Britain has spoken.

The problem is, no one’s quite sure what it’s said.

Some votes are in, many still being counted, and every party is already drawing their own conclusions from broadly the same set of results.

This was never going to be a straightforward electoral test. The national picture is fragmenting, the voting system distorts as much as it reflects, and the usual caveats about localism and potholes still apply.

But amid the noise, a few patterns are beginning to settle. Here are six things we can say with some confidence — and a few others that are likely to keep Westminster occupied for some time yet.

1. Reform’s rise is real — but the numbers are more complicated than the headlines suggest

Nigel Farage will be undoubtedly be celebrating with a champagne or two, but the headline numbers of Reform’s victory mask a more complicated picture.

Last year, Reform won around 41 per cent of all seats contested in England’s local elections. Early overnight estimates this year appeared closer to the low-30s — prompting some commentators to argue the party may already have peaked.

But that interpretation risks overstating what these elections can tell us. As political analyst Sam Freedman pointed out, the early results were heavily skewed towards London and areas less favourable to Reform. As we move into the afternoon, it has become clearer that Reform is continuing to make gains across the North of England, for example, taking fifteen contested seats from Labour in Sunderland.

Even if Reform ultimately underperforms compared to last year’s extraordinary breakthrough, that does not mean the threat to Labour — or the Conservatives — has diminished. “It’s a big, big day, not just for our party, but for a complete reshaping of British politics in every way,” Farage has said. He’s not wrong. Reform had an objectively good night, taking control of four new councils so far: Essex, Havering Newcastle-under-Lyme and Suffolk.

It is important to note that Reform does not need to be universally popular to win power electorally. Crucially, the party is eating directly into the Conservative vote while benefiting from a broader anti-establishment mood. Under first-past-the-post, that matters enormously. A party polling in the high 20s or low 30s nationally can become existentially dangerous if its support is concentrated in the right places and its opponents remain divided.

2. Labour is losing votes to the left and seats to the right

The instinct inside parts of Labour will be to read these results as proof the party needs to chase Reform voters harder. But the evidence points in the opposite direction.

As Professor Sir John Curtice noted during the BBC’s coverage, Labour’s sharpest declines are often occurring in places where the Greens are surging, not where Reform is strongest. Labour may be losing seats to Reform, but it is losing votes to the Greens. The result is a squeeze from both sides.

The Hackney mayoral race, won by the Greens, is symbolic here: a dramatic swing away from Labour in what was once considered one of the party’s safest urban strongholds. Likewise, Manchester — where Labour haemorrhaged support to both Greens and Reform — shows how unstable Labour’s coalition has become.

This matters because Labour’s current strategy risks aggravating both problems at once. The government has already spent months hardening its rhetoric on immigration in an attempt to neutralise Reform. Unsurprisingly, this has not stopped Reform’s advance. On the other side, it seems to be accelerating disengagement among younger, socially liberal and environmentally focused voters who once formed a crucial part of Labour’s electoral base.

3. The electoral system is putting the brakes on the Greens

The Greens are having possibly their strongest election in vote share terms, but once again, the seat totals barely reflect it.

While Labour and the Liberal Democrats each secured roughly 250 seats overnight, the Greens won only around 50 despite operating in a broadly similar range nationally in many areas, because under first-past-the-post, dispersed support is punished.

As Peter Kellner points out, this is the same problem Reform faced before its vote became geographically concentrated enough to convert support into seats. A party can achieve good national numbers and still end up with minimal representation f it cannot efficiently target wards and constituencies.

There are signs, too, that the Greens’ own strategy may be compounding the issue. Some party insiders had hoped for breakthroughs in places such as Westminster, Hammersmith and Ealing, but these did not manifest.

The electoral system can be unforgiving. Britain’s voting system amplifies some forms of support while erasing others entirely. For Green supporters, the numbers may only cause their disillusionment to harden. And who could blame them.

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4. The Conservatives are down — but reports of their death may be exaggerated

These elections were unquestionably bad for the Conservatives, but not quite the total annihilation some had predicted.

