Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home. I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst,

and this week, as MPs returned to Parliament from their truncated summer break, we're taking

a look at the most pressing issues in Kirstam's bulging intro. Identified by the PM's Chief of Staff

Sue Gray before the election,

in an infamous shit list, the looming crises in prison places, local councils, public sector pay,

university funding, Thames water collapse, and the NHS could dominate the first few months of

the new Labour government. We'll be to discuss just how bad things are in each of those areas

and how they might be fixed.

I have Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and government advisor, whose book Screwed, lays out the collapse to prison service in recent years,

alongside two more members of the 2024 intake of MPs.

Firstly, Lewis Cocking, the new Tory member for Broxbourne and former leader of the local council, as well as Tim Rocker, Labour MP for Macclesfield,

was worked in the university sector, as well as the whole government before entering Parliament.

So the honeymoon is well and truly over if it ever really began for the government, and

kind of the risk register they had beforehand, probably had prisons pretty high ahead of the summer, but the riots and kind of the risk register they had beforehand probably had prisons

pretty high ahead of the summer, but the riots and the resulting jail terms of push that really

to the top of the agenda. Ian, just talk us through kind of how we got here with a prison service

scrabbling around for places to put offenders. Well, hi, Alan, and thanks very much for having me. Good to talk with two new

intake MPs as well, because they will be managing what's at the top of Sue Gray's shit list

in various ways going forward. What's the anatomy of this disaster? Because this is, you know,

what it is. You know, if you talk about crisis, crisis meaning

opportunities, well, we're, you know, probably standing before an opportunity to be optimistic about

the last opportunity was after the mass rioting a disorder of the 1990s that started in strange

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