This article is an on-site version of our The State of Britain newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every week. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here, or explore all FT newslettersGood afternoon. It’s mid-August and the tumbleweed is rolling through Westminster and Whitehall as everyone gathers their strength for what is shaping up to be a brutal autumn parliamentary term.The recent grumbles of pensioners denied their winter fuel allowance will be as nothing to the squealing that is likely to follow Rachel Reeves’s first Budget, where the ground is already being prepared for both spending cuts and tax rises.Reeves talks of “tough decisions”, but until we see the out-turn of the Spending Review these remain essentially abstract. Once that document is published the government’s choices — and therefore true priorities — will become real. (This will rightly trigger a fresh debate about the wisdom of repeating the mistakes of the George Osborne austerity years and raise real questions about where investment funding is going to come from, beyond taxing non-doms and excess oil company profits.)The autumn will also see the policy picture being pulled into focus. Currently this is being deliberately blurred by a mixed bag of reviews and “stakeholder consultations” through which new ministers buy themselves time to think (and make their case to the Treasury).So we’re in a period of phoney war on disparate areas of policy — planning reform, skills, health (see below), university finances, regulatory reorganisation and attracting foreign investment — but looking ahead there is a common thread that runs through them all. That is a central tension that exists between Labour’s “Five Missions”, which smack of a government with a plan, driven from the centre by a crack team of ministers, and the often fragmented mechanisms by which these missions will actually be delivered.This month’s anti-immigration riots gave Sir Keir Starmer an opportunity to look like a leader in command, helped by the fact that part of the solution lay in meting out quick justice, which was right in the wheelhouse of a former director of public prosecutions.But in many of the other major areas listed above, Labour’s centrally directed missions will actually be delivered by a patchwork of entities, sometimes with competing interests and often without sufficient resources to deliver them.Local government (everything from county councils to a big metro mayoralty), assorted arms-length bodies, educational providers, private industry and their lobby groups, sectoral regulators and institutional investors will all have to play a part if Labour is to succeed. Or as Jack Shaw and Patrick Diamond put it in this rather good blog for the Bennett Institute for Public Policy in Cambridge:Labour needs to acknowledge that governing requires mobilising a coalition of actors whose actions Labour does not directly control.To move from the abstract to the concrete: take Labour’s recent consultation on planning reform in order to “Get Britain Building Again” after 40 years of failure, during which no government has managed to preside over the building of more than 200,000 homes a year.Labour’s plan looks to be based around using compulsory purchase powers as a stick to enable local governments, development corporations and housing associations — that is, non commercial actors — to create a fresh pipeline of guaranteed demand outside private sector control.But to make that work, it will need the assistance of not only local councils and mayors which are often chronically short of manpower and legal knowhow, but also simultaneously multiple regulators and other agencies. Planning reform is only part of the solution.Take Cambridge, which should be a growth engine, but is falling far short of its potential because of infrastructure deficits for water and transport that are the bailiwick of so-called “arms-length” bodies such as Highways England or the Environment Agency. As one senior planning office in Cambridge put it to me this week: Labour is really clear on growing the economy, and strategic planning is part of that, but there is a really important interplay between Local Growth Plans, infrastructure planning and the wider economic strategy for the nation. It’s not entirely clear what the platform is for that interplay.In short, who will join the dots? Which brings us neatly on to the skills reform landscape, which as we’ve discussed in previous editions, is central to delivering housing growth, the green revolution and fixing the NHS, and is similarly fragmented. Skills England, another freshly announced quango currently in its review phase, is promised as the body that will do this, yoking together local government, with their new Local Growth Plans, together with a mixed bag of organisations that actually do the training.That includes further education colleges, universities, technical colleges, private providers and employers (now paying the new, flexible skills levy) that all have different regulators, funding mechanisms and — in some cases — cross-cutting incentives.In short, the balkanised UK skills landscape, correctly described as a “mess” by Starmer in a speech last month, was never set up as a machine to deliver ministerial