At the time of writing, the party lost roughly 44 per cent of the seats it was defending — disastrous by normal standards, but still an improvement on last year’s catastrophic local election performance, when it lost closer to 68 per cent. Gains in places such as Wandsworth and Westminster offer at least some evidence that the Conservative collapse may be slowing.

That said, there is no serious sense in which a main opposition party making net losses can claim victory. The more important reflection is what kind of Conservative Party emerges from this moment. The Lib Dem sweep of Richmond underlines how decisively affluent, socially liberal southern voters have drifted away from the Conservatives.

Meanwhile, Reform is cannibalising large chunks of the party’s older, more culturally conservative base in places like Essex and Suffolk. The coalition that built modern Conservatism is fracturing everywhere, all at once.

That fragmentation may force increasingly uncomfortable decisions. In some councils, viable administrations may now require some form of tacit arrangement or cooperation between Conservatives and Reform. Hampshire and Peterborough are already being discussed in those terms.

If those relationships deepen and are deemed successful, we could perhaps see a thawing between the two rival right-wing parties and prospective electoral plots. But the question will remain which party will come out on top, and whether either can thrive while the other exists.

5. The devolved picture is fragmenting too

The turbulence is not confined to England. In Wales, Labour figures are already openly conceding that a historic run of dominance is coming to an end. Counting is still underway in the Senedd elections, but the expectation is clear: Labour is on course to lose the ground it has held for generations, with senior figures warning that First Minister Eluned Morgan will lose her seat.

The significance cannot be underplayed. Labour has won every Senedd election since devolution began in 1999. But that era now looks set to end, with Plaid Cymru and Reform emerging as the main contenders to shape what comes next.

In Scotland, meanwhile, the SNP is already declaring with confidence that it will be the largest party, even as the full results are still being counted. The Scottish Greens are also reporting gains, while Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has admitted the party has “lost the argument for change” and is “hurting” after a difficult set of results.

Taken together, the picture across the devolved nations points to something broader than a single bad night or a familiar midterm correction. This is not a wobble at the edges, but a loosening across the whole political map. Long-standing governing parties are slipping in England, Scotland and Wales at the same time.

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6. Starmer is in deep, deep trouble

Inside Labour, much of the post-election autopsy will focus on the wisdom of Keir Starmer, the legacy of his former adviser Morgan McSweeney, and whether the party moved too far left or right.

Political Editor of Byline Times Adam Bienkov argues that McSweeney essentially handed Reform “massive gains in Labour’s former Northern heartlands, whilst ensuring a similar surge in support for Zack Polanski’s Green Party in the South.”

He writes: “Not only did McSweeney’s strategy achieve the complete opposite of its stated aim in winning over Reform voters, but the collapse of a big chunk of Labour’s support to the Greens has also actively helped to hand Reform a series of stunning gains across the country.”

But the deeper problem may be more fundamental than positioning. Pollster Luke Tryl recently argued that the voters Keir Starmer should fear most are not those who actively dislike him, but those who once believed in him and have quietly concluded he simply does not have what it takes. Once that perception hardens, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to reverse.

That mood surfaced repeatedly during these elections. On doorsteps, canvassers reported that voters were still raising the government’s early decision to cut the winter fuel allowance — a policy that the government may wish to forget, but the public have certainly not forgiven.

But so too did Starmer himself, a man who insiders fear has suffered a fatal collapse in public confidence. Voters either despise him, distrust him, or simply pity him — three conditions that rarely end well for a prime minister.

This is the danger for Labour. Governments can survive unpopular decisions, but it is far harder to survive the creeping sense that voters no longer believe you instinctively stand on their side.

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Eh, what now?

These elections offer less a single verdict and more a set of overlapping, sometimes contradictory, signals. Parties will spend days insisting they have “understood” the message. In truth, there are several messages here, and they do not yet add up to a coherent whole.

What is clear is that the old political map is breaking. Votes are fragmenting, loyalties are thinning, and the system is increasingly rewarding those who can turn instability into advantage.

