Blackpool, Milton Keynes, Sheffield and Wrexham are vying to be UK City of Culture 2029, with a £10 million prize, after nine applicants were whittled down to a shortlist last month.

The winner will get to put on a year-long programme of cultural events and activities that celebrate its strengths and stories, aiming to bring in investment, create jobs and increase tourism.

The other applicants, assessed by a Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport expert panel, were Inverness-Highland, Ipswich, Middlesbrough, Portsmouth and Swindon. The eagle-eyed will notice not all of them are cities.

This is the fifth UK City of Culture competition. Research shows that previous winners Derry-Londonderry, Hull, Coventry and Bradford enjoyed widespread participation in the programme and tourism and economic benefits during their year. But evidence of longer-term benefits is less clear.

Background

City of Culture owes its origins to one Andy Burnham, when he was culture secretary. Marking the end of Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture, which saw an extra £800 million spent in the city, he proposed a UK competition.

Burnham’s successor as culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, announced the first competition, won by Derry-Londonderry for 2013. TV producer and screenwriter Phil Redmond, a leading figure in Liverpool’s European year, has chaired the UK City of Culture Panel since then.

Bidding costs cash-strapped local authorities money – although it can be a worthwhile process in itself for focusing cultural strategy making. This year DCMS gave a £60,000 grant for applications from the longlisted bidders, and the shortlisted four will get a further £125,000 each to develop their case.

But the big difference this year is that there is a prize fund of £10 million for the winner, “in acknowledgement of the programme’s impact”. Previously the winner had to put in piecemeal applications for government cultural and regeneration funding after being awarded the title, as well as private sector investment.

Ministers encouraged applications from larger towns such as Blackpool, as they had for Cornwall in 2025. Culture secretary Lisa Nandy has now also launched a UK Town of Culture award for 2028.

Redmond said there is a “hard choice ahead” to pick the UK City of Culture winner, with the result expected early next year.

“Each place represents a different view, or aspect, epitomising what culture is, the sum of all we do together, and while each approaches it differently, they all share the common aim of reminding the rest of the UK of who they are, where they are and why they are worth visiting,’ he said.

The bids

Blackpool

Blackpool’s bid has four elements. We’ll Show You builds on its showtown heritage and will include major performances and immersive spectacles, dance, music, broadcasting and “artist-led interventions”. The Welcome Inn is about Blackpool’s tradition of hospitality. Sea Change will connect culture with “care for people, communities and the environment”. It’s Like Blackpool Illuminations in Here! will use the 150th anniversary of the Illuminations to feature local and international artists.

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Blackpool makes the final shortlist for UK City of Culture

Blackpool is one of the final four places on the shortlist to be named UK City of Culture 2029…

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Milton Keynes

Design is to feature highly in the bid from Milton Keynes, inspired by its grid-like new-town planning, modernist architecture and creative industries enjoying proximity to London. Plans include new creative apprenticeships for young people, support for emerging talent, and Culture Kids MK – offering every baby born in 2029 five years of free cultural access. If successful, Milton Keynes’ City of Culture year would coincide with the opening of a new £76 million, 4,000‑capacity venue.

Sheffield

Sheffield’s council says its creative scene goes from DIY grassroots to global. “Think synth pop, think indie, think Adolescence. However, we remain under-recognised and under-funded compared with other core cities.” Its programme to address this has three core ideas: make, belong and imagine. The first will celebrate what it makes in music, festivals and artistic commissions. The second will entail community-led programming across its 147 neighbourhoods and a Sanctuary Carnival, celebrating its status as the country’s first City of Sanctuary. The final idea is to use creativity to explore climate, nature and wellbeing.

Wrexham

Led by Wrexham Community & Culture Trust, the North Wales city says its ambition is “simple but bold: to make Wrexham the world’s most playful place”. It boasts that thousands of people have shaped its bid, after it was pipped to the post by Bradford in 2025, including residents, artists, schools, businesses, volunteers, community groups and more than 1,000 schoolchildren. One priority is to support Wrexham’s grassroots musicians, artists, designers and makers to “continue to live and work in the place they call home”.

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Analysis

Last year Bradford put on more than 6,500 events, more than 80 per cent of them free. That resulted in capital investment for over 30 local cultural organisations. A fuller economic assessment for Bradford Council is due by the end of the year, but a report to the executive last month referred to the “extremely positive provisional evidence of reach, participation, quality, pride and connection” of its City of Culture tenure.

In Hull, tourist visits increased by 9.7 per cent when it held the title in 2017, compared with 2016. Jobs in the visitor economy grew by over 27 per cent between 2012 and 2017. In its creative industries sector, including the cultural industries, employment rose by 15.4 per cent from from 2015 to 2017. Between 2013 and 2019 an estimated £676 million worth of new public and private investment in Hull could “at least be partly attributed to the UK City of Culture”.

There is no reason 2029’s winner cannot achieve similarly impressive figures – but it’s not a given.

In 2013, Derry-Londonderry boosted visitor numbers, improved its image and saw better community relations, but its ambitious tourism targets were not met, because it was forced to scale back its cultural programme. The council had to increase its direct funding for the year because sponsorship, ticket sales and merchandising revenue fell short of expectations.

The trust set up to run Coventry’s year in 2021 has been liquidated after taking a loan from Coventry Council while possibly insolvent. Earlier this year the Charity Commission said the trustees’ failure to maintain effective oversight of the charity’s finances amounted to “misconduct and/or mismanagement”. The regulator acknowledged that the Covid-19 pandemic adversely affected Coventry’s year.

Cultural organisations prize legacy over almost anything, but it can be elusive. Researchers have found that City of Culture programmes can boost visitor economies over the short term but there is “no evidence to suggest these impacts are sustained in the mid to long-term” and that they should “not be seen as a quick fix for structural socio-economic problems within post-industrial cities”.

Hull University researchers said the city’s 2017 project “arguably did not give a sufficiently high priority to legacy and citywide cultural strategy considerations”.

What people are saying

“Great culture is everywhere, but the opportunity to showcase it, to put it on display and to show how it is woven into our national story is not… That is the beauty of the UK City of Culture competition.” - Culture secretary Lisa Nandy

“Despite the local MP being the Secretary of State’s parliamentary secretary, Ipswich still lost out to – Wrexham. Words desert me.” - Central Suffolk and North Ipswich Conservative MP Patrick Spencer expected better of his Ipswich counterpart Jack Abbott

“Some people are stating clearly they will not be part of a UK culture bid, so, as an elected representative, I need to be cognisant of that. Strabane, it’s not only a nationalist town, it’s a Republican town.” - Strabane independent councillor Paul Gallagher after the County Tyrone town was shortlisted for the UK’s first Town of Culture

What happens next

Flesh on the bones of a bid can only come when the winner is declared. But all four on the shortlist can expect a valuable boost to their profile anyway – even if some of it will inevitably be snobbish jokes questioning how [insert city name] can be equated with culture. ■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023. He writes regularly for The Lead to untangle the issues facing the UK and also reporting on social justice and other issues across the North of England as part of our award-winning The Lead Local titles.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ed@thelead.uk and you can see every edition of The Lead Untangles so far.

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What’s got into Europe’s youth?

In France, hundreds of thousands have marched for three weekends running over living costs and underfunded schools, with more than 560 arrests on Saturday alone.

In Germany, the Gen Z regelt movement marched in multiple cities against rising costs, education cuts and the threat of conscription. In Frankfurt and Cologne masked rioters were beaten back by water cannons.

Italian students have occupied a school in Rome. Milan has seen looting. In Spain and Portugal the anger is about housing. In Belgium, Austria and Greece, education funding.

These aren’t just a flash in the plan. In Albania, students have been on the streets for nearly five months over the cost of living and corruption. In Serbia, candidates chosen by student assemblies just won a general election, toppling an entrenched government. Young Europeans are on the move, and they mean business.

The anger is not mysterious. Across the EU, house prices rose by more than half between 2010 and 2024, while youth unemployment is more than double the rate of the wider population. Across each country lies specific national challenges, but all of them come down to the same grievance. This generation was raised on the promise that hard work would buy them a home, a family and a better life than their parents. Now, it seems, the deal is off.

It would be easy to frame this as young versus old: boomers sitting on houses and pensions while their grandchildren pick up the bill. It isn’t helpful. Most pensioners didn’t design the housing market, and plenty of them are watching their own children stuck in the box room in a house share well into their thirties.

The real story is demography. Europe is ageing fast, and older people vote in far greater numbers. Parties have spent decades quite rationally tailoring their offer to the people who turn up. The result is a politics that protects asset values, guards pensions and treats immigration as the problem to be solved, while the costs pile up on those least likely to complain at the ballot box. Until, that is, they complain in the street.

Britain is caught in exactly the same bind. Take welfare. Our debate has fixated on the sick, the disabled and the near-million young people not in education, employment or training. Andy Burnham has called the NEET figure “an economic catastrophe and a moral failure”, and has pledged support up front with benefits as the backstop.

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But the wider conversation too often carries an unspoken charge. The young haven’t earned their crust, that they’re able-bodied and should get on with it, that they simply aren’t resilient enough. What goes conveniently unsaid is that the work they are meant to tolerate is built on stagnant wages, insecure contracts and soaring rents. The rising cost of growing up is even out of reach for those who are doing everything right — so what’s the point?

Or take Shabana Mahmood’s plans to make many migrants wait ten years or more for settlement; a textbook case of governing for the interests of older generations. Immigration ranks among the top issues for 65 per cent of over-65s, but just 21 per cent of 18-24s.

Initially, her policy was sold on cost. The Home Secretary originally claimed £10bn in savings, a figure Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College, has shown, using the government’s own data, is closer to £600m. Meanwhile, the IPPR estimates that skilled migrants due to settle (including health and social care workers) would make a net lifetime contribution of around £115bn. The numbers don’t add up. But this policy was never really about money — it was about winning back voters Labour fears it has lost. And the bill will land on the young: an ageing country needs more carers and more taxpayers, not fewer.

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So what should governments do? Across Europe, young people are being pulled in all political directions, but it is the far-right that has worked hardest to organise them. Leading political academics Cas Mudde and Duncan McDonnell find the populist right has invested heavily in recruiting and training articulate, university educated young people, drawing them in by talking “in clear terms about the issues that concerned them”.

The lesson for the mainstream is blunt: do the same. Speak plainly and offer real answers. In practice that means two things. First, honesty with the electorate. Restrict foreign workers and there will be fewer people to care for you, and the economy will suffer. Fail to build homes, and your children will struggle to find a place to live; they may stay with you for longer.

Second, engage with the young directly. A Secretary of State for Young People, perhaps, a seat at the cabinet table for the group with the most at stake and the least voice. Longer term, a properly funded national care service and a path back into the EU would do more to rebalance the deal than any number of youth guarantees.

Burnham’s focus on NEETs suggests he grasps the scale of the problem. But while his government keeps pursuing a migration policy written for older, anxious voters, it risks undoing with one hand what it builds with the other.

Europe is shouting, Britain needs to listen. Ignore the young at your peril. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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The question of power is central to understanding the dynamics of the data centre infrastructure boom which underpins the current AI arms race globally.

Data centre operators and the giants of the AI industry alike are scrambling to secure access to power in the literal sense: electricity sources for the megawatts required to keep servers and cooling systems humming.

The government has unveiled a raft of new policies on data centres with this year’s Budget, including a Covenant which “encourages” operators to take action to lower electricity bills, invest in local communities, minimise their impact on the environment, create jobs and strengthen Britain’s security.

But behind these fine words lies a policy framework built on industry claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny, and one that would give the largest projects a fast track past local objections.

The government’s draft National Policy Statement for Data Centres published with the Budget, describes the UK as a “global hub for data centres”, estimating there are around 220 facilities in the sector with a capacity of around 2 GW.

Crucially, the draft would also take the biggest projects — those over 100 MW — out of the hands of local councils altogether, with ministers told to start from a presumption of consent. As the analysis below shows, that is exactly where the pipeline is heading.

The problem is that the government’s own data on these facilities is unpublished and therefore difficult to scrutinise.

The analysis which follows is instead based on a dataset I compiled for Watershed Investigations using similar methods and sources to those likely relied on by government officials. It covers around 2 GW of operational data centres across 154 facilities and nearly 20 GW of planned or announced projects.

It shows that planned data centres’ appetite for power is expanding rapidly, despite a growing protest movement and mounting concern that debt may overwhelm some data centre firms. CoreWeave, an American AI data centre operator, is the only tenant so far announced in the huge data centre being constructed in the government-backed AI Growth Zone in North Lanarkshire. The company would be very vulnerable to a loss of investor confidence in the AI boom.

And far from paving the way for ‘sovereign’ AI capacity, the construction pipeline is dominated by large American tech firms, including the cloud and AI giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

The hyperscalers are coming

The backbone of the UK’s data centre sector has traditionally been small to medium-sized facilities, not the hyperscale campuses which have caught the imagination of investors and politicians.

In fact, the vast majority of data centres in the UK have until recently been very small. Watershed’s dataset has been compiled from a variety of public trade directories, open access industry databases, government data and company websites.

It ranks data centres by IT Load, a widely-used metric which the data centre sector uses to compare facilities by estimating the electricity demand of their IT equipment in megawatts (MW). IT Load figures exclude the electricity used by cooling systems, lighting and other building systems, so the total power required to keep the facility running will be higher.

Data centre operators and property developers also estimate the size of data centre capacity across regions or countries using the same measure, publishing an estimated inventory of how many MW are available to prospective customers.

Out of 154 data centres listed in Watershed’s dataset, 93 are under 10 MW. These small data centres account for 324 MW in total out of more than 2,100 MW, or 2.1 GW across the sector (which nearly matches the government’s own estimate). The bulk of the IT Load is concentrated in medium-sized data centres up to 100 MW, with only a single UK facility of over 100 MW (Vantage’s large campus near Cardiff).

The picture changes dramatically in the pipeline of projects announced or planned by data centre operators (this excludes projects proposed by estate agents and infrastructure companies). In the 5,335 MW of future projects in this sector tracked by Watershed, 73 percent of the planned capacity will be in data centres greater than 100 MW, compared to only 7 percent today. That future pipeline is not all guaranteed to be built — some of the projects will hit planning hurdles or face opposition from local authorities — but these projects are all associated with companies already active in the data centre sector, rather than property developers hoping to attract a purchaser or a tenant. Most of them have projected timelines up to 2030 — not decades in the future.

This scale shift will have enormous consequences for the planning system. The government’s draft policy sets a threshold of 100 MW for data centres to gain access to the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project (NSIP) planning process. This means that the decision will rest with the Secretary of State, rather than locally elected officials, who will be instructed to make a “presumption of consent” in favour of allowing construction to go ahead, according to the draft.

The estate agents’ bonanza

The government says that London was already running out of data centre capacity two years ago, quoting a 2024 report from CBRE, a global property firm. Data centre developers and estate agents use figures on how much electricity data centre servers are expected to use in order to rank facilities and clusters of data centres by size.

According to the CBRE website, at the start of 2025, the “inventory” of data centre capacity in London was 1103.5 MW. The figure represents the peak amount of power that the servers require at any moment in time.

The government claims that there was a “deficit” in London’s data centre capacity of 51 MW at that exact moment. The implication is that there were more companies seeking space in those servers than could be accommodated by the existing infrastructure.

It turns out, however, that there was a very large gap between the power requirements of the inventory and electricity consumption that year.

According to data released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) earlier this year, data centres in London and the South East used 3.5 TWh of electricity during 2024.

If data centre servers in London during the same period were really as full as the government claims, CBRE’s estimate for London data centre inventory multiplied by the number of hours in a year ought to approximately match the electricity consumption figures recorded by ONS.

The problem for the government’s argument is that they don’t. Not by a long way.

Using CBRE’s inventory as a starting point would give a figure of at least 9.7 TWh of electricity used in 2024 (in fact it would be even larger than this because data centre inventory usually only measures electricity used by the servers and other IT equipment, not the cooling systems).

That means the electricity actually used by data centres in 2024 was only 36 percent of the electricity demand predicted by the industry’s estimate of its inventory.

None of this would be surprising to anyone in the industry itself. Another industry analyst, DC Byte published an estimate of data centre capacity in the Slough Availability Zone in 2024 which also turned out to be much more than the actual electricity usage.

The difference between industry figures for data centre inventory and actual electricity consumption raises many questions about the pipeline of future projects — and about the two-year-old figures the government is relying on to make the case for breakneck expansion.

How much of the planned capacity could end up sitting idle, allocated to companies which are not going to make any use of it? What will happen if data centres are allowed to fill their inventory with power they don’t use in areas where they are competing with homes and other industries for grid connections?