ambitions, but will now be asked to pull together to respond to the demands of a new industrial strategy.The same applies to attracting investment, both foreign and domestic, which will be a massively important factor in Labour’s success given its commitment to current fiscal rules and the state of the public finances.As Lord Richard Harrington observed in the excellent review he conducted for the last government, the UK has fallen far behind comparable countries in composing a coherent offer to would-be investors.Lord Richard Harrington completed a review into foreign direct investment because of government concerns that the UK was missing out on potentially transformational investments by companies and foreign investors © Charlie Bibby/FT/Financial TimesWhile competitors have investment organisations “with a single front door”, he found that the UK system left potential investors having “to navigate their way around different entities for policy, finance, visas, skills, grid [connections], and regulation”. Harrington tells me he wants to see a cabinet-level investment minister appointed (so far that position remains vacant) who will have the clout to pull together the competing parts of Whitehall and quangocracy in order to create competitive packages.That’s distinct to the usual investment minister who has tended to be a retired business executive sent to the House of Lords. They may have the personal financial resources and family circumstances to glad-hand around the world, but no real power.“If you’ve got the clout of the PM behind you, you can actually get stuff done,” Harrington says, noting that many of the sovereign wealth fund bosses that such a minister would be wooing are themselves cabinet-rank in their own countries. For now, in these sultry summer days, we are still at the planning stage, but soon these new delivery bodies must morph from the “castles in the air” that are built to furnish manifestos and think-tank papers, to citadels of delivery. It is going to be fascinating to report how it plays out on the ground.Britain by numbersYou are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.This looks set to be the busiest summer in history for A&E departments across England, with health bosses privately warning they are feeling a level of pressure normally reserved for the more testing winter months, writes Laura Hughes.The unprecedentedly high summer demand serves as a warning shot for the new health secretary Wes Streeting, who has inherited a service that is operating in an almost permanent state of winter.Calls from health leaders for an urgent cash injection are only going to get louder this year as the sector battles to reduce the crippling waiting times they argue are putting patients at risk. The NHS has a pledge to admit, transfer or discharge 95 per cent of patients within four hours of arrival in A&E — but July saw almost 120,000 patients in England waiting more than 12 hours to be seen, according to NHS data. NHS performance figures out last week showed there were 4.6mn A&E attendances over the past two months, higher than any other June and July on record. That is four times the total over this period during the summer of 2019 and almost twice as many as that during the winter peak before the Covid-19 pandemic.One reason behind the rise in admissions is that patients are unable to book appointments at overwhelmed primary care settings (including GP surgeries) and are turning to local hospitals instead where they think they will be seen sooner. All this comes amid a backdrop of 7.62mn people waiting for routine hospital treatment in England. So far the new Labour government has been clear that additional funding for the NHS must follow reform, but hospital bosses don’t believe this line can stand the test of time if ministers are serious about radically reducing hospital queues. The new secretary of state has promised that within five years the NHS will once again meet a target that the majority of people should wait no more than 18 weeks after referral to begin non-urgent hospital treatment. The commitment was introduced in 2004 but was last achieved in 2016.To deliver this, the government has pledged a flagship manifesto policy to provide 40,000 extra routine hospital appointments a week, which would equate to an extra 2mn a year. So far Streeting has said ministers will invest £1.3bn in the first year to fund this programme, which will be paid for by cracking down on tax avoidance including by those with non-domiciled tax status.However, the party faces growing questions over the long-term funding of the policy and the viability of asking already overstretched NHS staff to take on additional evening and weekend shifts to hit its target — many of whom are already doing so. The A&E waiting data is a stark reminder that the winter is no longer a uniquely pressurised time of the year for the NHS, or a chance to get the overall queue in better shape. The State of Britain is edited by Georgina Quach today. Premium subscribers can sign up here to have it delivered straight to their inbox every Thursday afternoon. Or you can take out a Premium subscription here. Read earlier editions of the newsletter here. Do tell us what you think. 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