For now, there is little to do but take stock. Step away from the noise, let the dust settle — and remember that, whatever this was, it is not finished yet — and it’ll all still be here on Monday morning. ■

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

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A string of Reform UK candidates for this week’s local elections have made violent, Islamaphobic, racist and antisemetic comments, according to a recently-released dossier.

As part of its local election campaign, the Labour Party released a report identifying Reform UK candidates “with views that are extreme, bizarre and offensive”. From supporting fascism and outright racism to anti-NHS sentiment, Reform Revealed: The People Behind Reform contains information on 45 candidates, including two who were covered by The Lead’s correspondents in Southport and Lancashire.

At least 16 candidates had shared conspiracy theories, 12 had made Islamophobic comments, 10 supported fascist and far-right agitators like Tommy Robinson and Britain First’s Paul Golding, four expressed or endorsed homophobic and sexist views, three were antisemitic, and two posted pro-Russian propaganda.

Among those posting conspiratorial and anti-Islam comments was the Reform UK candidate for Birkdale Ward, Mark Ormsby. As The Southport Lead reported last week, Ormsby repeatedly shared videos uploaded by far right figures Tommy Robinson and Paul Golding among a string of Islamophobic content. As well as frequently referring to government figures as “treacherous”, he regularly compared UK policing to the Gestapo and repeated two-tier policing conspiracies in a feed which was almost entirely devoted to anti-Islam posts.

In 2024, Golding posted an image of Humza Yousaf leading prayers as the then Scottish First Minister and wrote: “Scotland. Conquered by mass immigration.” In response, Ormsby commented: “Unbelievable. Tirkeys [sic] voting for Christmas except Christmas would be banned. How could we be so suicidal?”

Neither Reform’s Southport or Sefton branches responded to questions from The Southport Lead about the incident.

Meanwhile, in Lancashire, Reform UK backed its Blackburn South-East candidate Andy Mahon, telling The Lancashire Lead the party “believes in freedom of speech.”

In a series of now deleted Facebook posts on his personal account, Mahon used the ‘n’ word, made sexist and offensive remarks about new Green MP for Gorton and Denton Hannah Spencer, and references to former Labour deputy leader and Angela Rayner being overweight.

The posts also included homophobic remarks about health secretary Wes Streeting and posts to suggest Prime Minister Keir Starmer would appoint paedophiles such as Gary Glitter and Jeffery Epstein as ministers.

Some of the most shocking Reform UK candidates also include Derek Bullock, of Bolton, Hulton, who was expelled from the Conservative Party for using a racial slur to call for people of Pakistani heritage to be shot, and Ricky Hodges in Hastings, who called for the Prime Minister to be shot.

Caroline Panetta, in Bexley, shared this quote: “Islam is the religion of rape, incest and pedophilia”, and shared the leader of Britain First Paul Golding’s videos. She wasn’t alone in her support of far-right groups; Sharon Barker of Droylsden West in Timeside said Tommy Robinson deserves a knighthood, despite the fact that her party’s leader Nigel Farage has put significant legwork into distancing Reform UK from Robinson.

Sexism – such as Alan Stone from Basingstoke suggesting women should “bear responsibility” for sexual assault – and antisemetic slurs and conspiracy theories also featured in the dossier.

And then there’s the anti-vax sentiment: Elizabeth Clarke, in Bury, questioned if “protecting granny [was] worth it?” after alleging vaccines killed children adding; “our NHS wants canning”.

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Last week, three Reform UK candidates were expelled from the party over alleged former membership of the British National Party – John Black in Blackburn, David Prior in Saltwell and George Parnell in Hampshire. The expulsions were the result of an investigation by anti-racist campaign group HOPE Not Hate and the Mirror which revealed a leaked list of BNP members and contacts from 2007-2008.