And how much of that pipeline is purely speculative, where inflated figures for gigawatts of IT Load serve as marketing gimmick rather than evidence of genuine future need?

The largest group of potential future data centres in Watershed’s dataset are not those associated with data centre companies, but with estate agents, property developers and infrastructure companies.

They make up a huge 14,356 MW of projects including at least 13 campuses over 500 MW, a large proportion from Scotland. This is unlikely to capture the true scale of the boom at the top end of the scale, however. Electricity regulator Ofgem is consulting on measures to eject non-viable and speculative proposals from the grid connection queue, which is currently clogged with 80 GW (80,000MW) of data centre projects – almost twice the peak daily demand from the entire UK grid.

It is not just in the UK that is suffering from a glut of exceptionally large data centre projects. The epicentre of the data centre infrastructure boom lies in the US. Texas is widely regarded as the second largest data centre market in the US, after northern Virginia. But the state’s Republican governor Greg Abbott has lost patience with data centre developers. This August he announced a temporary moratorium on all data centres in the queue to connect to the Texas grid after the size of prospective projects’ peak electricity demand ballooned to five times the current peak load of the entire state grid.

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From London to the regions

Data centre markets are often associated with cities, rather than countries or regions. This is because one of the factors which drives data centre clustering is the availability of good fibre connections allowing operators to give customers the option to seamlessly switch workloads between facilities. The UK’s data centre landscape has historically been concentrated in a gigantic ‘London’ cluster sprawling across large areas of the South East. The most important cluster within the ‘London’ region is located in Slough, but there are others in Docklands and the Park Royal area of West London . One notable exception however is what was until recently the UK’s largest operational facility, the 148 MW campus operated by Vantage near Cardiff.

That picture is now changing, however. New clusters may be emerging in Scotland, Yorkshire and the Humber, while the greater London market continues to expand. The scale of some of the proposed projects now looming on the horizon for local communities in rural areas is breathtaking. The largest of these is the giant 1.5 GW data centre and battery storage facility announced by energy infrastructure developer Xlinks in North Devon.

Tap to explore where data centres are now and where they are planned for

Most of the larger projects may never materialise, as many are backed by landowners in search of exceptionally wealthy tenants able to mobilise the eye-watering sums required to build and fit-out a hyperscale data centre. Just building the shell of a 50 MW data centre in London before a single server rack is wired in place will set back operators up to £700 million, according to global estate agent JLL. This is a small group of companies to start with, and if the overheated market falls sharply and investor confidence evaporates, many data centre projects will be abandoned.

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Expanding US corporate footprint

The nationality of the companies behind data centres in the UK is also changing. The proportion of UK-headquartered companies is shrinking as the sector grows in overall size and facilities scale up. Long-established British players in the sector are facing rising competition from incoming US data centre operators and the cloud and AI giants: Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

These future data centres represent investment by data centre operators, rather than the property developer segment of the industry. Once combined with the existing data centre infrastructure, the overall percent of total IT Load under the control of US-headquartered companies in Watershed’s dataset rises to 52 percent, up from 34 percent today.

‘Sovereignty’ in the world of data centres is much more complicated than simply the location of a company’s headquarters of course. Like the vaults of a Swiss bank, data centre server racks often host a multinational crowd of clients. Sometimes, however, a single company books the space, bringing in their own IT equipment and leaving the data centre operator managing only the building shell. A UK company providing the bricks, mortar and air conditioners, while a US tech giant owns the chips and servers inside, and makes the bulk of profits from the data centre’s operation is unlikely to meet many people’s definition of economic ‘sovereignty’.

Behind the new 500 MW campus which Scottish operator DataVita is building in North Lanarkshire with the help of government-backed loans lies a story like this: the sole long-term tenant for the first 80 MW data hall is US company CoreWeave.

Tech giants on the march

The most significant US expansion in the UK market is coming from the cloud and AI giants: Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Unlike colocation data centre operators which lease space to other companies, the Big Tech giants often operate their own facilities. All three have been major customers of the colocation data centre operators in the UK for many years, but the pipeline of their future projects shows an accelerating shift towards large-scale operations in their self-built facilities.

Unlike data centre companies aiming to attract business from tenants looking to lease space, the cloud and AI giants rarely advertise how much power and water they consume. The IT Load on their facilities tracked in Watershed’s dataset has been calculated by a variety of methods, including using the output of the back-up generators to estimate the approximate electricity consumption of the servers.

All three of the cloud giants have long been active in the UK, often leasing space in other data centre operators’ facilities. This major expansion of data centres which the companies own and operate themselves is significant because it puts them in charge of industrial sites which will collectively consume as much electricity as several large cities.

So where are Amazon, Google and Microsoft building in the UK? Amazon and Google’s expansion has so far been concentrated in the South East and London, whereas Microsoft has also expanded north and west investing in two large sites in Yorkshire, one on the edge of Leeds and the other at Eggborough, and another large site at Imperial Park in Newport. These facilities join others in Microsoft’s portfolio in the London region, including in the Park Royal area and a new site in Langley near Slough (not included in the data above or the map).

This geographical concentration should raise concerns over the local impact of London’s mega data-centre cluster. While the three US giants all promise industry-leading efficiency in electricity and water use, the sheer scale of their operations will increase the burdens on already-strained local grids and water systems.

Explore this map in Datawrapper, tap to view

If the government wants to see evidence of what unchecked data centre expansion looks like, Virginia is a good place to start. The US state which incubated the data centre boom and which hosts the largest and densest concentration of data centres anywhere on the planet has just published its Energy Plan.

It makes for uncomfortable reading. The problems documented there show that encouraging data centre operators to invest in very large facilities where the energy infrastructure doesn’t exist to support them is a disastrous approach. Virginia’s report makes clear that data centre expansion warped the entire regional electricity grid, encouraged more intense use of fossil fuels, sent electricity bills skyrocketing for everyone, and created massive air pollution for local communities.

Britain is now being asked to follow the same path, on the strength of capacity figures that don’t match the electricity used, a pipeline increasingly controlled by US tech giants and a planning regime that would take the biggest projects out of local hands.

As the consultation on the draft National Policy Statement gets under way, ministers should publish their own data and halt new large-scale approvals until they can show demand is real and the grid can take it. ■

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About the author: Anne Alexander is a journalist and author specialising in reporting on the AI industry. She is currently working on a project investigating the UK’s data centre sector with Watershed Investigations. You can read more of her work on Substack here.

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Fiscal devolution in England could be a memorable exception in a Budget meant to be largely forgotten.

As the Chancellor aims for elected mayors in all English areas, drawing powers down from central government, he yesterday promised them a share of the taxes raised from their patch.

Ministers argue that mayoral strategic authorities (MSAs) will be more effective and responsive if they raise more of their own funding, rather than going cap in hand to central government for grants.

John Healey called this “the most radical act of devolution in a generation”. But will it really drive the “good growth in every postcode” his boss wants, and will there be enough scrutiny of how the money’s spent?

Background

Former Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham wants all of England to be covered by regional devolution deals, which offer strategic authorities certain powers over transport, housing, skills and other areas once held by central government. Most will involve mayors who, the prime minister hopes, will be inspired by his “Manchester model” of growth through devolution.

Including Greater Manchester and London, there are already 14 MSAs in England, including seven others across the North: Liverpool City Region, Tees Valley, South Yorkshire, North of Tyne, West Yorkshire, York and North Yorkshire, and Hull and East Yorkshire.

The Budget statement updated progress on further deals. The government is now in the final stages of agreeing 10 new MSAs: Devon, Plymouth and Torbay; Hertfordshire; Lancashire; Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland; Stoke and Staffordshire; Surrey; Thames Valley (Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Swindon); and Wessex. Kent and Medway, and Cornwall will become foundational strategic authorities at this stage, without a mayor and with fewer devolved powers.

Once complete, this will mean that more than 90 per cent of England’s population will have a devolution agreement in place, according to the Budget statement. Ministers want full coverage by the end of 2028.

There is evidence that regional mayors can be effective, having legitimacy with the electorate, strong influencing capabilities and the ability to work at a larger scale than local authorities. Control of the bus network in Greater Manchester, apprenticeship funding in the Liverpool City Region and Coventry’s regeneration are all cited as mayoral successes.

But England remains a highly centralised state, and critics point to Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen as an example of what can go wrong when scrutiny and accountability are lacking. Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has just launched an inspection of the Conservative mayor and the Tees Valley Combined Authority over concerns about finances and governance.

Nor are devolution deals easy to pull off. Earlier this year long-running negotiations over a Lancashire mayor were paused because of opposition to the necessary local government reorganisation – though Lancashire is now among the deals nearing agreement.

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What the Budget offers

Until yesterday, fiscal devolution – the ability of a devolved authority to raise or retain its own money through taxation – was limited to pilots in Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, the Liverpool City Region, and the West of England, where MSAs received a small share of business rates and the rest went to its constituent councils. The Budget signals a major expansion in fiscal devolution.

MSAs will in future be largely funded through “assigned and local taxation, giving them the certainty and autonomy to drive transformational investment in their regions. Grant will only need to be used on an exceptional basis, where there is a clear policy rationale for this,” states the Budget’s accompanying Fiscal Devolution Roadmap.

The Chancellor intends that local and regional government will retain 100 per cent of their business rates before the end of the decade in place of grants from central government. The first step will be allocating mayors a 20 per cent share of locally retained business rates from next year. Local authorities will retain at least 70 per cent of business rates by the end of the decade.

Healey said: “If local leaders help businesses to start and grow, more of the rates they pay will stay in that area.”

Figures were not released for income tax assignment to mayors but it is intended to constitute the majority of mayoral funding. In their foreword to the roadmap, ministers James Murray, Dan Tomlinson and Jim McMahon wrote: “The long-term certainty that comes from access to tax revenues will enable mayors to invest more in projects that create the conditions for businesses to succeed and for local economies to grow.”

All strategic authorities across the country will also be given powers to implement a new overnight visitor levy. Labour mayors have said they would voluntarily limit the tax to 5 per cent of the cost of visitors’ accommodation if they do implement it but argued in a letter it would allow “meaningful investment”.

Healey also announced £285 million for Good Growth Funds, which will enable mayors to attract further investment in “local growth priorities”, and a £1.5 billion borrowing facility.

The roadmap promises to strengthen mayoral accountability but further detail, including the role of MPs in scrutinising MSAs, will have to wait for the Rewiring the State delivery plan, due by the end of the year – before the Houchen inspection, with findings expected in March next year.

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Analysis

The Centre for Cities think tank welcomed the Budget as the “end of the beginning” for fiscal devolution but warned it was hard to to say whether the roadmap will improve growth in the short term until it’s confirmed how much money each mayor would get – and that central government might retain much control over the detail of the settlement.

“Perhaps the most important thing about the fiscal devolution roadmap is it shows the biggest battles have been won,” wrote Centre for Cities’ Anthony Breach. “The highest levels of policymaking now accept that our exceptional fiscal centralisation is a problem for the national economy. Income tax will soon be irreversibly part of the local funding mix – overcoming an impasse that has been stuck for almost 50 years in fewer than 12 months.”

Zoë Billingham, director of another think tank, IPPR North, called the Budget a “vote of confidence in our regional and local leaders” and urged the government to ensure income tax assignment is high enough to make a difference to people’s lives.

“Five per cent of income tax devolved to mayors would see an additional £4 billion held by mayors,” said Billingham. “When the devolution agenda is felt by our communities across the country we know it will have succeeded.”

The roadmap gives “welcome substance” to the government’s devolution plans, according to Tom Lloyd Goodwin, deputy chief executive of CLES, the local economic think tank. But he said it must support the wider purpose of devolution: “reducing poverty and inequality, improving living standards and delivering better health outcomes”.

What politicians are saying

“These new financial flexibilities will help to drive the development of Leeds South Bank and Bradford Southern Gateway to deliver thousands of homes, create a better-connected region, and build a region of learning where everyone has the skills they need to succeed.” -Tracy Brabin, Labour mayor of West Yorkshire

“There is a right way to do devolution and a wrong way, so we will have three tests for the government’s plan as it develops. First, does it give councils enough money to fulfil the responsibilities they are being given? Secondly, does it reach beyond mayors to councils and communities everywhere? Thirdly, is it fair, so that those areas that are already struggling do not find themselves with even less?” -Ed Davey, Lib Dem leader

“We have had devolution since the Blair government, and Wales has become one of the poorest parts of the whole of Europe, although it has had serious and real fiscal devolution. If it has been so spectacularly painful for the residents of Wales to have such devolution, why does the hon. lady [Labour MP Seema Malhotra] think it will be so marvellous for people in other parts of the United Kingdom?” - Graham Stuart, Conservative MP for Beverley and Holderness

“This is an important step forward for Lancashire. Securing greater investment is vital if we are to deliver better opportunities, stronger communities and sustainable growth for our residents and businesses.” - Stephen Atkinson, Reform UK leader of Lancashire County Council

“You’d have thought that, after going to the trouble of ousting the last PM, taking his job, and installing a brand-new chancellor, Andy Burnham would be keen to ensure Labour displayed a bit more ambition.” - Ellie Chowns, Greens’ Treasury spokesperson

What happens next

Confirmation over the figures for income tax assignment and getting the remaining mayoral and foundational agreements over the line. But devolution needs to address declining living standards, predicted to fall yet further.

“Devolution must not stop at town halls or combined authorities: power and control must be put into the hands of local communities,” said Yasmin Ibison, senior policy adviser at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. ■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023. He writes regularly for The Lead to untangle the issues facing the UK and also reporting on social justice and other issues across the North of England as part of our award-winning The Lead Local titles.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ed@thelead.uk and you can see every edition of The Lead Untangles so far.

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From the twists and turns of Lancashire’s Mayoral and Devolution journey, to deep questions about where money has been going in Teesside and the regeneration of Stoke-on-Trent. Our award-winning Lead Local network, rooted in communities in the North of England, provides the kind of scrutiny that is needed over public spending decisions which will increasingly be made by Mayors and Combined Authorities. Help us keep track and ask the tough questions needed by becoming a supporter of The Lead today.

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Desperate times call for desperate measures. Unless — perhaps — your name is John Healey.

Because today, at a moment of such clear need, we got a budget of half measures. Small packages of relief to blunt the worst of the pain. But that pain is still coming, and it’s going to hurt.

Energy bills are forecast to rise by around 27 per cent in January. The Trussell Trust reported last week that almost nine million people are now in severe hardship, and that without further action another 165,000 will join them by the last full year of this parliament. Two in five people referred to its food banks are already behind on their energy bills.

The wider economic picture is just as grim. The chancellor mentioned the conflict in the Middle East so many times during the Budget pre-amble that yours truly lost count. The Iran war has indeed sent energy prices soaring. Gilt yields are above 5 per cent and the cost of servicing our debt has jumped £14 billion this year. The OBR has cut next year’s growth forecast from 1.6 per cent to 1 per cent, and Healey’s headroom against the fiscal rules has fallen by almost £9 billion since March.

The political weather has shifted a long way since 2024, yet this government is binding itself to the manifesto it was elected on. Never break the fiscal rules, never raise income tax, National Insurance or VAT. When Andy Burnham entered No 10, he said Britain should not be “in hock to the bond markets”. His first budget held the bond markets’ hand from start to finish.

Let us give credit where it is due. Taking green levies off energy bills and paying for them through general taxation is the right call. Charging every household the same flat amount for the energy transition was always regressive, when young workers in draughty houseshares pay as much towards a wind farm as the millionaire pensioner down the road. Moving those costs onto the tax system, where the better-off contribute more, is fairer, and it means future price shocks will hurt just a little less.

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Equally, the carer’s allowance taper finally ends the shameful cliff edge that pushed carers into debt. And handing mayors a share of income tax, the power to set overnight visitor levies and control of business rates is full frontal Burnhamism, if anything is.

But this budget may come to be remembered solely for its absences. The green levy switch came with no date. Gas standing charges go in 2027 “or as soon as possible after”, though the cost simply moves onto the unit price, predicted to save the average household about £45 a year. The families who use the most gas, including those in large households, poorly insulated homes and people who are ill and at home all day, could end up paying more. Against a 27 per cent rise in January, a £100 winter payment and an extended VAT cut won’t touch the sides.

Then there are the gaping holes. Welfare reform is parked until the Milburn and Timms reviews report, so millions face another year of uncertainty and demonisation as food and energy costs climb. The path to 3 per cent of GDP on defence has slipped to next year’s spending review. And Rosebank, the oilfield the energy secretary insists only she can decide on, is already accounted for in the numbers: the Treasury asked the OBR to count its tax receipts.

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We are constantly told that Britain has no money. Our national debt sits at 95 per cent GDP, and servicing it costs more every year. Andy Burnham came in with big ideas and bigger warnings about a country that isn’t working, and there is of course a difference between borrowing to pay the bills and investing to change the country. Something, somewhere has to give. So why a status quo budget that kicks every hard decision down the road?

