative politicians on the Leave campaign. 

Home to what was once branded the worst-run council in the country, local elections this week mark the start of a new chapter for Northamptonshire.

After years of council turmoil including bankruptcy, a corruption scandal and failing social services, when people head to the polls on Thursday they’ll be voting for the first time to elect two new unitary authorities hoping to start afresh.

It’s the first local elections in the area since 2017, after the vote was delayed first for the restructuring process and then Covid. “It’s been a long time coming, we haven’t had an election for years, so I think everybody is keen to see democracy in Northamptonshire again,” said Robin Burgess, the chief executive of the Hope Centre in Northampton, which works to address poverty in the town.