After a string of controversies in the previous General Election, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage promised his party would have stricter vetting of candidates than ever before. Then last summer it dropped that strictness in favour of what the party calls “common sense” vetting.■

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🗳️Keep your eyes across our Lead Local network this week as we’ll be covering all the local elections fall-out with a focus on the Valleys of South Wales, Calderdale Council elections, the battle for Sefton and Lancashire district council elections. We’ve also been out on the streets speaking to voters in Lambeth, Southport and the Valleys:

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So follow us on TikTok and Instagram to see what people had to say ahead of the 7 May polls. And be sure to subscribe for Zoe Grunewald’s results coverage and analysis this Friday.

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While local elections may not deliver the kind of political earthquake some are frothing for, next week’s votes will still offer the most comprehensive snapshot yet of Britain’s political mood. And, spoiler alert: people aren’t happy.

What matters is not just dissatisfaction, but that it is no longer flowing in predictable directions. A mosaic of English councils, mayoralties, and devolved contests in Scotland and Wales, the headline is likely to be fragmentation – not just between parties, but in the issues shaping how people vote.

And, of course, the bigger question political watchers will be asking is whether Keir Starmer can still hold together a governing coalition broad enough to survive the pressures of office, and whether the Conservatives remain the natural vehicle for anti-Labour sentiment – or whether that role is now being actively contested, and in some places replaced, by Reform UK.

The two-party system itself comes under renewed strain: Labour tested in government, the Conservatives tested in opposition, and both increasingly forced to operate in a political landscape that no longer behaves like a two-horse race.

Mid-term blues meet multi-party politics

Let’s start with local council elections, which are happening across England, but not in all areas.

There are almost 5,000 seats up for grabs across 136 local authorities, with Labour defending just over 2,000, the Conservatives around 1,300, and the rest split between Liberal Democrats, Greens, Reform UK and independents.

The party in power – here, Labour – almost always tends to lose ground in local elections because turnout is lower and voters vent their frustrations. For Labour, this is truer than ever. Turnout in local elections typically hovers between 25 and 35 per cent, and when voters are more disillusioned, the results become harder to read as genuine mandates. Fewer votes in total means smaller, more motivated blocs — whether a local residents’ group, a single-issue campaign, or a party with a narrow but disciplined base — can punch well above their weight. Councils can end up controlled by parties or coalitions representing a fraction of the electorate, while the majority simply didn’t show up.

Some polling suggests the governing party could be in for a bloodbath, set to lose more than 1,000 councillors, as voters across the spectrum find an outlet their mid-term exasperation. But the more unsettling possibility is not just that Labour loses seats, but its winners have thin, fragile mandates that make governing very difficult in practice.

This time, something different is occurring too. Despite being in opposition, the Conservatives’ vote share is also expected to fall according to pollsters Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher of Exeter University, as “neither opinion polls nor local by-elections suggest much has changed” in the past 12 months. In other words, voters are not yet done punishing the Tories, creating a fragmented field where multiple parties can win by default rather than dominance.

This changes what ‘losing’ looks like. Losses are more likely to be diffuse, spreading across councils rather than concentrated in clear defeats. Control of councils will hinge less on national swings and more on vote-splitting, tactical withdrawals, and hyper-local dynamics.

That fragmentation is reinforced by voter behaviour itself. YouGov’s polling on local priorities shows voters are not converging around a single dominant issue. Instead, concerns vary sharply between communities, with the economy, NHS, crime, housing and local services all competing for attention. The result is a political environment in which voters are all moving in different directions.

The rise of independents and hyper-local campaigns adds another layer. In some places, elections are no longer about national parties at all, but planning disputes, local services, or foreign policy positions that cut across traditional left-right divides.

Overall: expect more councils under no overall control [NOC], and more unstable administrations.

Reform UK rising

The most disruptive force in these elections is Reform UK. Polling suggests it is no longer just a protest vehicle but a viable electoral competitor, particularly in suburban and post-industrial England.