Privately, MPs worry that Burnham’s small fixes will only get them so far. Cheaper gherkins and plentiful Post Office drop boxes might show voters he gets the frustrations of everyday life. But ordinary families are about to get very cold and very hungry this winter, and they are acutely aware that their elderly parents and children face bleak prospects for their security and prosperity if things continue as is.

Part of the answer is caution. With an eight-point poll lead and nervous markets, a quiet budget is a rational choice, and Burnham’s “everyday fixes” are building trust. But placating the markets and getting the public to like him cannot be ends to themselves. They should be the building blocks for a larger, more urgent mission: to support a government that promised not just change, but ambition, radicalism and a rewiring of Britain.

The other answer may be timing. Some (many) in Westminster now suspect the big ideas are being saved for an early election, where a fresh mandate to rewrite the fiscal rules and raise taxes would buy room – and authority – to act. Burnham has already ruled one out, and with good reason. Labour would likely lose seats, further frustrate voters and waste weeks campaigning when too many problems need fixing now.

But if a new mandate is what he is waiting for, consider that he doesn’t need one. A government with a large majority and a healthy poll lead can simply point to all the reasons 2026 is not 2024, and push forward. Breaking manifesto pledges may once have been a cardinal political sin, but the rules of the game have changed. The populist right is on the march, big tech is out of control, our allies are increasingly unreliable, and our climate and economy are at best stalling and at worst failing. The stakes are too high to stay bound to Treasury orthodoxy and a manifesto written for a different world.

This was a budget that deferred rather than launched. There will never be a better moment than this one: a big majority, a poll lead and a public that knows the country isn’t working. No more rolling the pitch. Roll up your sleeves and get on with it. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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Extreme heat this summer put patients and healthcare professionals at risk; the UKHSA estimated there were 2,877 excess deaths for two early heatwaves alone.

It’s not just this year, either: there were 1,504 excess deaths in the summer in 2025 and in 2022, there were 2,985 heat-associated deaths. The climate crisis is having a huge impact on mortality around the world, and the UK is no exception.

The climate crisis comes from our use of fossil fuels, so many people have been shocked that Labour has honoured a license issued under the previous Conservative government for Jackdaw gas field.

The licences for Jackdaw, and a nearby oil and gas field named Rosebank, had been blocked after a legal challenge by Greenpeace.

What are the health risks?

Doctors are not particularly concerned with direct health risks from drilling gas at Jackdaw (such as risks to workers, or local pollution).

Instead, doctors warn the long-term impact of giving the go-ahead for Jackdaw is ‘significant’.

Last year, dozens of clinicians in leadership roles wrote to the then health secretary to outline the impacts including:

• increasing risk of pregnancy complications

• increasing incidence of children with asthma

• greater risk of stroke

• acute kidney injury

• premature death in older adults

Signatories included the chair of council for the Royal College of GPs, president of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, president of the Faculty of Public Health and chair of the Royal College of Nursing England.

Many of these risks, and their costs, are already having an impact. In a report published last year the Royal College of Physicians put 30,000 deaths a year down to air pollution. In 2019 the government said it was the top environmental risk to human health in the UK. Studies are now beginning to link air pollution with cognitive impairment and dementia.

The letter also warned of health risks across the board when extreme weather (such as storms and floods or, in summer, heatwaves due to global warming) disrupts NHS services. Polling last year found that more than two thirds of UK health workers have been unable to get to work because of extreme weather since 2020.

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Who is protesting?

The Doctors’ Association UK will write to Yvette Cooper, the Health Secretary, to call for an independent health impact assessment of the Jackdaw gas field. The letter has over 100 signatories already.

“The science is clear that every fraction of a degree of warming now is understood to be associated with health harms and subsequent increases in mortality,” wrote Dr Matt Lee, DAUK’s sustainability lead.

Authors of the DAUK letter estimate that Jackdaw may be associated with approximately 8,000 projected heat-related deaths when applying estimates from research on the mortality cost of carbon to projected lifetime emissions.

The letter also calls on the government to reject Rosebank and joins a wider call for a ‘national emergency briefing’ – something over 130,000 people have called for in a petition launched earlier this year.

The campaign group Health for XR also spoke out against the decision. In an open letter, members have also called for a health impact assessment for Jackdaw (and for a commitment to one before making a decision on Rosebank, and the removal of policy costs from electricity bills.

Dr Naomi Adelson, a GP in London and member of Health for XR, said: “Our response is grounded in our professional duty,” she said. “The GMC expects doctors to raise concerns where patients are at risk because of ‘policies or systems’. Where patients ‘are, or may be, at risk of death or serious harm for any reason’, doctors should report it ‘immediately’. That is what we are doing.”

Health for XR urged health professionals to raise concerns through the Royal Colleges, unions, MPs and local health bodies, to talk with patients about the impact of policy on their health, and to stand with colleagues who act on their conscience.

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What about the Budget?

Energy bills are one of the things that experts are expecting – and hoping – to be a target in this year’s Budget.

Policy costs in electricity bills – which Health for XR are campaigning about – pay for things like renewable energy projects, social and fuel poverty schemes and carbon pricing support mechanisms. They make up about 18 per cent of a bill.

The suggestion that these could be moved from electric bills to gas bills was raised last week by MPs on the Commons Energy Security and Net Zero Committee.

It’s also something that UK businesses want. Over 120 organisations, including the Confederation of British Industry, AgeUK, Nationwide and the British Retail Consortium wrote to the Chancellor last month calling for all taxes to be removed from electricity.

Something similar happened in last year’s Budget when some policy costs were moved into general taxation, but this year many voices are calling for more changes.

Energy UK has proposed removing the remaining 25% of Renewables Obligation (RO) costs from domestic electricity bills, removing RO costs in full from non-domestic electricity bills, and removing the Feed-in Tariff (FiT) from the unit rate for both domestic and non-domestic bills.

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What about Rosebank?

Doctors are expected to raise another wave of protest if the government also allows drilling at Rosebank.

After all, the stakes are much higher for the second site. Oxfam has estimated that, if it goes ahead, Rosebank’s estimated lifetime emissions would cause up to 57,400 excess heat deaths, more than the babies born in Scotland in 1 year.

Rosebank is an oil field with some natural gas off the northwest coast of the Shetland Islands. It is Britain’s largest untapped fossil fuel reserve.

But as numerous campaigners have already said, Rosebank’s resources will not reduce bills or offer energy security, as the oil at Rosebank will be sold on international markets. If approved, Rosebank’s oil would generate 254m tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions – around 70 per cent of what the UK produced last year.

There is no way to limit global climate rise to 1.5°C while approving new oil and gas ventures – and with Jackdaw already going ahead, doctors are doubling down on stopping this second site. Members of the public can still sign DAUK’s open letter. ■

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About the author: Ellie Broughton has over 12 years’ experience writing about mental health and wellbeing for titles including The Guardian, the i paper, the Huffington Post, Lifehacker, patient.info, Stylist, The Independent, Refinery29 UK and Vice UK.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ed@thelead.uk and you can see every edition of The Lead Untangles so far.

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All eyes are on The Budget on Wednesday, and our political editor Zoë Grünewald’s will be. She’ll bring you her reaction and analysis direct after the new Chancellor has delivered his first ever Budget. Make sure you’re subscribed to get it first.

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This month saw the second wave of early prison releases, authorised by the Burnham government. Around 650 offenders were released, and the government expects the total to rise to 5,000 by June next year.

It is, frankly, a desperate measure in a crisis – and, as often with crises, the politicians are learning the wrong lessons. Alongside the early release scheme more prisons are being built or expanded in order to add another 14,000 prison places by 2031.

The driving factor behind these developments is the UK’s acute prison overcrowding crisis, with 87,499 people detained in prisons in England and Wales as of last week, a rise of 1,700 since June this year and a further 8,495 people were imprisoned in Scotland. Since 1990 the prison population has grown by 94 percent, near five times the growth of the general population.

Three quarters of prisons are overcrowded, meaning that in practice rehabilitation takes second place to warehousing inmates in cells where they can be kept for up to 23 hours a day.

The results are that prisons are more dangerous and unhealthy places, for prisoners and staff, and their outcomes are worse. The reoffending rate is around 37 percent in the first year after leaving prison and rises to 75 percent in the nine years after.

The Norwegian model

The UK is not the only country to have faced this challenge.

“If we go back in time, in the 80s here in Norway when I started in the business, we had big problems in the correctional service,” says Are Høidal, a retired prison governor. Reoffending rates were as high as 70 percent five years after prisoners were released, he explains, along with significant problems with mental health, violence and drugs within prisons. The then Minister of Justice decided to embark on a wholesale reform of the system, sending civil servants to other countries to find best practice. Their findings shaped the design of anew correctional service set out in a White Paper. Høidal was one of the members of the working group that produced it.

“In this white paper, we focus a lot on the prison officer role. How shall the prison officer work inside the prisons,” he says. The shift they wanted was away from a traditional “guard” and towards the rehabilitation of offenders through social work. Høidal was the governor of Oslo Prison, the largest in the country at the time, and recalled that this change in role was a challenge for staff, some of whom did not want to work in the new ways.

“That was my job, to change Oslo prison, and that was quite a heavy job, difficult work to motivate the officers to work in a totally new way,” he says also changed the education for the officers, so they learned a lot of new subjects at the officer training school.” This drew on work from Canada where officers were trained to deliver learning and skills to prisoners and incentive rehabilitation. The training for prison officers in Norway currently lasts two years, and will increase to three next year. By contrast, prison officers in England and Wales receive ten weeks of training.

Norway built on these reforms with an expansion in community sentences in the late 90s, electronic monitoring in the 2000s. There was a second White Paper in 2008 that focused on support and life after release from prison. “We give them, we call it the normality principle. So the life inside the prison shall mostly look like the life outside the prison,” Høidal explains. “You can go to school, you can go to the healthcare, you can also have work in workshops, and we also help them to find new interests in life.”

Norway’s reoffending rate is now among the lowest in the world at 20 percent after two years and 25 percent after five years.

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Lessons from the Netherlands

The UK has been a world-leader in criminal justice policy and practice before. In the 1970s, again in response to an overcrowding crisis, the UK pioneered the use of community service as an alternative to incarceration. It is a fact that my attention is drawn to by Jochum Wildeman, the head of the international bureau at Reclassering Nederland (the Netherlands Probation Service) which is constituted as an NGO independent of government. “I think it’s good for the UK also to be proud of what they invented and how it was adopted in the rest of Europe, but also in the rest of the world,” he says.

The Netherlands, like Norway, has also succeeded in reducing its prison population - in its case by around 40 percent, enabling it to close some 20 of its prisons completely. A high proportion of of criminal sentences result in community service and probation rather than incarceration and this approach is seen across the political spectrum as an efficient way of tackling criminal behaviour.

“We know in the long term, that probation and community service and supervision and electronic detention, that it works, it works better than locking up people in terms of reoffending, in terms of people getting back in the system and costing tax money,” Wildeman says. Reclassering’s own research has concluded that every Euro spent on prevention saves two Euros in costs to the government and society at large.

The prison system in the Netherlands does still have capacity issues, which stem from a shortage of staff rather than of prison places, Wildeman explains. While the job is relatively well-paid, it demands a lot of staff and is not a particularly desirable career at the moment, a problem faced by other professions in the country. However, the workforce challenges are less acute in probation, which Wildeman feels reflects the fact that their work is entirely focused on rehabilitation and resocialisation and so is rooted in hope.

Another big discussion happening in the Netherlands is the use of short sentences of less than three months, which comprise 80 percent of prisoners. These are generally acknowledged by practitioners to be counterproductive, as they do not enable any serious rehabilitation and resocialisation work to happen while damaging any positive relationships the prisoner may have in their community. As a result the reoffending rates for this group of prisoners remains high.

“There are new laws [being] drafted to make changes in this system so that we also can make sure that short-term prison sentences will be replaced by electronic detention, so wearing an ankle bracelet and making use of community services,” Wildeman explains.

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A home, not a cell

There are changes and innovations happening in the UK too, that point the way towards a better alternative to prisons. One Small Thing is a charity working with women in contact with the justice system based in Southampton. It runs Hope Street, a small residential community for women who have committed criminal offences, which opened in 2023.

“We wanted a small scale alternative, where women who would normally be remanded or sent to prison on sentences under 12 months [had] a place for them to go.” explains Fionnuala Gordon, a criminologist and former prisons inspector. The service provides trauma-informed intensive support, wraparound services meeting the needs of addiction and other factors linked to offending and on-site accommodation.

The most radical element of Hope Street is that women can bring their children to live with them. “There’s a very strong theme around our model about maternal separation and keeping mothers and children together where possible and where appropriate,” Gordon says.

Hope Street could be described as being similar to detention houses found across Europe. These are small scale residential homes where people with criminal convictions may live and work on their rehabilitation and resocialisation. It is, arguably, an example of the normality principle used in Norway. The building is purpose-built and designed to accommodate up to 24 women and eight children at any one time. “We had a group of women with lived experience who we consulted with around the design, and they were very keen for it to look like a home,” Gordon says.

“We wanted people to come in and out of the building, and we designed it in that way,” she explains. The building includes a café, which is run as a social enterprise and where women can train as baristas and work. Hope Street also provides training in hospitality and horticultural qualifications.

Each resident has a personalised plan that is supported by the staff at Hope Street and by partner agencies, and the approach is one that is trauma-informed and which looks at the strengths the person has rather than a more traditional prison approach of punishing infractions and non-compliance.

Gordon and the team at One Small Thing believe the model they are developing at Hope Street could be replicated across the UK.

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Smart on crime

While the UK is locked into its current political consensus of warehousing people in prisons, it would be understandable to feel pessimistic about the possibilities of change. But the case for things to stay as they are does not hold. Prisons are an expensive and largely ineffective solution to criminal behaviour and actions. The alternatives are there and the financial imperatives may just overtake the political ones in time.

“It’s also about being smart on justice, smart on crime,” Wildeman explains. “The majority of the people who commit crimes, big crimes, small crimes, will not benefit from prison, and that’s the story you have to carry in a very honest way.” This means “show it with numbers” but also with stories and emotions,” he says. ■

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About the author: Samir Jeraj is a journalist and author with a focus on social issues. He is co-author of The Rent Trap, a book on private renting in the UK and reports on housing, migration, and homelessness. Samir is a policy correspondent at the New Statesman and commissioning editor at Hyphen.

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This piece is the latest in our Burnham Britain series, where we’re testing the new agenda against the reality on the ground.

So far we’ve looked at what his conference speech tells us about the kind of premiership he wants to run, asked whether he can really end rough sleeping by Christmas, and revealed in an exclusive that more than a third of people at risk from cuts to universal credit disability payments are over 50, a group facing some of the toughest barriers to work. We’ve also looked at the long road to adult social care reform. Subscribe to help us dig deeper into the issues which Burnham must tackle if he is to build a new Britain.

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At the second annual EU-UK summit on 20 November leaders will assess any progress in the bilateral relationship and seek agreement on ways to make it closer.

Andy Burnham will meet the heads of the European Council and the European Commission in Brussels aiming for deals on measures including trade and immigration, as well as discussing the UK’s longer-term relationship with the EU.

The summit, postponed from July because of Keir Starmer’s resignation, is an opportunity for “every family and business to feel the benefits of a closer relationship with Europe”, according to his successor Andy Burnham.

How likely are concrete measures for the short term and how will EU heads respond to the question of a wholesale reset of the relationship, including the possibility of the UK rejoining?

Context

The first EU-UK summit was in London in May 2025, when the two parties established a post-Brexit Strategic Partnership, with the main agreement covering security and defence, and a “common understanding” to work together on fisheries, energy and climate, and youth mobility. Leaders committed to annual summits thereafter, but this year’s date was only confirmed last week.

In a statement to MPs – overshadowed by the debate over possible Russian interference in the Brexit referendum – Burnham said the summit could offer progress on boosting UK growth and controlling “illegal immigration”.

On the table are a trade deal on food and drink products, a deal on emissions trading and energy systems, a new youth experience scheme, and deeper co-operation on immigration.

“Together, these deals will add the equivalent of over £10 billion per year to the UK economy by 2040, with the potential to add significantly more,” Burnham claimed.

Burnham will meet Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Antonio Costa, president of the European Council, who said the EU and UK are “like-minded partners, united by common values and shared interests”.

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Deal by deal

Food and drink: Leaders are aiming for a common sanitary and phytosanitary area that would remove the burden of the many certificates and controls concerning the movement both ways of animals, plants and their products.

