Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Emma Norris. So the votes have been cast and at the time of recording, lots of them have been counted.

So this episode of Inside Briefing is going to travel from London to Liverpool to the West Midlands and to the Tees Valley,

Manchester to Yorkshire and across the many council elections in England and Wales.

Oh, and a by-election in Blackpool South as well.

We're going to be reacting to a big night in British politics and explore what it tells us about mayors, about the way people think about their local politicians, and look at how

the electoral map has shifted. We're also going to ask what it all means for Rishi Sunak and Kyr Starma.

After all the expectation management, who can claim victory and who should be worried?

And does any of this tell us anything

about the general election and how it might turn out, or what it means for Sunac's job

security? And then we'll take a leap forward to what we think is an absolutely urgent task for

whoever wins the next general election, and that's setting budgets for government departments.

Because right now, those budgets are set to expire in April.

We're approaching a cliff edge moment. In fact, we're very nearly into unchartered territory.

A new IFG paper sets out what the next government urgently needs to do and we'll be speaking to

its author. Joining me throughout is Akash Pown, who leads all our work on devolution. Hi, Akash.

Hi, Emma. Did you stay up for the results,

or did you just get up early to find out what happened overnight? I did not stay up. No,

there wasn't that much being declared overnight, of course, so I wasn't going to lose all my

sleep just for Blackpool South and a couple of councils. But yeah, lots of interesting results

coming in

now for sure. Yeah, very sensible. And I'm delighted that we're joined by political journalist Rachel

Wyrmouth. Hi, Rachel. How are you? Did you stay up watching the elections all night?

...