In the North and Midlands, councils and wards in places such as Doncaster, Barnsley, Rotherham, Stoke-on-Trent, Dudley, and parts of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire represent the clearest expression of Reform’s ‘working-class protest’ appeal. These are areas where Labour still dominates, but where voter loyalty is increasingly soft and turnout-sensitive. In next week’s elections, Labour faces losing yet more councillors to the insurgent party in similar areas, such as in Barnsley, Wakefield and Sunderland. Crucially, Reform does not need to win outright control to be significant; it only needs to poll strongly enough to split the anti-Labour vote or embed itself as a permanent second-order choice.

In the South and East, the dynamic is different but equally important. Last year, Reform seized control of eight authorities from the Conservatives, including former strongholds in Kent. Areas such Thanet and Medway, and Thurrock and Basildon in Essex, as well as parts of Hampshire and Lincolnshire will continue to be fertile ground for Reform’s suburban insurgency, as concerns over immigration, taxation, and trust in national institutions map more directly onto Reform’s message.

The key point is that Reform’s impact is two-fold. In some areas, it replaces the Conservatives; in others, it replaces Labour. But in both cases, it destabilises the old two-party local order. In practice, that means more hung councils – administrations where no single party has a majority but one party might have enough seats to block or obstruct policy. For the public, this could look like budgets being delayed or deadlocks, planning decisions being stalled or local services caught in the crossfire of decision making.

Look to North Northamptonshire Council – Reform-run since last year – which pushed back its net-zero target by up to 20 years, splitting the authority and drawing condemnation from across the political spectrum. A small example of what Reform control actually looks like on the ground.

The Green surge

The Green Party’s challenge outside London is more geographically concentrated, but increasingly credible in specific types of place: university cities, affluent progressive towns, and parts of the South West.

The Greens are the biggest party in local government on a dozen councils already, and in some cities like Bristol and Brighton, they have already demonstrated the ability to lead the agenda and win council control.

In Cambridge and Oxford, the Green challenge is shaped by a highly educated, transient electorate and a strong environmental policy salience. Elsewhere, in parts of Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool, the gains are more incremental but still strategically important, clustering in inner-city wards with younger populations.

Unlike Reform, the Greens rarely reshape control of councils on their own. But they chip away at Labour’s urban coalition, particularly among younger and more progressive voters who might previously have defaulted to Labour in local elections. And it’s worth pointing out that the Greens are surpassing their own expectations: on the Green’s surprise victory in the Gorton and Denton by-election last month, Green leader Zack Polanski declared: “It’s not hyperbole to say that our win – in a seat that was 127th on our target list – has changed everything.”

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The fragmentation capital

If these elections tell a national story of fragmentation, nowhere embodies it more clearly than London. On paper, this is still Labour’s city, but in practice, it is becoming a multi-party battleground.

Labour and the Conservatives combined could fall below 50 per cent of the vote in parts of the capital, an extraordinary figure in a system historically structured around two-party competition.

In outer boroughs such as Bexley, Bromley and Havering, the key story is the fragmentation of the right. Reform is targeting the voters the Conservatives rely on: suburban, older, economically anxious. Even modest gains could deny Conservative control outright and turn previously safe councils into hung administrations.

In inner London, the pressure comes from the opposite direction. The Greens are polling strongly across a corridor including Camden, Islington, Hackney and Lambeth – areas with younger, more progressive electorates. Increasingly, disillusioned Labour voters are not moving to the Liberal Democrats, but to the Greens.

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Add in independent candidates, particularly in areas shaped by Gaza politics and foreign policy concerns, and Labour’s dominance begins to look less secure than headline seat numbers suggest.

Across London, three indicators to look out for are the number of NOC councils, Reform breakthroughs in outer boroughs and Green gains in urban areas. What might make this more destabilising in England is the electoral system itself. What makes this more destabilising in England rather than Scotland or Wales is the electoral system itself. First-past-the-post was designed for two-party competition, manufacturing majorities but punishing smaller parties. But as support fragments, it starts to produce the opposite: false minorities and distorted outcomes. Scotland and Wales both use PR which are better wired for multi-party politics.