Border document checks are estimated to cost the Scottish salmon business – the country’s largest food export – £100 million a year. UK farmers and food producers can pay £1,400 on a single shipment for the right paperwork. Export health certificates for small businesses can cost £200 each.

“This is having a real impact on businesses and the agreement on the table could reverse some of that damage,” said Burnham, adding that it will “ease the pressure on prices in the supermarket”.

Emissions trading and energy systems: The EU and UK are now “tying a ribbon” on an agreement to link their emissions trading systems, according to one EU diplomat, with the deal to be confirmed at the summit.

This will mean carbon-intensive businesses exporting to the EU will be exempt from its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) tax, which is designed to prevent “carbon leakage” from countries with weaker environmental laws. Similarly, EU companies in energy-intensive sectors such as cement and aluminium will be exempt from the UK’s CBAM tax, which comes into force next year.

Discussions are also taking place on linking UK and EU electricity and energy markets, and co-operating on clean energy technologies. Burnham claimed this could lower energy costs for households and businesses, including a 20 per cent cut for wholesale energy in Northern Ireland.

Youth experience scheme: There are no reported ribbons yet on a deal allowing 18 to 30 year olds from the UK to live, study and work in EU countries and vice versa. Since Brexit ended freedom of movement, visa restrictions have curtailed youth mobility but the UK has been cagey about a new scheme for fear of creating concerns about increased migration.

Since the first EU-UK summit, the UK government has signalled its intention for a deal modelled on its existing schemes with Australia and New Zealand that would cap the number of visas annually and limit the time period young people could stay here, perhaps to two years.

But individual EU member states have a role in implementing a youth mobility scheme, and some are reported to be sharply at odds with the European Commission over whether the deal should be linked to an agreement by London to reduce university fees paid by EU students in the UK, which can reach £38,000, compared with £10,000 for British students.

Immigration: As a result of Brexit, the UK lost access to Eurodac, which would allow it to check whether asylum seekers had previously applied elsewhere. It also lost access to the Schengen Information system, which shares information about individuals for national security, border control and law enforcement, and the European Arrest Warrant system, meaning requests for extradition have to go through lengthier legal proceedings.

Although the number of people arriving in the UK on small boats has dropped, Burnham places great importance on striking a deal and believes von der Leyen is open to restoring data sharing on immigration. “On immigration, we could link up our law enforcement efforts once again, sharing more data and criminal records of foreign nationals as well as faster electronic evidence from the phones of those behind the gangs,” he said.

On Monday [18 Oct] the home secretary Shabana Mahmood met the European Commission officials for further talks on “migration, border management, law enforcement cooperation and counter-terrorism”.

Made in Europe: The EU’s Industrial Accelerator Act aims to increase the share of manufacturing in EU GDP from 14.3 per cent in 2024 to 20 per cent by 2035. A key plank is the so-called Made in Europe policy, in which EU procurement contracts, subsidies and state aid depend on a minimum share of the goods being made in the EU. One aim is to protect the EU from Chinese competition but UK automotive, energy and chemicals companies fear they will also be frozen out of EU supply chains.

Burnham told MPs Made in Europe “presents risks to British manufacturing” but it is unclear whether the situation can be resolved at the summit. France and Germany have dropped their opposition to UK inclusion, but EU legislation for the Industrial Accelerator Act has not been completed and a deal may have to wait until it has.

“I am raising those concerns with European partners,” said Burnham. “It is important that we get to an arrangement that works for both the UK and the EU. After all, we are both trying to deal with the same issue: the damaging effect that Chinese exports are having on our industries.”

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What people are saying

“A threadbare Brexit deal has damaged our economy. Britain can do so much better, so at this summit I want to take practical steps that pay off for the British public, cutting costs for our farmers, food producers and families.” - Andy Burnham, prime minister

“Here he is unpicking the deal this country signed with the EU a decade after the referendum. He is not going to get a better deal. The EU are tough negotiators, and it’s not just that the EU are tough negotiators, he has already revealed his entire negotiating hand.” - Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition

“We on these Liberal Democrat benches have consistently argued that their Brexit deal has made us all poorer, weaker and less safe, so I am glad that the prime minister has arrived at the same conclusion, but now it is time to do something about it.” - Ed Davey, Lib Dem leader

“If Andy Burnham, the King of the North, wants a fight in Doncaster and the ‘Red Wall’ with me on rejoining the EU, then bring it on, I say.” - Nigel Farage, Reform UK leader

What happens next

The breadth and depth of the deals to come from the summit will set the tone for what the European Council calls an “occasion to discuss the next steps in bilateral relations” and what Burnham says is “being open to a discussion about our relationship with the EU in the longer term”.

If that conversation takes place, it could mean joining the customs union or Single Market, or even rejoining the EU itself. Burnham insists any such talk is premature.

“Our immediate priority is securing a successful outcome at the summit, and I believe we should then set up a serious dialogue about the different options for our relationship in the long term,” he said. ■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023. He writes regularly for The Lead to untangle the issues facing the UK and also reporting on social justice and other issues across the North of England as part of our award-winning The Lead Local titles.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ed@thelead.uk and you can see every edition of The Lead Untangles so far.

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A new relationship with Europe is nothing new to readers of The Lead, recap our full series on The EU Referendum a Decade On. And see our political editor, Zoe Grunewald, took a deep look at Burnham’s comments about a new future with our European neighbours.

This weekend we’ll be back in your inbox with the latest in our Burnham’s Britain series, as Samir Jeraj considers the state of our prison system and what the UK can learn from elsewhere - particularly Europe. Make sure you’re signed up to receive it first

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A year ago, I wrote that I was glad I wasn’t Rachel Reeves.

Twelve months, one Prime Minister and a Chancellor later, I’m perhaps even more glad I’m not John Healey.

Next Wednesday, Healey will stand up to deliver his first budget, barely three months into the Burnham government. He is, of course, the surprise Chancellor: the loyalist Secretary of State who plunged the final nail into Keir Starmer’s coffin, resigning over holes in defence spending. Now — perhaps as some kind of karmic retribution — he’s the one who has to plug them.

Reeves had left him roughly £24bn of headroom against the fiscal rules. But as the war in Iran wages on, energy prices and inflation have spiked, and borrowing costs went have too: 30-year gilt yields topped six per cent this month, a level not seen since 1998.

Economists warn that his headroom may already have been halved, and in a bad scenario — more Trump tantrums, a longer war, a gloomier OBR — it disappears entirely. I can’t imagine anyone in the Treasury is sleeping well this week.

The pressures are not only economic, but political too. Burnham is well aware that his entrance into Downing Street came with high expectations. Tinkering is not an option. Over the past few weeks, we at The Lead have been closely examining the many challenges of the prime minister’s big plans for the nation. A “new social contract”, a national care service that is free at the point of use, more social housing, a route off the streets for every rough sleeper by Christmas, and defence spending.

None of these come cheap, and all with a straitjacket. Labour’s 2024 manifesto pledges: no rises in income tax, VAT or employee NICs have survived the change of leader, and Healey has already ruled out a much anticipated capital gains rise, to the irritation of the Labour left. That leaves a chancellor who needs billions, with the four biggest levers taped down.

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The Conservatives have a helpful answer: don’t spend it. Kemi Badenoch is out today, imploring Healey to “live within our means”. She believes she can find £70bn of savings, largely from welfare as well as cuts to the civil service and foreign aid.

It’s a curious prescription: a plan that relies on taking the most from the people least able to give it, and a convenient rewriting of history from the party whose last experiment with austerity left Britain poorer, sicker and with a welfare bill that never shrank the way it promised. Nonetheless, Burnham has already said there’ll be no welfare cuts in this budget. That’s a defensible political choice; but it does mean the money has to come from somewhere else.

Last autumn, we asked economists, campaigners and thinkers for bold, credible ways to raise revenue without stealth taxes or mass cuts. Most of them are still sitting on the table. From scrapping council tax to a wealth tax, from a levy on ultra-frequent fliers to the banks, there were fairer options than the ones Reeves reached for.

The question for Healey next week is who he asks to pay for Burnham’s Britain. Reeves spent two budgets reaching for the stealth taxes and threshold freezes that hit working people hardest while leaving wealth largely untouched. Today’s promises require something different. This budget will test whether the ambition matches the bravery,

So: Here they are again, Chancellor. Have a look.

And part two…

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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We’ll be keeping a close eye on the Budget next week, make sure you’re signed up so you get Zoe’s analysis direct in the hours after the Chancellor takes to the dispatch box. And let’s see what ideas Mr Healey has…

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Data centres in the pipeline across London and the South East would add large scale new demand to the grid – and a substantial water bill.

Today, we’re launching a look at Britain’s data centre sector, led by Anne Alexander, a journalist who specialises in reporting on the AI industry.

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll look at who is building these facilities, what they cost the places that host them, and why the conversation about “controlling AI” keeps missing the most concrete harm.

Anne starts today with an argument for a kill-switch: not for rogue robots, but for Shrimp Jesus memes during a heatwave.

There has been much discussion in the media, in the boardrooms of tech companies and in the corridors of power about whether it is either desirable or even possible to “control AI”. Opinion is sharply divided. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, published a wordy essay on the topic. Trump doubled down on cheerleading an accelerationist approach to the technology arms race while claiming to have Xi Jinping’s approval for renaming AI “super intelligence.”

For some, any prospect of opening a conversation about regulating or holding the AI industry to public account for the vast resources being consumed in its quest to build “intelligent machines” is welcome.

But there is also danger of distraction from the AI industry’s role in exacerbating the genuine “existential threat” we face: climate and ecological breakdown.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m deeply concerned about what the summer’s spree of so-called “rogue agents” breaking things online - including exploiting a vulnerability to access private health statistics from an Australian government website.

That isn’t because I think that there is any evidence of artificial consciousness. The “agents” concerned are programmes executing code based on text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). These are better thought of as a kind of statistical typewriter than an intelligent lifeform. Of course there is some “magic” in there: but only the kind achieved by trillions of calculations to generate predictive text and random numbers. In other words, the shiny aura of money, machines and power.

And yes, having an “off-switch” for machines is generally a good idea. Suggesting otherwise would be a bit like 19th century engineers arguing that you shouldn’t add brakes to a steam locomotive in case its feelings were hurt. The Victorians went through decades of catastrophic railway accidents without pretending that the engines “went rogue” and eventually legislation start to hold railway companies to account for their atrocious disregard of public safety.

The conversation we need to start having however, is about how embedding AI products into everyday tasks inevitably results in more power and water use.

Travelling around London this summer, it has been hard to avoid adverts urging adults to “save water” for the kids. I’m completely in favour of fixing leaky cisterns and taking short showers. But while ordinary people have watched their gardens shrivel, the data centre and AI industry is galloping ahead with a construction pipeline which if it is all built out will add up to 5 GW of new electricity demand to the grid across London and the South East.

Producing electricity is a highly water-intensive industry in the UK, according to experts at UN’s University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. In a report published earlier this year, they calculate that running AI models on servers in the UK will use on average 20 litres per kilowatt hour just at the power generation source, before even a drop comes anywhere near a data centre cooling system.

The same report highlights how the routine use of AI models to generate images and video or carry out internet searches risks raising the power and water footprint of everyday information tasks exponentially. Generating a typical AI image requires roughly 1450 times more energy than an old-style internet search using text classification methods.

During the heatwave in 2025 the Environment Agency recognised that old emails taking up storage space in data centres add stress to overstretched water and power systems, with an appeal for water-conscious users to delete them.

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But the spiralling energy and water costs of AI tools could be more easily controlled from the top, by the companies which make them, rather just nudging consumer behaviour in the right direction.

Luckily there are some quite simple methods to achieve this. Turning off access to image and video generation based on the users’ IP address ought to work. Google already claims to take into account local water stress when deciding what kind of cooling system to install in its new data centres, so why not add in settings which are responsive to heatwaves and droughts?

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In reality it will take a mixture of approaches to rein in an entire industry which has “gone rogue.”

A “kill-switch” for Shrimp Jesus memes in the middle of heatwave would be a start, but it needs to be connected to much broader campaigns for accountability. A moratorium on new data centre construction in the UK would be another vital step.

In a world already reeling from the impact of extreme heat we cannot afford to wait. We need a fundamental rethink of the relationship between Big Tech companies and their host societies here on planet earth. ■

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About the author: Anne Alexander is a journalist and author specialising in reporting on the AI industry. She is currently working on a project investigating the UK’s data centre sector with Watershed Investigations. You can read more of her work on Substack here.

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Make sure you’re signed up to get the next instalments of our reporting on AI data centres and we’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday with the latest from our political editor Zoë Grünewald

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Andy Burnham reignited interest in Russian interference in the Brexit referendum at the weekend when he said the Kremlin had sought to influence the vote.

Speaking to the podcast The Rest is Politics, the prime minister said: “I asked the question coming to Downing Street: well, was there interference in the 2016 referendum from Russia? I’ve had the clear answer that yes, there was.”

In the Commons on Monday, he maintained the line but offered no further evidence, saying it was a “matter of record” that Russia sought to interfere in the 2019 general election. “We think it is inconceivable that this was the first time.”

But his opponents accused him of questioning the legitimacy of the referendum just as he was seeking to unpick the Brexit deal and opening the door to Britain rejoining the EU in the long term.

Interference versus influence

Stories of Russian interference began to emerge soon after the close-run referendum. In 2017, City, University of London researchers found thousands of Twitterbot accounts had published mainly pro-Leave material in the run-up to the referendum, only then to disappear. Others said Russia’s social media attempts were even greater.

Further studies revealed one-sided pro-Leave coverage by Russian media outlets, and the Electoral Commission launched an inquiry into the Leave.EU campaign’s funding.

It’s possible that these stories are the basis for Burnham’s claims to The Rest is Politics but he did not say who in government or the civil service told him about the interference, nor disclose any evidence.

“I think we’ve been too much on the back foot on that, actually, and we haven’t informed people sufficiently about the extent to which people are seeking to disrupt the political process from overseas,” he said.

In a BBC interview on Monday, Foreign Office minister Stephen Doughty said Russia “clearly has attempted to interfere on a number of our democratic processes” but refused to “get into specifics”.

That lack of evidence allowed the government’s opponents to go on the offensive, although their case partly rested on blurring the line between Russia interfering in the referendum and successfully influencing its outcome. And politicians on the right have criticised Russian interference in UK affairs other than the referendum.

Reform’s Nigel Farage called Burnham “a liar” during a press conference. He said: “There was no Russian interference – the Russian hoax has run all the way through this.”

Former prime minister Boris Johnson said on X Burnham’s claim was “not true” and that he had asked the security services the same question when he was foreign secretary.

“They replied that there was no evidence of any successful interference in the 2016 referendum, by Russia or any other power.”

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused Burnham of seeking to question the result of the EU referendum on the same day he announced the date of the forthcoming EU-UK summit, at which he intended to “unpick” the Brexit deal.

“He implied that the referendum result was illegitimate because of Russian interference. Where has this come from? We all remember in 2018, the head of MI5 said that there was no evidence that Russia had influenced the EU referendum result,” said Badenoch, adding: “So, will he confirm here and now whether he believes the referendum result was legitimate? And if not, will he publish the evidence that Russia swung the results of the 2016 referendum?”

Burnham, who said he “had implied no such thing”, was later backed up by MI5 director-general Sir Ken McCallum, who said he strongly agreed with the prime minister and that Russian media, troll and bot interference in 2016 was a matter of record. But there is a “really important difference between interference attempted and outcome swayed”, he said.

The row continued at Wednesday’s PMQs when Burnham said raising the issue of Russian interference was “what the party opposite didn’t do” because “they wanted to look in the other direction”.

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What we know

There is plentiful evidence of what McCallum calls interference attempted, much of it contained in official reports.

In 2018, a minority report from the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations said: “Officially, the Russian government asserted its neutrality on the question of the Brexit referendum, but its English-language media outlets RT and Sputnik covered the referendum campaign extensively and offered ‘systematically one-sided coverage’ supporting a British departure from the European Union and frequently broadcasted statements from UKIP head Farage.”

The next year in the UK, a report by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee said “Kremlin-aligned” English language media outlets RT and Sputnik published significant numbers of anti-EU articles and criticised the Conservative government’s claim there was no evidence of successful interference “as the term ‘successful’ is impossible to define in retrospect”.

The committee suggested the government’s reluctance to accept the idea of Russian interference was influenced by its political implications. “The government has been very ready to accept the evidence of Russian activity in the Skripal case, an acceptance justified by the evidence. However, it is reluctant to accept evidence of interference in the 2016 Referendum in the UK.”

It also referred to Russian attempts to interfere in the 2014 Scottish referendum.

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What we don’t know

Published in 2020, the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia Report did not assess the extent of Russian interference in the EU referendum because the government or security services had not investigated it, “despite widespread public allegations” and open source material.

In the redacted report, the committee said the intelligence and security agencies attitude was “illogical” because “this is about the protection of the process and mechanism from hostile state interference”.

Then prime minister Johnson was criticised for a nine-month delay in publishing the report – which talked about a “failure to prepare”, “narrow coverage” and “lack of retrospective assessment” over the EU referendum – until after the 2019 general election.

During that election campaign, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn produced official documents showing that the Conservatives wanted to include the NHS in a future UK-US trade deal. Foreign secretary Dominic Raab claimed the documents had been illicitly sourced from Russia and it was “almost certain” Russian actors had sought to interfere in the general election.

The Electoral Commission’s inquiry into Leave.EU’s funding resulted in a referral to the National Crime Agency over concerns its backer Arron Banks was not the true source of loans of £8 million paid to it. Banks admitted to visiting the Russian Embassy in London several times before the referendum but vigorously denied Russian officials had sought to influence the Leave campaign. The NCA dropped its inquiry in 2019, saying there was a lack of evidence of criminality.

Last year, Nathan Gill, former leader of Reform UK Wales and leader of Ukip Wales in 2014-16, pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from a former pro-Russia Ukrainian politician to make pro-Russian statements in the European Parliament and to the media. Gill, who was an ally to Farage when they were MEPs in Strasbourg, was sentenced to 10.5 years under the Bribery Act.

What people are saying

“It’s very difficult to know on what basis people made decisions, and it’s difficult to know whether the Russians were making up additional lies or simply amplifying the lies that were already there.” - Dame Emily Thornberry, Labour chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee

“Burnham is clearly laying the groundwork for rejoining by casting doubt on the result and throwing red meat to his base, but in the interim he now has serious questions to answer on the nature and scope of Russian interference.” - Shadow defence minister Ben Obese-Jecty

“I’m a little bit worried that if we all stay in this debate for another few days, the Russian trolls who didn’t appear to do all that much at various points over the years, they’ll be delighted they are front page.” - MI5 director-general Sir Ken McCallum

What happens next

It’s not clear whether Burnham felt he was merely stating the obvious on The Rest is Politics and was dismayed to see it blow up, or whether he was laying the groundwork for his EU strategy.

The row is likely to subside once the distinction between attempting to interfere and successfully influencing emerges more clearly from the political fog and eyes turn to the EU-UK summit next month. ■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023. He writes regularly for The Lead to untangle the issues facing the UK and also reporting on social justice and other issues across the North of England as part of our award-winning The Lead Local titles.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ed@thelead.uk and you can see every edition of The Lead Untangles so far.

👫Found this edition of The Lead Untangles useful? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place.

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If you missed it our political editor Zoe Grunewald looks at Burnham’s statement this week about Brexit and considers the way forward and it seems our big focus in the summer on a decade on since Brexit and outlining the impact it’s had did catch the attention of corridors of power. See our full series on The EU Referendum a Decade On. And become a supporter of The Lead to help us go deeper on the stories affecting the UK right now.

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Westminster returned from conference season yesterday to find the prime minister rummaging around in the attic. Andy Burnham had dug out a box that has gathered dust in the corner of British politics for the best part of a decade, and he did what no prime minister since 2016 has dared to do. He opened it. The label on the side read “Brexit”.

Burnham told his MPs that the status quo was “not good enough for Britain” and that turning away from a closer relationship with Europe would be “a major dereliction of duty.” Next month’s Brussels summit would be the start of a “serious dialogue” about the long term. This is the latest in a series of pro-EU noises made by our Prime Minister. It’s now clear: “Breturn” is no longer unthinkable.

Many of us let out a breath we’d been holding for a decade. Successive governments have spent years tiptoe-ing around red lines on Europe, ignoring the red ink on the nation’s balance sheet. But the road once travelled may not be as gentle as it once was, and it’s worth being honest about how hard this will be.

The first problem is that it means having the whole argument again. Brexit didn’t just change our trading arrangements, but tore through many families, towns and friendships. As I’ve written before, it rewired our politics: destroying and creating political parties, seeding a new electoral battleground in the Red Wall that has dominated every campaign since, and handing the populist an endless well of grievance. Now we are supercharged by algorithms, a thriving right-wing media eco-system and mass disillusionment. Is there really public appetite to go through all of that again — but this time on steroids?

The second is that nobody yet knows what closer alignment actually means (possibly including the prime minister himself). Are we talking about re-joining in its entirety, the single market, or a customs union? Or more a string of dull treaties on food standards, emissions trading and youth mobility? These are very different propositions. And while recent polling from British Future showed that while a majority (57 per cent) of Brits admit Brexit as a failure, less than half (46 per cent) would vote to re-join, and even less (34 per cent) want a referendum as soon as possible. Mention free movement as the price of membership, and support dwindles further. Sentiment is nuanced and caveated.

Third, Brussels has little reason to be generous. Britain had a pretty good deal before it left: a budget rebate, opt-outs from the euro and Schengen. A returning member is very unlikely to get those terms. Having spent years being stonewalled by successive prime ministers, the chances of the EU rolling out the red carpet are slim.

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Fourth, if re-joining is the destination, there will almost certainly have to be another referendum. And that creates a trap. If you cast doubt on the legitimacy of the first vote, how do you then argue that a second one, held on the same terms, is any more legitimate? This is why Burnham’s weekend comments about Russian interference caused uproar. Moscow clearly tried to meddle in our democracy, but opening up the Brexit debate can’t rest on the claim that 17.4 million people were duped. That way lies disaster.

None of that is a reason not to do it. The damage Brexit has done to trade, investment, growth and our standing in the world is now too great to keep pretending otherwise.

So the question isn’t whether Burnham should make this case, but how. We may have already guessed that the Kremlin was rather pleased with the outcome of the referendum, and we may still be righteously furious about the £350m weekly promise to the NHS, or the fake proclamations of “taking back control”. But the argument that the 2016 vote was illegitimate will not wash with voters who already feel that Westminster looks down on them.

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Instead, the case for re-join must be made on how the world has changed. In 2016, the United States was a dependable ally. Now, Trump’s approach to Russia and Ukraine shows that Europe can no longer assume moral alignment, let alone protection. Russian aggression has escalated dramatically, and we are being hit by shock after shock: pandemic, energy crisis, trade wars.

We also now have a much clearer understanding of how much damage fourteen years of Tory austerity and underinvestment did to the economy, from energy to infrastructure, and the small businesses being squeezed even harder by red tape at the border.

So this has to be an argument about security, the economy and our values — not a rematch of the referendum. Immigration will be the hardest sell, and it can’t be ducked. The honest picture is more complicated than “small boats went up because of Brexit.” But the facts remain that Britain’s exit from the EU left us outside the very arrangements Europe uses to share intelligence on smuggling gangs and return people across borders, and those arrangements have moved on since we left. Equally, mass migration – driven by conflict and soon by climate breakdown – is a continental problem. Global problems need shared solutions.

Winning the argument will depend not on proving 2016 was a mistake, but convincing the country that 2026 demands something different. That means a patient, honest case about what Britain needs to be safe and prosperous in a far more dangerous world, and a narrative that persuades the country to look to a brighter future, not the gloomier past. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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Maybe there’s more reading of The Lead in the corridors of Northern and Southern power than we thought - given our big focus in the summer on a decade on since Brexit and outlining the impact it’s had. See our full series on The EU Referendum a Decade On. And become a supporter of The Lead to help us go deeper on the stories affecting the UK right now.

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If you stayed up for the Holborn and St Pancras count hoping for a political earthquake, bad luck.

Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali held Keir Starmer’s old seat with 12,292 votes (45.1 per cent of the vote), beating Green leader Zack Polanski by 3,364. Turnout was around 39 per cent – totally unremarkable for a by-election.

It was a comfortable hold. The honest — and slightly dull — reading is that there isn’t much to take from it, except the one thing that matters most to Number 10 this morning: voters still seem willing to give Labour a chance.

Start with the Greens, because they built their autumn around this result.

On paper, Holborn and St Pancras is exactly the kind of seat where the Greens should be making seismic gains. It’s young, with an average age of 32. It’s highly educated: around half of residents have a degree. It’s home to UCL, the King’s Cross tech cluster and some pretty eye-watering property prices, yet fewer than one in four households own their home. Young, squeezed private renters and diverse inner-city estates make up the Polanski project; so it made sense to stand the Green leader. Sadly for them, he lost by 12 points.

It may or may not have helped that the final week of campaigning wasn’t about the Green’s flagship rent controls policy, but about the party conference voting to define Zionism as racism. Polanski skipped the vote to campaign in Camden. The Chief Rabbi condemned the motion, four of the party’s five MPs publicly rejected it, and Israel barred Polanski from entering the country. Former leader Caroline Lucas publicly criticised Polanski’s lack of leadership on the issue. How much that impacted the final vote is impossible to know, but it was certainly an unwelcome distraction for Polanski and the rest of his party.

To be fair to the Greens (who are making this point loudly this morning) their vote share more than tripled; a 22-point jump in one of Labour’s safest seats.

That reading may prove deceptive. As pollster Peter Kellner points out: In 2024, the anti-Labour left vote was split, and the Gaza independent Andrew Feinstein took 18.9 per cent, more than the Greens did. Feinstein backed Polanski this time, and if you put his share together with the Greens, the non-Labour left had 29.3 per cent in 2024. Last night it got 32.8 per cent. So only up three and a half points; not necessarily something that can be described as “a surge”.

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In another context that would be perfectly respectable. The Burnham bounce is real, and holding your ground through a new prime minister’s honeymoon is no disgrace. But ultimately the Greens played their trump card, the leader whose personal brand has driven their poll surge.

Of course, you cannot extrapolate a general election from a by-election. This one had a historically unpopular former PM’s seat and a single-issue row in the final week, which made it a particularly strange contest (although by-elections have been mounting in their individual peculiarities in recent times). The Greens won Gorton and Denton in February, and that didn’t make them a party of government either.

For Labour, a hold like this does matter. This was Starmer’s seat. Voters here had every opportunity to punish Labour for the last two years, a protest vote would have been easy and cost them nothing, and there was no real threat of Reform winning in this area, which might have seen a coalition of left-wing voters holding their nose and voting for the governing party. Despite all this, Labour’s share fell by less than four points on 2024.

Even Polanski acknowledged it, telling Today programme’s Nick Robinson that voters liked what the Greens had to say, but they still wanted to give Labour another chance.

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Further down, the Conservatives came third on 7.1 per cent and Reform fourth on 5.9 per cent. Don’t read too much into the Tories’ third place, their share is almost identical to 2024. Reform’s number is the more interesting one, sitting slightly below what they got here in 2024. This is about as Reform-unfriendly a seat as exists (and Restore Britain certainly nibbled at the edges), but it’s still fits that whispered pattern of the Reform vote stalling since Burnham arrived.

That brings us to the question everyone in Westminster is asking this morning: how about an early election?

Holborn suggests people still have some faith in Labour, but the gamble is how much patience. Burnham has to prove that something is tangibly changing in people’s lives. Meanwhile the Greens can keep pushing radical ideas from the sidelines, with nothing to deliver.

Burnham has radical answers of his own: fixing social care, a closer relationship with the EU, and proportional representation. These are big structural changes that could materially change things. The question is whether he can afford to leave them in the long grass, or whether he needs to bring them forward and show people what a Burnham government is actually prepared to do. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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Andy Burnham upped the stakes in his speech to Labour’s conference when he promised to end the ban on public ownership of water companies. Previously he had called only for more public control.

Campaigners believe water privatisation has been a disaster, with poor environmental performance and rising bills for customers coupled with huge dividends for shareholders and extravagant bonuses for executives.

But politicians are split on what needs to be done. Full public ownership would be too costly, say some. Extending public control, say others, would be simply tweaking an existing system that has failed. Is the prime minister trying to straddle both sides?

Context

Margaret Thatcher’s government privatised the water industry in 1989, creating 10 natural monopolies from the regional water authorities of England and Wales. The privatised companies’ debts were cleared and they received a further cash injection in the hope of unlocking billions of pounds of private investment for a much needed upgrade of infrastructure.

The investment did materialise – to the tune of more than £236 billion, according to trade association Water UK. But that came with £78 billion in dividends for shareholders – much of them paid for through borrowing – and a 44 per cent increase in bills for consumers.

Meanwhile, the water companies shrug off fines for illegal discharges of sewage with apparent impunity, and have failed to build a single new reservoir since 1992. No other country has followed the England and Wales experiment of full privatisation.

In a recent speech, Feargal Sharkey, who has been campaigning about water for more than 10 years, said: “The brutal reality is as employees, bill payers, as customers, we have been lied to, we’ve been misled, we’re being extorted, we’ve been cheated.

“For 37 years, we’ve been subjected to nothing more than the greatest act of organised criminality perpetrated against the British people.

“We’ve had little in return apart from corporate greed, profiteering, financial engineering, political failure and regulatory incompetence.”

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Public control versus public ownership

In the form of Defra, Ofwat, the Environment Agency, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and the Consumer Council for Water, there is already public control of the water industry, although Sharkey and many other campaigners characterise it as “regulatory failure”.

Keir Starmer’s government began to take action, inspired in part by recommendations from an independent commission into the water sector in 2025.

In May’s King’s Speech Starmer announced the Clean Water Bill. It includes the abolition of Ofwat and the creation of a new single regulator for the sector, a new Water Ombudsman to resolve customer complaints and “plans to attract greater investment”.

Campaigners welcomed the bill as a step in the right direction but not far enough, and called for full public ownership of water companies. Then environment secretary Steve Reed had prevented the independent commission from investigating nationalisation, and Burnham himself, post-Makerfield but pre-Downing St, said it was “complex and probably expensive”. But his conference speech in Liverpool, as well as promising yet more control measures such as new powers for mayors in a “strengthened” bill, also opened the door to public ownership.

“The centrepiece of that bill will be this – the repeal of Margaret Thatcher’s ideological ban on public ownership of water companies,” said Burnham, adding that water is a “symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain.

How to own it

A report by We Own It says when countries own public assets and services, “they are wealthier, they can benefit from revenue streams from household bills and they have the real control that only ownership can provide”. Against that is the costs the government would face for compensating shareholders and assuming liabilities.

Much attention has focused on Thames Water, teetering on financial collapse, with £20 billion of debts, and in talks with creditors over a takeover. Because of its near insolvency, the government can place it into temporary state ownership, known as a Special Administration Regime (SAR), while its future is secured.

That could mean a return to private ownership, or the government, under Burnham’s new law, could seek to retain it, having to pay limited compensation because of its low market value. The think tank Common Wealth puts the figure somewhere between zero and £4 billion, based on a bid for Thames Water by a private equity firm that then withdrew it.

Last month, the cross-party Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee urged the SAR option, saying it would be “cost-neutral”. It criticised the “opaque consortium” of hedge funds and other creditors for claiming they had the public interest at heart, not least because they want to be let off the fines they owe.

“We believe Thames Water can be turned around, but not by giving the keys back to the people who have been joyriding in the family car,” said Alistair Carmichael, Liberal Democrat committee chair.

But Thames Water is a special case. A SAR would only apply to other water companies if their financial performance worsened or they were judged to be in serious breach of their statutory duties. The costs of bringing the entire industry into public ownership are hugely contested.

Last year Defra assessed the bill to be around £100 billion, basing it on companies’ regulatory capital value (RCV), assessed by Ofwat, which it believes to be the “closest proxy for the total value of the sector’s debt and equity”.

Frontier Economics, commissioned by Thames Water’s creditors’ group, this year put the figure as high as £144 billion also using RCV.

In 2019, Moody’s credit rating agency came up with a figure of £14.5 billion using a different calculation.

Common Wealth says RCV is a “construct of the regulator” that over-estimates companies’ true worth because of the way it treats their debt.

It says the SAR process should be used for the worst companies – Thames Water and also South East Water, because of its breach of duties – meaning zero cost for the taxpayer.

The next ones, the “very bad” for polluting, should be forced to release their full repair costs. If they then can’t comply with their statutory duties, they should be put in a SAR and on to public ownership at zero cost. The “bad but better” rest of the companies might need compensating up to £12 billion in total, says Common Wealth.

Public ownership is not synonymous with nationalisation. It could include mutuals and co-ops. But “public ownership is what 90 per cent of the world does and what 82 per cent of the British public want because they see the failures of privatisation,” says Common Wealth’s most recent report.