Mayoralties and personality politics

There is not a full set of regional ‘metro mayor’ elections this year, but a smaller number of directly elected borough mayoralties in London, where personal recognition and local incumbency matter more than party brand. These include Hackney, Lewisham, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Croydon.

That said, they still behave differently from standard council contests. They are more visible, more personalised, and more volatile. Turnout tends to be higher than in ward-level council elections, and candidates often draw support based on name recognition, local profile, and protest sentiment rather than strict party loyalty.

The Greens will be eyeing the Hackney and Lewisham mayoralties, while Labour is expected to hold onto Croydon, Newham and Tower Hamlets, but not without a fight. Luftur Rahman – who won the Tower Hamlets mayoralty back in 2022 as head of his own Aspire party after being banned from office – has shown the power of a well-organised hyper-local movement that combines community identity with anti-establishment feeling. Whether or not he holds on this time round, his model is a template for insurgents can win power in the right context.

SNP dominance under strain

Alongside England’s local contests, voters in Scotland and Wales will also elect members to their devolved parliaments – national institutions that run most domestic policy, including health, education, transport, housing and parts of taxation.

In Scotland, voters choose 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament [MSPs] in Holyrood, where a majority requires 65 seats.

Labour has seen some recovery in Scotland in recent years, particularly in urban and central belt areas, often driven more by anti-SNP sentiment than by a settled constitutional shift in its favour.

But according to the latest YouGov MRP modelling, the SNP remains on course to be the largest party and is projected to be in contention for an outright majority. This is rather striking, given years of incumbency fatigue, internal strain and scrutiny over delivery in government.

The Conservatives, meanwhile, continue to act as the main unionist force in parts of Scotland, but remain structurally constrained in national terms. The result is less a clean swing between two dominant parties, and more a fragmented recalibration of Scotland’s political blocs – with SNP dominance still intact, but increasingly contested at the margins.

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Take it to the Senedd

In Wales, voters elect Members of the Senedd [MSs] to the Welsh Parliament – the Senedd Cymru – a devolved national legislature responsible for health, education, transport and local government.

Just five years ago, Welsh Labour was celebrating one of its best Senedd election results. Now, according to the latest YouGov MRP modelling, the party is set to face a once-in-a-century defeat, as its vote share is projected to fall to 13 per cent, down 23 points on the 2021 election. In its place, a tight competition is emerging between Reform UK and Plaid Cymru for second place.

Plaid remains Labour’s most established challenger, especially in Welsh-speaking and rural areas, where it blends cultural identity with critiques of economic performance and public services. But the newer story is Reform UK’s rise in parts of Wales, particularly in more economically strained Valleys and coastal areas. While still less embedded locally than the main parties, it is drawing support from voters who have drifted between Labour and abstention – and are now looking elsewhere entirely.

More broadly, the political story in Wales is no longer just about Labour’s gradual erosion, but about a potential turning point in the country’s direction. Wales is increasingly being pulled between two very different visions of nationalism: Plaid Cymru’s pro-devolution, more powers-for-Wales agenda, and Reform UK’s more UK-centric, devolution-sceptic approach.

The bigger story behind the ballots

These elections probably won’t deliver a single dramatic shock result. But they may well confirm something we’ve long suspected: the slow, uneven unravelling of Britain’s two-party politics.

Across England, Scotland and Wales, the pattern is likely to be one of more fragmentation, more volatility, and fewer areas where one party can take control and assume loyalty will follow.

The evidence is there in different forms: Reform UK pulling apart traditional party coalitions on both left and right, the Greens steadily building in urban, younger areas and devolved politics in Scotland and Wales increasingly shaped by competing nationalist visions.

Even voter priorities are no longer clustering around a single dominant issue. Instead, they are scattered across a wide set of local and national concerns, from public services to identity to trust in government itself.