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What people are saying

“My constituents in Morecambe and Lunesdale are really cross about the level of their water bills, and they get more cross when they see the profits being taken out of the water industry.” - Labour MP Lizzi Colling

“Around 80 per cent of water companies are foreign owned – in other words, the majority of their shareholders live abroad, in all kinds of places, including China. Most users of water would be shocked to hear that. The government have an obligation not to allow key utilities to fall into foreign hands.” -Conservative MP Sir John Hayes

“The whole investment world must realise that while we believe in markets and competition, we will not allow the taxpayer to be shafted.” - Reform MP Richard Tice calls for Thames Water to be placed in a SAR

“We need public ownership now, and we have all the tools we need to make it happen. Forget compensation for shareholders and creditors – these are insolvent companies. It’s time to take them back.” - Green Party deputy leader Rachel Millward

What happens next

A repeal of a ban on public ownership does not amount to advocating for public ownership. The government will be uneasy at incurring any additional costs that ownership entails, especially as it remains committed to Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules. Nor do some ministers around Burnham want to be seen as unfriendly to industry, defy its lobbying or deter future investors.

On the other hand, even Starmer’s government was willing to nationalise British Steel. A clearer picture will emerge in environment secretary Angela Eagle’s new bill about Burnham’s 10-year journey to a very different water system. ■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023. He writes regularly for The Lead to untangle the issues facing the UK and also reporting on social justice and other issues across the North of England as part of our award-winning The Lead Local titles.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ed@thelead.uk and you can see every edition of The Lead Untangles so far.

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More than 5,500 days have now passed since Andrew Dilnot’s commission into England’s adult care system declared it “not fit for purpose” and in need of “urgent and lasting reform”. But it has still not arrived.

How did we get here? And why haven’t we been able to get anywhere further? As Andy Burnham and Baroness Louise Casey gear up for another attempt at lasting adult care reform, The Lead looks at the false starts and failures that brought us here – which go back almost three decades.

Burnham 1.0 and the “death tax” debacle

Adult care isn’t easily defined. It broadly takes two forms – “residential care” provided in care homes, and “domiciliary care” provided in people’s own homes by live-in carers or care visitors.

As far back as 1997, Tony Blair’s New Labour government launched a royal commission into adult care, only to then reject its calls for tax-funded free personal care and more support with residential care costs.

Scotland adopted free personal care in 2002, but little happened in England until July 2009, not long after Burnham became health secretary, when Gordon Brown’s government published its own green paper on adult care reform.

The green paper set out the problems. There was a postcode lottery in who qualified for care support. People had to fund all their own care until their savings had dwindled, and their care costs could vary dramatically and unpredictably. Those who needed a care home were often forced to sell their own home to fund it.

In March 2010 a white paper arrived setting out the Labour government’s decision: “it is time to build a comprehensive National Care Service that is universal and free when people need it”. People would make compulsory contributions to a state insurance system during their working lives, and the state would then pay all their basic care costs when they needed it.

But there was no detail on the size of these “contributions”. If Labour won the 2010 election, they would instead set up a commission to work this out, with implementation delayed to the late 2010s.

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion Labour was kicking difficult decisions into the post-election grass. But the political damage had already been done — in February 2010 reports had emerged that Burnham was backing a compulsory “inheritance levy” on people’s estates when they died in order to help fund adult care. Within a day of the reports, the Tories were putting up billboard adverts around the country attacking the proposals as a “death tax”. Secret talks to get cross-party agreement on care reform collapsed.

No such levy appeared in Labour’s manifesto. They lost the election because of the 2008 financial crisis. But the death tax assault had a lasting effect; limiting the political risks governments were willing to take to fund adult care, and establishing reform as a “hot potato” that few wanted to touch.

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Dilnot and the false dawn

The incoming Tory-Lib Dem coalition ditched Labour’s proposals and instead asked independent economist Dilnot to chair a commission to come up with care reform proposals.

But meanwhile the government started enacting heavy spending cuts. Council-funded adult care services took a big hit, especially in poorer areas.

Even in the first year of austerity, most councils cut their social care budgets. A few raised their eligibility criteria, meaning only people with the severest needs would qualify for support, while the majority cut the number or length of care visits to people living at home. Day centres and care homes were closing and care charges for services users were rising.

This was the rapidly worsening backdrop when the Dilnot commission’s report was published in July 2011.

The report rejected Labour’s proposed universal free adult care. “Evidence suggests that those countries that have introduced full social insurance schemes have cut back on care packages and eligibility in response to fiscal pressures,” the report warned. “The consequence of this is that unmet need is rising and people are still left exposed to very high care costs.”

Instead, the Dilnot commission suggested a £35,000 cap on individuals’ care contributions – everything above this would be met by the state.

In addition, more people in residential care would receive means tested support. Those with assets worth less than £100,000, including the value of their home, would have their care needs at least partly funded by the state. A financial means test would still be used to determine who was too poor to pay towards their care, while people who needed adult care by the age of 40 wouldn’t have to pay anything.

The report estimated around a third of adult care users would benefit.

The Dilnot report led to the Care Act 2014. This ensured people would no longer have to sell their own homes during their lifetime to pay residential care charges. It also tackled the postcode lottery with an England-wide eligibility threshold.

But beyond that things were less clear. The Care Act created the legal framework to cap care costs – at £72,000, well above Dilnot’s suggested £35,000 – and raise the means-test thresholds so more people could get state support. But it required ministers to actually implement these measures. This was meant to happen in 2016, but after the Tories won the 2015 election they kicked it back to 2020. It was the start of a pattern.

Even some aspects of the Care Act that were implemented lost their lustre. For example, the Act gave care users the broad right to have their council funding provided directly to them as “direct payments” so they could spend it on meeting their own needs.

It was meant to give care users more independence. But councils are becoming more restrictive in what care users can spend their direct payments on – an attack on their independence.

“Councils are tightening up,” says Jade Hamnett, a care user who chairs ILG Community, a national support group for employers of PAs. “They’re restricting budgets, putting in place ridiculous monitoring that didn’t exist even a few years ago.”

She says that initially, councils accepted many different ways that care users could meet their needs – “specialist physio, art classes that increase your wellbeing … now, you say to your council ‘could I have a specialist physio’, they’re acting like you’re asking for them to buy you drugs”.

“A lot of [the Care Act] is quite good,” says direct payments specialist David Ashley, “but it’s never really operated as it should have done.”

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The dementia tax disaster

Theresa May’s 2017 election manifesto pledged to introduce a £100,000 “floor” so that, “no matter how large the cost of care turns out to be, people will always retain at least £100,000 of their savings and assets, including value in the family home”. This was a massive increase on the existing floor – about seven times higher.

But there was a catch. When means-testing a homeowner’s assets, the value of their home is taken into account in relation to residential care costs – but not domiciliary care costs.

The Tory manifesto pledged to abolish that distinction and include housing in all adult care means tests – meaning many homeowning domiciliary care users would lose out on state support. It was a hasty makeweight to fund the £100,000 floor.

The backlash was immediate. Dilnot said that under the plans “the majority of people who are getting care not in a residential care home but in their own home, will find themselves worse off”.

Dubbed the “dementia tax”, the plans sank the Tories’ election campaign, cost them their parliamentary majority, and sealed adult care reform’s reputation as a political minefield – when in truth it was an ill-judged policy thrown into an election campaign out of nowhere.

The longest grass

The Dilnot cost cap wasn’t implemented in 2020. The following year, Boris Johnson pledged to implement an £86,000 cost cap in 2023, which Rishi Sunak then pushed back to 2025 — taking it beyond the last possible date for what was then the next general election.

Meanwhile, Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting asked Andrew Harrop, head of the Fabian Society think tank, to come up with proposals for a National Care Service.

By the time Harrop’s recommendations were published in 2023, things had gotten much worse since Dilnot’s report in 2011. Austerity had wreaked havoc with council finances. The number of adults receiving adult care services fell 29% between 2008/09 and 2013/14. Social care staffing was in crisis.

Indeed, this five-alarm fire was part of why the Dilnot reforms hadn’t happened. Bill Morgan, an adviser under the Conservatives, recently told the Financial Times the Treasury was against a cap on care costs as it wanted to spend the money on improving services and taking pressure off the NHS instead: “Prioritising a free-to-use social care service risks using scarce public funds for private wealth protection rather than addressing the very real quality and capacity issues.”

After all, “private wealth protection” is in one sense the point of limiting people’s lifetime care costs.

Harrop’s report reflected the greater range of problems that now needed fixing. Amid 165,000 vacancies, it called for a national fair pay agreement to cover the entire adult care workforce. It said more people ought to be found eligible for support than was happening in practice, and implied the Care Act wasn’t always being followed. It suggested a dedicated central government grant to councils to fund the National Care Service, to help address local government’s dire finances.

The report also ranged beyond previous efforts, paying more attention to co-producing adult care systems with the people who would be using them, and embedding individual rights in law. Harrop called for the creation of a National Care Service “constitution” and appeals system, bringing the UN right to independent living into domestic law.

Harrop was more circumspect on care charges. He called for “immediate steps” on charging reform, suggesting options such as making short-term care free. Over time, more measures could be added – maybe the Dilnot cost cap, free care for those with lifelong disabilities, or reform of means testing.

But he didn’t adopt Labour’s old proposals for universal free care: “Charging reform is only one of several potential priorities for extra spending and any reforms need to be balanced against competing pressures and introduced in the context of the government’s overall financial position. That means for the foreseeable future, there will be a mix of adult care services that are free of charge, and services that require a financial contribution.”

Streeting welcomed the report and then essentially ignored it. Labour’s 2024 manifesto committed to a fair pay agreement in adult care — work on which is now underway but won’t be complete until 2028. But beyond that the manifesto made no meaningful commitments to care reform.

Was Streeting hamstrung by Labour’s caution around tax and spending, or was he simply more interested in the NHS side of his brief? Either way, weeks after winning power Labour killed off the long-delayed Dilnot cost reforms — meaning the adult care means tests are still frozen in time from 2010.

The government asked Baroness Casey to head up yet another commission on care reform essentially as a holding position. It was Burnham’s decision to accelerate the commission’s work that has put adult care at the top of the government’s in-tray.

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So where now?

There’s no doubt Casey’s eventual proposals will have to be phased in over time – the more ambitious the reform, the longer the timeframe. Burnham said in his Labour conference speech that a National Care Service, free at the point of use, will be in Labour’s next manifesto at an election expected in 2029.

So far there is little detail — inevitably, as Casey won’t report back until next summer. But Burnham fleshed out his thinking on X this week, placing heavy emphasis on older people’s care and pledging “free personal care – support with the most basic human needs: eating, dressing and bathing”, which is potentially quite a narrow conception of free adult care.

Disabled people’s organisations working under the umbrella of the Roadmap to Independent Living Coalition this year set out a three-phase route to a free universal National Care Service based on independent living – crucially, with people’s needs determining financial costs, rather than costs determining how councils assess people’s needs.

“The assessment of need, it’s fixed at the moment to hide unmet need, to meet the amount of resources [councils] have got. So it’s a scam,” says Rick Burgess of the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People. “If we just create change around the edges and don’t change that actual engine of injustice, it will be a completely wasted opportunity.”

Casey has the opportunity to focus on parts of the adult care system that have been marginalised in previous reform proposals. Unpaid carers, often family members, are central to the care of many elderly and disabled people, but councils frequently use them to fill gaps in provision, leaving them overworked.

While Harrop proposed a duty on councils to discuss unpaid carers’ wishes and giving them a legal right to short breaks, other reform plans have tended to overlook them.

“The central test for reform is: does the system give people genuine choice about whether and how much unpaid care they provide,” says Emily Holzhausen, director of policy and public affairs at charity Carers UK. “Does it allow carers to have a life outside of caring? Will it provide the amount of support necessary so that carers do not end up in poverty? Or does it continue to assume that families will absorb whatever formal services cannot deliver?”

Another group often ignored in reform proposals are care users who rely on benefits — the focus is nearly always on protecting people’s savings and housing wealth.

Under current rules, councils must include income from most benefits when deciding how much care users can afford to pay in charges. By contrast, councils must exclude income from paid work. This is the complete reverse of nearly any other means test, as it favours people with more income over people with less income.

“The group that come to our meetings in tears saying ‘I’ve got a new care bill, I can’t decide whether to pay my heating bill this month or my care charges’, is that group – people on benefits, those who are already too disabled to work and are being punished for being unable to work,” says Hamnett.

Councils are also meant to exclude money required for disability-related needs when calculating the means test. But what councils accept as disability-related spending can vary. Hamnett’s council refused to accept her wheelchair as a disability-related expense. “I honestly cannot tell you the trauma this causes when you’ve got a council swearing blind ‘that’s nothing to do with us’.”

Making adult care free doesn’t automatically solve this — first, it would likely take years to achieve under a phased reform programme; second, there’s the risk that what is counted as “adult care” shrinks to make free care cheaper.

And reform won’t come cheap. This year the Health Foundation think tank estimated that free personal and nursing care for over-65s would cost £6.5bn a year, while NHS-style free universal and comprehensive adult care would cost £18.5bn a year by 2035/36. A Dilnot-style “cap and floor” system would cost £4bn a year by 2035/36.

More preventative care could save money by reducing the need for expensive provision, but those savings wouldn’t come through for many years.

“It’s shameful, to be honest, that politicians have put point scoring before fixing this issue,” Burnham said in his speech on social care in July. “But that’s what’s happened.”

It’s understandable he might think that, having been on the receiving end of the Tories’ “death tax” attack in 2010. But why wouldn’t there be disagreement about a new inheritance tax?

It isn’t point scoring that has delayed care reform, but disagreements on how to find the money and what to spend it on. That isn’t “low politics”; it’s what the business of politics is. What’s been missing is a leader willing to lead. ■

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About the author: Chaminda Jayanetti is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs - housing, welfare and public services.

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This piece is the latest in our Burnham Britain series, where we're testing the new agenda against the reality on the ground.

So far we've looked at what his conference speech tells us about the kind of premiership he wants to run, asked whether he can really end rough sleeping by Christmas, and revealed in an exclusive that more than a third of people at risk from cuts to universal credit disability payments are over 50, a group facing some of the toughest barriers to work.

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Now we've gone back over the long, painful history of adult care. There's plenty more dig into, and we'll keep asking the same questions: what's actually being promised, who pays, and who gets left out.

If there's an area you want us to look at, let us know in the comments.

Whether you consider his political strategy to be savvy social networking or a selling out to Instagram, Andy Burnham’s grasp of what makes politics relatable is his key strength as prime minister. He demonstrated this with an unexpected but important announcement on his very first day in office: to end rough sleeping across England by Christmas.

Although designed to highlight his social conscience, this was also a straightforward retail policy. Alongside the rising cost of food and fuel, the sight of people sleeping rough in our towns and cities is one of the most tangible sights of the degradation of the British economy and the fraying of the social safety net. People are upset by it. They notice it and they wonder what is going wrong. That’s why sorting it out is one of the first promises the new prime minister has made.

Burnham’s plan is to roll out a version of the project that led to huge success in reducing rough sleeping in Greater Manchester between 2019 and 2021 across the whole country. But can the principles of one small scale scheme – which only suppressed rough sleeping numbers for a short period of time – solve a wider, national issue? Experts are divided.

There are lessons to learn from Manchester’s progress, but other projects at home and overseas could provide far better guidance for Burnham as he works with councils to meet the tight Christmas deadline.

What worked?

Burnham’s Greater Manchester scheme was one of the first projects in the country to implement the principles of an idea called Housing First. Inspired by work in Finland and elsewhere in Scandinavia, this approach offers anyone facing homelessness access to stable accommodation first, before tackling any other social issues that a rough sleeper might also be facing – such as mental illness, substance addiction, or unemployment. In the past, agencies would often refuse support for anyone who failed to address their alcoholism or drug use, but these schemes focused on the most urgent need: shelter and safety.

Like elsewhere in Europe, Housing First has a very high success rate in Manchester. The original £1.5m scheme set up by Burnham as Greater Manchester mayor included support and investment from local councils, charities and business and focused on making sure vulnerable people had access to support from the first night they came to sleep outside. Burnham’s “bed every night” scheme created 600 new beds in emergency accommodation.

It was introduced in 2019 and two years later it had housed more than 450 people, with 269 still working with the Greater Manchester programme. The rough sleeping count, though, tells a much more complex story. Initially it plunged from 268 people per month to just 90, which also coincided with national efforts to get “everyone in” during the covid pandemic, but after 2021 it began to rise again. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority put that down to attraction of the project bringing vulnerable people to the area because they knew they would get support but there were other flaws too – and these will need to be addressed if the national target is to be met.

Nevertheless an independent evaluation showed that in its first three years it reduced rough sleeping 20 per cent points faster than the rest of the country thanks to the combined efforts of all agencies.

Housing First depends heavily on a shared set of values, particularly from all local councils in a region but also voluntary and charity sector groups too. In Greater Manchester that was straightforward to foster as almost all local authorities were under Labour control. Even though it is officially government policy to operate a Housing First approach in all homelessness cases, including rough sleeping, across the country there is huge divergence of opinion on the social value of investing heavily in vulnerable people.

According to Megan Hector, senior policy manager at Homeless Link, before Burnham’s plan was introduced the vague commitment to Housing First came with a “general lack of ambition” which has been used as an excuse to avoid following these guidelines by councils either struggling so hard for cash they can’t face up to their homelessness problem, or who are ideologically opposed to the Housing First philosophy – or both.

The government has now created a single pot of cash to fund rough sleeping prevention work but without clear instructions or incentives guiding how to use it, these principles could go on being ignored. Burnham’s push for widespread devolution is a risk to the success of this project. Differences of opinion could unpick the core elements of what has been found to work effectively, and so homelessness charities are together calling for the government to issue strict guidelines around how this money should be spent locally to support rough sleepers. “We’re still trying to find out how far Andy is going to go. It will remain to be seen to what ends he will have to, with the carrot and the stick,” Hector says.

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Quality control

London’s City Hall also made major improvements in reducing rough sleeping in London following a similar approach to Greater Manchester. In the last year, that work has been surprisingly effective. There were 3,959 people recorded as sleeping rough in the capital in April to June 2026, a decrease of 10% on the April to June period in 2025. There were 1,685 people recorded sleeping rough for the first time in the first quarter this year, 16% lower than the same time last year.

Experts say the lesson to learn from London’s success is to ensure there is sufficient high quality accommodation available to provide emergency support for rough sleepers to move quickly off the street and into supported housing. In London, the volume of housing stock has made this easier to achieve than some areas, but the real benefit has come from the freedom and funding that devolution has offered.

“London does have a lot of really effective provision. I think areas where devolved funding and have been able to develop much better partnership working with the voluntary and community sector,” Hector says. In Leeds, a similar focus on bringing charities together to provide enough accommodation options has led to the city sustaining a rough sleeping rate half that of Nottingham and Liverpool per 100,000 people.

But success in raising bed numbers has come with a cost.According to Ben Reeve-Lewis, founder of Safer Renting and a legal advisor to councils on private rent, there has been a rush of supported housing providers set up to offer accommodation drawn in by the enhanced rate of housing benefit offered for providers of housing with additional support for vulnerable tenants. In reality, they are making no efforts to scaffold their residents’ lives and often create a new revolving door of homelessness once the extra funding provided by the local authority runs out.

Reeve-Lewis says he saw one provider in Enfield supporting 20 homeless women across two properties, claiming the enhanced rate and yet offering nothing more than a 10 minute phone call each month asking if they were OK. As soon as this failure of service was exposed and challenged by the local authority, the provider “showed their true colours” and all the women were evicted.

This pattern is being repeated all over the country. For councils who are short on funding, distinguishing a rogue landlord from a legitimate community service provider takes time and money. “So much money is being given away and the problem of rough sleeping is being exacerbated,” says Reeve Lewis. “Local authorities are so desperate that they just don’t ask any questions and put people in the most awful places without even a visit. There’s a whole market for it: a racket.

“In Birmingham they’ve spent so much money every year on supported accommodation where providers aren’t providing any support. It’s a big problem, and they are tackling it - but not everywhere is.”

Repeated exposure to bad support only entrenches the cycle of homelessness for rough sleepers. In Liverpool and Bradford, councils have introduced regular, detailed checks on any landlord or community provider offering housing to the local authority. Reeve Lewis says that to be successful Burnham must instruct all councils to not only focus on the provision of emergency housing but on whether it’s actually doing the job it promises to do, as is already happening in these outlier cities.

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Counting correctly

One of the trickiest problems in understanding rough sleeping is getting the numbers right. Every council carries out regular counts, but these often miss women. Almost all services claim that female rough sleeping is rare, but that is not the case. It’s just invisible and under-served.

According to Jasmine Basran, head of policy and campaigns at homelessness charity Crisis, research consistently demonstrates that there are 10 times the number of women sleeping rough than accounted for in the annual, national snapshot figures shared nationally. “There’s a well identified issue of knowing that women are under-counted on the streets because they hide for safety. Women’s provision is really lacking.”

This is another area that Leeds has tackled effectively. A pilot scheme pairing homeless women with a supported housing placement found that wraparound support led to almost all participants still sustaining their tenancies a year after being given a secure home. The scheme was also found to reduce other issues for the women including exposure to domestic violence and coercion - frequent drivers of homelessness. Councils must spend some of the money allocated specifically to marginalised groups, including LGBT people, that may be hidden in the data to be successful by Christmas.

Ultimately, though, cutting rough sleeping is only the most visible element of a much wider housing crisis across Britain, and most evident in the cities where that crisis is felt most acutely. Burnham may wish to create a homelessness support system that apes Finland, but today that simply isn’t possible. “We’re campaigning to change the system,” says Hector, “but there are challenges. We need a massive increase in housing supply in order to do that.” The success of Housing First requires the security of a strong, inclusive benefits system and enough decent homes to house those in need. In the current global economy, even Finland is now struggling with that. It’s own rough sleeping population is rising again. ■

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About the author: Hannah Fearn is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs. She was comment editor of The Independent for seven years, and has previously worked for The Guardian, Times Higher Education and Inside Housing.

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Have you ever heard of NIMTO?

Neither had I, until a sunny Monday afternoon at Labour Party Conference, when Lord Toby Harris, Chair of the National Preparedness Commission, introduced a room full of delegates to the phrase.

No, it’s not a soft drink made in Manchester, nor a type of pocket mint, but a rather brilliant acronym for the foibles of modern politics: Not In My Term of Office.

Politicians know that Britain has enormous problems that need fixing, yet they also know fixing them will be expensive, disruptive and unpopular. So they put them off, commission a review, kick them into the next parliament and hope that someone else will have to deal with the consequences.

Harris’s point was that this is not just political cowardice, but a structural problem.

Governments are judged on what they can deliver within the narrow window between elections. They are less likely to be rewarded for spending billions preparing for a crisis that might not happen for ten years, or for taking difficult decisions whose benefits will be enjoyed by somebody else.

The result is a country that has spent years putting off difficult decisions — and is now increasingly exposed by the things it failed to prepare for.

By Tuesday morning, the skies over Liverpool had turned grey, the rain was coming in sideways and the wind had picked up. Inside the conference hall, things remained remarkably buoyant. The infighting that had left a dark cloud over the event last year had, for now at least, subsided. Andy Burnham was being greeted as the man who might actually get things done. The slogan — and the mood — was Hope Again.

I spent most of my time outside the hall, chairing a series of fringe events over the week on growth, resilience, defence and the challenges facing Britain’s infrastructure and supply chains. The message, repeatedly, was that Britain is not as prepared as it thinks.

A combination of austerity, Brexit and short-termism has left us reliant on countries whose interests will not always align with ours. Defence, energy, infrastructure and industrial capacity all have vulnerabilities that cannot be fixed by the next budget, let alone the next news cycle.

And these problems are competing with things that voters understandably care about much more immediately: energy bills, schools, hospitals, immigration, and the cost of living. It is difficult to make the political case for spending billions preparing for a crisis that may never arrive when people are worried about next month’s bills.

There was hope, certainly. But there was also a nagging sense that hope, on its own, might not be enough.

The night before Burnham’s big speech, conference bars and receptions were spilling over with chattering excitement about what he was going to announce. “Something big is coming,” one minister told me. They weren’t wrong.

What followed was an unusually ambitious speech: thoughtful, focused and, at times, overflowing with passion and raw emotion. Burnham set out his desire to build a National Care Service in memory of his father, who died only weeks ago, funded in part by changing the triple lock. He backed electoral reform. And, perhaps most strikingly, he argued for a serious conversation about Britain’s relationship with the European Union. A day later, when asked on the Today programme whether rejoining the EU should be considered, the Prime Minister said they were all on the table: “We could go all the way.”

And so it all begins.

Burnham’s speech was, in some ways, an exercise in calling the electorate’s bluff.

“I have given you what you often say is missing from politics,” Burnham concluded. “Honesty, ideas and a clear direction for the country we all love.” The message was thus: You say you want change and are sick of politicians who dodge difficult decisions and offer little beyond managerialism. So here are some difficult decisions — will you back me? Finally, he was calling time on NIMTOism.

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Social care has been an albatross around the neck of successive governments, Burnham’s own included. Electoral reform has been debated for decades without being delivered. The triple lock is Westminster’s sacred cow. And the consequences of Brexit are becoming so difficult to ignore, even Nigel Farage has deemed it a failure.

Burnham told his conference that he sees these are the conversations we have spent years avoiding, but it’s time to have them.

A National Care Service would be a huge undertaking, requiring major political upheaval, almost certainly further tax increases and difficult conversations about the redistribution of wealth and the role of the state. But it is precisely the kind of undertaking that has been deferred for years because every government knows the politics are easier if the problem remains somebody else’s.

There was, though, one conspicuous absence from Burnham’s speech.

Immigration was mentioned three times, each time in the context of control. There was no comparable passage about safe routes for asylum seekers, the social and cultural contribution made by migrants or the extent to which Britain’s economy relies upon migrant workers.

That felt notable, particularly against the backdrop of the far-right marches which have swept parts of the country this summer. There is a difficult conversation to be had about migration, but honesty must run both ways. Britain can talk about pressures on housing, public services and infrastructure while also admitting that the country needs migrants.

A recent OBR calculation found that losing 100,000 migrants from the UK would cost the Treasury around £7bn, and yet we rarely hear a politician say talk about the economic contribution of migrants. If Burnham really wants to slay sacred cows, perhaps that one should be next.

Because the end of NIMTO cannot simply mean making difficult decisions about the things other people have traditionally been protected from losing. It has to mean being honest about trade-offs, about how what’s good for society may — on occasion — inconvenience or challenge us, and how the social contract requires us to sometimes put the interests or views of one group aside for the good of the country.

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Perhaps that all explains the slightly strange duality of Labour conference. On the hall floor: Hope Again. Out on the fringes: anxiety about just how much needs to change to make that hope meaningful — and whether the government is quite ready to summon the political bravery to have the many fights that need to be had.

There was no shortage of confidence in Liverpool. But underneath it, a deep, niggling recognition that diagnosing the problem is rather different than solving it. That, ultimately, is the core of NIMTO.

Burnham is right that some of these decisions simply cannot be put off any longer. The question is whether politics — and voters —are ready for what comes with finally making them. ■

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About the author: Zoë Grünewald is Westminster Editor at The Lead and a freelance political journalist and broadcaster.

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Our award-winning local journalism at The Lead has been turning heads and gaining thousands of subscribers - as we drop into inboxes every Wednesday and Sunday.

We’re expanding our team to help build on the work undertaken since 2024 as we’ve launched local newsletters and publications across the North of England and ensure our journalism is making an even bigger impact and being more widely read than ever before.

This isn’t about writing more stories, we already dig deep and tell stories the communities and towns we serve need telling - it’s about ensuring these stories are getting their fair space in the timelines of how people now consume their news.

Role #1: Story Distribution Editor

The Lead is looking for a creative and proactive Story Distribution Editor to help get our original local journalism in front of more people.

This role is all about finding new ways to share our stories, reaching the communities they matter to and making sure our journalism has an impact beyond our own website and channels.

You’ll take our written journalism and find opportunities to share it across social media, online communities and other media outlets.

We’re looking for someone who understands how different online communities work, knows what makes people stop scrolling and is excited about helping independent local journalism reach a wider audience.

This is a hybrid role, combining home working with time at Society1 co-working hub in Preston alongside other members of The Lead Local team.

Key info

Salary: £28,000-£33,600 per annum dependant on experience

Location: Hybrid: Home-based (North West of England) and co-working in Society1 in Preston

Contract: This is a fixed-term role until end of March 2027, this is a full-time role of 37.5 hours per week although there is flexibility around working hours

Key responsibilities

Story distribution and audience engagement

• Find creative ways to share The Lead’s journalism across a wide range of online platforms and communities.

• Work to promote stories through our owned and operated channels, including The Lead’s social media channels, as well as third-party platforms such as Reddit.

• Identify relevant online communities and conversations where our journalism could add value, and build relationships with those audiences.

• Adapt how stories are presented to suit different platforms and audiences, while maintaining the accuracy and integrity of our journalism.

• Monitor how content performs and use audience engagement and other insights to identify what works well and work with The Lead Local’s team to understand how correspondents can input into our distribution strategy

Media outreach and partnerships

• Identify opportunities for The Lead’s stories to be picked up, shared or featured by other media outlets, organisations and relevant online platforms.

• Build relationships with journalists, publishers, community groups and other organisations that could help amplify our work.

• Proactively pitch relevant stories to external outlets and look for opportunities to extend their reach and impact.

Learning and development

• Track the reach and engagement of distributed stories and use these insights to improve future activity.

• Share ideas and learning with the wider team to help strengthen The Lead’s distribution strategy.

• Experiment with new approaches to reach different communities and audiences.

About you

You’ll ideally have:

• Experience creating, distributing or promoting content across social media and other online platforms.

• A good understanding of how online communities work and how to engage with them in an authentic and thoughtful way.

• The ability to spot opportunities to get stories in front of new audiences.

• Experience creating visual content for social media, or the confidence and willingness to develop these skills.

• Strong written communication skills and an eye for what makes a story engaging.

• A proactive approach, with the confidence to try new ideas and learn from what works and what doesn’t.

• Good organisational skills and the ability to manage your own workload.

• An interest in local journalism, community issues and the role independent media plays in society.

What you’ll bring

You’ll be someone who thinks beyond simply posting a link and waiting for people to read it. You’ll understand that different audiences discover and engage with stories in different ways, and you’ll enjoy finding the right approach for each platform and community.

You’ll be comfortable working independently, bringing ideas to the table and working collaboratively with the editorial team to make sure The Lead’s journalism reaches as many relevant people as possible.

How to apply: Send a copy of your CV and a covering letter of no more than 250 words to ed@thelead.uk by 5pm on Tue 27 October. We hope to shortlist and interview in late October/early November.

Role #2: Visual Storytelling Editor

The Lead is looking for someone to take our predominantly written output and help bring our award-winning, agenda-setting journalism to life in visual formats.

How people consume their media is changing rapidly, from podcasts, to reels, to swipe-through visual graphics, to watching YouTube clips.

We need someone to help upskill both our editors, correspondents and our stories to be fit for how people engage with news in 2026 and beyond.

This is a hybrid role, combining home working with time at Society1 co-working hub in Preston alongside other members of The Lead Local team and also working on location with our correspondents across The Lead Local network in the North of England (Southport, Blackpool, Lancashire, Teesside, Stoke-on-Trent and Calderdale and other North of England locations as ).

Key info

Salary: £28,000-£33,600 per annum dependant on experience

Location: Hybrid: Home-based (North West of England) and co-working in Society1 in Preston, as well as various locations in N.West England as the role demands

Contract: This is a fixed-term role until end of March 2027, this may be one full-time role of 37.5 hours per week or we may offer a number of casual-working freelance contracts depending on the needs of the role.

Note: You must possess a full, clean, driving licence and access to vehicle to apply for this role. Mileage and expenses will be paid if undertaking travel.

Key responsibilities

Visual content and social media

• Turn The Lead’s original journalism into engaging visual content for platforms such as Instagram and TikTok and work with the team to identify opportunities for doing this consistently

• Create social media assets, including swipe-through posts, graphics, illustrations, data-driven graphics and other formats that help bring stories to life.

• Find new and creative ways to present local journalism to audiences who may not otherwise come across it.

• Keep up to date with emerging platforms, social media trends and new ways of reaching audiences, identifying which are relevant to The Lead.

About you

You’ll ideally have:

• Experience creating, distributing or promoting content across social media and other online platforms - especially video-based content and stories

• Able to demonstrate an ability to train individuals in social media storytelling techniques and strategies

• A good understanding of how online communities work and how to engage with them in an authentic and thoughtful way.

• The ability to spot opportunities to get stories in front of new audiences.

• Strong written and graphic skills and an eye for what makes a story engaging.

• A proactive approach, with the confidence to try new ideas and learn from what works and what doesn’t.

• Good organisational skills and the ability to manage your own workload.

• An interest in local journalism, community issues and the role independent media plays in society.

• A full-clean driving licence and access to a vehicle

What you’ll bring

You’ll be someone with a creative mind, who is underpinned by a sound knowledge of how to tell a story and the fundamentals of what makes a great local news story. You’ll have the technical confidence and competence to create compelling stories for the audience of 2026 and beyond, and also inspire and encourage our team to also do so.

You’ll be comfortable working independently, bringing ideas to the table and working collaboratively with the editorial team to make sure The Lead’s journalism reaches as many relevant people as possible and not afraid to tell stories in new and different ways.

How to apply: Send a copy of your CV and a covering letter of no more than 250 words to ed@thelead.uk by 5pm on Tue 27 October. We hope to shortlist and interview in late October/early November.

John Healey’s resignation over defence spending was one of the final nails in Keir Starmer’s coffin.

The former defence secretary felt the former prime minister had been unable to commit the resources necessary to confront Russia’s growing threat, conflict in the Middle East and other challenges, and secure the UK’s leading position within Nato.

Andy Burnham has since inherited a defence spending plan that found an extra £1.5 billion in response to Healey’s complaints, bringing the total to £298 billion over the next four years. But that means cuts to public spending elsewhere, and it still won’t meet government and Nato targets.

Burnham is resisting calls for further cuts in welfare spending, but how will he and Healey, now Chancellor, fund Labour’s commitments, what kit will it pay for, and is there another way to secure the UK’s security?

Background

Defence spending increased during the Cold War, dropped when the Berlin Wall fell, grew again when the UK was involved in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, and then fell sharply once more during the austerity years – by 22 per cent from 2009/10 to 2016/17. Increases since then mean it’s now above 2010 levels, and the UK meets its current commitment to Nato of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence.

But the UK has a “Nato-first” strategy and Nato –under pressure from President Trump to do more on European security – has upped its core spending target to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035. The Labour government inherited procurement disasters, equipment shortages, a recruitment and morale crisis within the armed services, and a delay in renewing its Trident nuclear deterrent, according to Healey’s short-lived successor as defence secretary, Dan Jarvis.

July’s Defence Investment Plan is intended to create “war fighting readiness” from a “more lethal, integrated force”. That means drones, which have emerged as the most effective frontline weapons in conflicts from Ukraine to Africa, and also AI-guided targeting systems, with all the new ethical questions they provoke. But it also includes more prosaic measures such as boosting munitions stockpiles, building combat vessels and investing in barracks, all of which ministers say is already providing a jobs and growth dividend.

Some flesh on the bones came in Healey’s speech to the Labour conference yesterday when he promised £6 billion of contracts for British shipyards to build docks at Faslane to maintain nuclear submarines.

Mark Rutte, Nato secretary-general, called the Defence Industrial Plan a “good step” towards its 3.5 per cent target. So too did defence industry trade association ADS Group. Matthew Savill, director of military services at defence and security think tank RUSI, called it a “bold bet on technological solutions with no margin for error if procurement is not speedy and implementation rapid”. Unions including the GMB and Unite welcomed the jobs it could bring, although others oppose increased defence spending.

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We need more buck for the bang

The Starmer government said it would fund some of the increases in the Defence Investment Plan through a 1 per cent cut in other departments’ capital spending, with additional savings from road building and £2 billion from the Net Zero budget. The row over where the rest is going to come from will only intensify in the lead-up to the Budget on 28 October.

But the Budget won’t contain details of Healey’s own bigger target, expressed previously, of a 3 per cent spending rise by 2030. Instead, decisions on that and a pathway to the Nato 3.5 per cent target will be pushed back to next year’s Treasury spending review.

At Prime Minister’s Questions a fortnight ago, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch asked whether Burnham was “unable” or “just unwilling” to meet the 2030 target. Burnham replied: “This chancellor of all chancellors will be willing to provide that funding to our armed forces.”

Rutte called last week for the UK’s spending review to contain a “credible path” towards 3.5 per cent. But Burnham is resisting calls for it to be paid out of welfare cuts. In April, Lord George Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary and Nato secretary-general who led last year’s Strategic Defence Review, warned the government of “corrosive complacency” over national security. “We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget,” said Robertson who, like many former politicians and government officials, has links to the defence industry.

Badenoch continued the attack on welfare spending at PMQs, pushing plans to reimpose the two-child benefit cap, cut housing benefit and remove the VAT exemption for Motability vehicles. Burnham denied there was a consensus for housing benefit cuts to fund defence, saying it would create unprecedented levels of homelessness.

“I say to the right honourable Lady that, yes, we do everything to support our national security, but it cannot come at the expense of social security. Having strong national security also depends on resilience in our communities. We on the Labour benches will not be forced to choose between the two.”

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What people are saying

“We have got to make the case for more defence investment spending, but what we should not do within the process is allow a distraction from making sure we live within our means.” - Defence secretary Wes Streeting

“The spending review is next year… The threats are now. Argentina is threatening the Falklands – now. Russia is threatening us in the North Sea – now.” - Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition

“All three main UK parties have to accept that at various points over the last 15 years at least, we’ve all taken decisions that were reducing our defence expenditure. We now have to find ways of stepping back up to the plate.” -Baroness Smith of Newnham, Lib Dem defence spokesperson

Is there an alternative?

Last year CND published the Alternative Defence Review, arguing that the UK’s militarised foreign policy risked worsening global conflict, the climate crisis and domestic inequality. It questioned the assumptions of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, its Nato-first defence policy and the AUKUS military pact between Australia, the UK and the US to build nuclear-powered submarines.

Noting that war in Ukraine is deepening despite the West’s support, the Alternative Defence Review’s authors called for a reduction in military spending, an immediate halt to arms exports to countries involved in armed conflict or human rights abuses, including Israel and Gulf states, and transitional funding to move workers and communities out of defence-dependent jobs.

“Our review calls for a shift toward a significantly demilitarised defence strategy rooted in human security and common security – prioritising diplomacy, global co-operation, conflict prevention and investment in health, education, climate resilience, social care, and the creation of well-paid, secure, unionised and socially useful jobs.”

Ian Davis, founder of Nato Watch and associate senior fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, acknowledged Russia’s threats and the need for the UK to play its part in European defence, but warned against writing a “blank cheque” for Nato and sidelining the diplomacy that might bring more security for Ukraine and elsewhere.

“Once military spending becomes the main political signal, the result is self-justifying: more threat means more spending, more spending means more contracts, more contracts mean more momentum for still more spending.”

Paul Rogers, emeritus professor of peace studies at Bradford University, warned Burnham against “delusions of imperial grandeur even half a century after the end of empire”, involving costly aircraft carriers and nuclear arsenals.

Confronting the West’s recent failed wars and accelerating climate breakdown are “essential if the UK is to have a rational approach to international security, but neither is remotely given the space it deserves”. ■

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About the author: Kevin Gopal is a Manchester-based journalist who has returned to freelancing after editing Big Issue North from 2007 until its closure in 2023. He writes regularly for The Lead to untangle the issues facing the UK and also reporting on social justice and other issues across the North of England as part of our award-winning The Lead Local titles.

About The Lead Untangles: In an era where misinformation is actively and deliberately used by elected politicians and where advocates and opposers of beliefs state their point of view as fact, sometimes the most useful tool reporters have is to help readers make sense of the world. If there is something you’d like us to untangle, email ed@thelead.uk and you can see every edition of The Lead Untangles so far.

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Our Zoe is at Labour party conference this week and will be bringing you her verdict, later this week, on what she’s heard and seen during the speeches and events in Liverpool. Make sure you’re subscribed to receive it first.

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It starts with a tragic event; a woman goes missing, a young man attacks children at a dance class, and a female politician is brutally killed in her home.

At first the online discussions are purely factual – dates, times and places – as people process what has happened. But, within hours, neighbourhood Facebook groups are awash with wild theories, prominent X accounts are suggesting a cover-up and hard Right politicians are promising to get to the bottom of it. In a matter of hours, the truth is left gasping for air beneath a tsunami of misinformation.

Conspiracies around major global events are nothing new; there have always been groups of people questioning what most of us accept as reality. What has changed recently are the number of people unwittingly spreading conspiracy narratives, the willingness of right wing politicians to jump on the bandwagon, and the negative effect on both policing and democracy.

The Lead took a deep dive into the misinformation eco-system to explain how conspiracy-spreading techniques are being used to promote an increasingly extreme political agenda.

The Event

On July 9th reports emerged in the press that Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe had died. Noting her age (seventy-eight) and listing the achievements of her political career, no information was given regarding her cause of death and the tone of the articles suggested no wrong-doing.

The following day, new reports emerged. Widdecombe’s death was now the subject of a murder investigation and a twenty-six year old man had been arrested and released without charge. The sudden change, coupled with police suggesting there was no political motivation, blew up comment sections across multiple platforms as everyone suddenly had an opinion on what had happened.

Over the next twelve days, another suspect (28 year old Joshua Kerry) was arrested and charged with murder as four newspapers published images of him taken from social media. These, coupled with two court sketches of Kerry attending bail hearings and a paparazzi photo of him in the back of a police van kick-started the conspiracy machine.

By the end of July 22nd, barely two weeks after Ann’s death, known conspiracists had claimed that Kerry wasn’t a real person, Tommy Robinson incorrectly identified him as a man speaking at a Communist Party conference in 2023, and Nigel Farage wrote an article in the Sun, claiming to have it “on good authority” that Kerry was a “hard Left activist”.

The ongoing police investigation means that we can report on what is being claimed but cannot verify or rule on guilt or the specific claims made against Kerry. This has not stopped the public from speculating, and the people involved are just some of the many who have made their careers capitalising on inflammatory misinformation.

To understand what motivates them, The Lead approached Dr Daniel Jolley, a social psychologist who leads Nottingham University’s programme on the psychology of conspiracy theories. Responding by email, he wrote that there were differences between those who deliberately spread conspiracies and those who believed every word of them and “may see themselves as helping others or exposing wrongdoing”.

For these people, he wrote, “conspiracy theories can give them a sense that they possess important knowledge that others have missed – that they can see what is ‘really’ going on beneath the surface.

“This is particularly appealing if people have a desire to feel unique, particularly within communities where uncovering supposed hidden truths is valued. There can also be a sense of purpose and belonging that comes from being part of a community working together to expose perceived wrongdoing. That connection with similar minded people can be powerful.”

For those whose entire career is dependent upon such people, it is vital that they are kept questioning the narrative around traumatic events.

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The Influencers

Jacqui Deevoy is a well-known voice in conspiracy circles. A former journalist for UK national newspapers, she now writes for her own Substack, conspiracy publication The Light, and the far right website Unity News Network.

Initially gaining traction during Covid, her unevidenced claims that the pandemic was a hoax found her in good company on social media. In 2023, her profile was further boosted during the disappearance and death of Nicola Bulley. Taking the stance of “just asking questions” (a conspiracy-seeding technique which allows for maximum reach with minimum personal accountability) Deevoy wrote multiple posts and articles questioning whether Nicola Bulley was a real person.

Suggesting that Nicola’s death was a false flag, invented by the government to usher in the digital ID and “[micro]chippping system”, Deevoy repeatedly asked to speak to people who knew Nicola in person. As friends of Nicola’s family responded, she dismissed their statements because they only knew her “third hand”.

Deevoy has recently made similar posts about Joshua Kerry. This time she is questioning his existence because a picture of him from 2022 looks different to the picture of him taken in a police van last month, and neither are completely identical to the various court-room sketches. Her questions have been echoed by multiple social media users on various platforms, each offering increasingly bizarre and unevidenced explanations.

The lack of information created by the ongoing police investigation has left a void, which those keen to feel unique and purposeful have filled with every possible conspiracy theory. Already primed by influencers like Deevoy to see any official silence as a cover-up, the longer this persists, the harder they try to fill it with “answers” and the more questions are posed by those keen to monetise their confusion.

When The Lead questioned Deevoy about her claims, she wrote “in these days of A.I. and social media, it’s often difficult to know what’s fake and what’s real, what’s true and what’s false and what’s a psy-op, a false flag operation or a real event. As an old-school journalist, my first port of call has always been to establish if the people involved in a story actually exist.”

Adding that “the way things are right now, I need to see things with my own eyes before I believe it,” Deevoy said she had personally seen “zero proof of [Nicola Bulley’s] existence.” Deevoy also noted that she had never made a concrete statement in this regard and “merely dared to ask the question”.

Regarding the impact of her posts on the families involved, Deevoy wrote that she was unaware of “any statements from any relatives who’ve claimed to be impacted by anything I’ve written”. In 2023, Nicola’s husband described the online obsession with the case as a “monster that got out of control” and comments on Deevoy’s X posts show the immediate responses of people who knew both Nicola and her family.

Dr Jolley explained that people only believing what they have personally experienced came from an “extreme erosion of trust in traditional sources of knowledge” and that “once somebody starts from the position that governments, journalists, police, scientists or other institutions may all be deceptive, the usual ways we establish whether something is true become much less persuasive.” Noting that this can lead to personal experience feeling like the only trustworthy source of evidence, he added that “you can end up with an almost impossible standard of proof…the absence of personally verifiable evidence can itself then become suspicious.”

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The Politicians

Trust in the media is at an all-time low and a recent study conducted by Kings College showed that those who used “alternative media sources” (including social media) were more likely to believe in specific conspiracies about the pandemic, the far-right Great Replacement Theory, or that the Manchester bombing was a hoax.

Hard and Far Right politicians have spent years cultivating this mistrust in much the same way as conspiracy theorists; relying on constituents’ limited knowledge of the law and policing to present a lack of public information as ‘the Establishment’ deliberately seeking to mislead them.

In the wake of the Southport murders, as conspiracists claimed the attack to be a psy-op, Reform party leader Nigel Farage publicly questioned whether the attacker was being monitored by security services, seemingly echoing false claims that had previously been circling social media that the suspect was an asylum seeker and on an M16 watch list. Following the ‘just asking questions’ model he said “police say it was a non–terror incident … I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us?”

The attacker – a British-Rwandan boy named Axel Rudakubana – was seventeen years old and protected from public identification by the Children and Young People’s Act which prevents the naming of anyone under eighteen. Whilst Farage’s followers and those who attended the subsequent riots could conceivably be unaware of this, Farage, as a senior political figure, would be expected to know that reporting restrictions apply to minors.

He employed the same technique when dealing with the death of Ann Widdecombe. Fully aware of the fact that police often withhold information during an active investigation, he used the event to publicly speculate about Kerry’s political leanings and claim that the “Westminster establishment” wanted to “sweep it under the rug”.

The long-term impact of this type of misinformation, according to Dr Jolley, is that it “reduces trust in the institutions and processes that allow democratic societies to function. If elections, journalists, courts, scientists or public bodies are routinely interpreted as part of some hidden plot”, he continued, “it becomes increasingly difficult to establish a shared understanding of events.”

This then leads to “political disengagement, prejudice and, in some circumstances, greater willingness to endorse political violence…[and] when prominent political figures then repeat or legitimise those claims, that can give them an additional layer of credibility. Something that might initially have existed on the fringes can therefore become part of mainstream political discussion.”

The Law

Assistant Chief Constable Arman Mathieson, NPCC lead for information disorder, told us of the impact of these fringe beliefs on policing.

“The growth of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy narratives present a significant challenge”, he wrote. “Events such as Southport demonstrated the real-world risks that can arise when false information spreads rapidly online, undermining investigations, damaging community cohesion and, in some cases, contributing to public disorder and harm”.

“In response, policing has made substantial changes to the way it communicates with the public and media. Forces are providing clearer and faster updates during major incidents, supported by new national guidance on the release of information, including suspect ethnicity and nationality where certain criteria are met…all designed to improve transparency, consistency, and the timely provision of accurate information.

“Recognising the scale of the challenge, policing has established a national Information Disorder Portfolio, supported by policing, Government and partner agencies, to strengthen prevention, response and ethical decision making across forces.”

By encouraging the public to “recognise that misinformation, disinformation and malinformation all exists, and…always carefully consider the information they read and share online, and to seek accurate information from trusted authorities,” Mathieson made it clear that police are hoping to disrupt the misinformation cycle. If their strategy is effective, it will enable the public to rebuild their trust in regulated media outlets and become less vulnerable to conspiracy narratives.

Despite a public warning from the CPS Chief Prosecutor in the Widdecombe case that “proceedings against the defendant are active and he has the right to a fair trial. It is vital that there should be no reporting, commentary or sharing of information which could in any way prejudice these proceedings,” neither Farage nor anyone else sharing misinformation has been censured under Contempt of Court law.

Whether that gap between law and enforcement narrows remains to be seen. But as Mathieson’s own reforms acknowledge, policing can only do so much to contain a misinformation ecosystem that political figures continue to feed — largely without consequence. ■

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About the author: Katherine Denkinson is a freelance investigative journalist with an extensive body of work on conspiracies and the the Far Right, published in multiple UK newspapers. Her reporting is informed by traditional journalistic methods and OSINT techniques, focusing on deep-dives into the murky waters of online communities. She is also the co-host of chart topping podcast, Carrie Jade Does Not Exist.

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This is the first part in our series aiming to tackle the misinformation ecosystem being built in Britain, and digging into the dark forces behind it. Subscribe to The Lead today to support our reporting.

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