For Labour, the question is how to govern in a country where its support is more conditional than it looks on paper. For the Conservatives, it is how to remain relevant in a system where they are no longer the automatic alternative. And for everyone else, it is an opportunity to break through a system that once seemed impenetrable. For voters, the outcome will be a politics that feels less predictable, more localised, and increasingly hard to map onto the old labels.■

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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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🗳️Keep your eyes across our Lead Local network this week as we’ll be covering all the local elections fall-out with a focus on the Valleys of South Wales, Calderdale Council elections, the battle for Sefton and Lancashire district council elections. We’ve also been out on the streets speaking to voters – so keep an eye on our TikTok and Instagram to see what people had to say ahead of the 7 May polls.

UK government websites are still actively sending tens of thousands of users a year to X – the platform at the centre of mounting concerns over abuse, disinformation and AI-generated sexualised imagery – according to FOI data shared exclusively with The Lead.

Between January 2025 and January 2026, official gov.uk domains generated at least 34,000 click-throughs to X (formerly Twitter), with monthly traffic ranging from 716 to a peak of 5,642. Citizens are being steered towards active government accounts, including ‘@10DowningStreet’.

The figures, obtained through Freedom of Information requests by the legal campaign group Foxglove, shed new light on the scale of government-directed traffic to X.

Politically, these numbers are anything but neutral. Every one of those clicks represents a state-sanctioned pipeline to a platform ministers themselves have repeatedly condemned – and which regulators are actively scrutinising.

The data, released by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, is also explicitly incomplete. It covers only the central gov.uk domain, with the department acknowledging that other government sites – including service-specific domains across Whitehall – hold their own separate analytics. There is no centralised picture of total traffic. In other words: 34,000 is a floor, not a ceiling.

Even that floor is significant. In June 2025 alone, gov.uk pages sent 5,642 users directly to X. Across the year, referrals rarely dropped below 1,000 a month, suggesting a steady, structural relationship between government communications and Elon Musk’s platform.

Victoria Collins MP, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology spokesperson for the Lib Dems tells The Lead that while we cannot “simply surrender the platform to Musk and his cronies”, the government must take stronger action:

“Elon Musk has made clear his utter disregard for online safety on X. That is why Liberal Democrats have repeatedly pushed for tougher action on the platform.

“We understand there is a need to communicate on X, we cannot simply surrender the platform to Musk and his cronies. But, these figures clearly show the Government is acting as a funnel for a platform that time and again flouts our most basic safety expectations.”

It is not unusual for departments, agencies and ministerial offices to routinely embed “follow us” links on official pages, directing users to their X accounts alongside other social platforms, but as we covered earlier this year, X is no longer just a social network hosting polarised debate. It is an environment where abuse is structurally rewarded, misogyny and racism are algorithmically amplified, misinformation spreads unchecked, and where AI tools like Musk’s Grok have been used to generate sexualised images of real women and girls at scale. Musk routinely amplifies dangerous, racist conspiracy theories and has publicly called for British citizens to overthrow the government. And yet, the UK Government continues to embed itself within that ecosystem.

Donald Campbell, Director of Advocacy for Foxglove, an independent non-profit organisation that works to stand up to Big Tech, tells The Lead: “The Prime Minister has said that X needs to ‘get a grip’ on its AI tool, Grok, over its creation of ‘disgraceful’ and ‘disgusting’ images of abuse.

“Yet, at the same time, his own Government’s websites are sending thousands of users to the X platform where these images were being shared.

“It’s alarming that the Government is actively directing users to this site, even while a live investigation is still underway by Ofcom. How can ministers justify this?”

Earlier this year, the Prime Minister described content circulating on X as “unlawful” and “disgusting”. Ofcom has since opened investigations into online safety compliance across major platforms including X, and ministers have repeatedly signalled concern about harmful content, misinformation and the erosion of online safeguards. Labour MP Charlotte Nichols described the Grok-generated images as “weapons of abuse”, while Helen Hayes, Education Committee chair said: “We cannot overstate the societal harm caused by the sexualisation and exploitation of women and children online.”

But the FOI data exposes an important gap between rhetoric and infrastructure, and at the same time as warning about the harms of platforms like X, the state continues to route users directly into them.

A Government spokesperson told The Lead: “Today’s media landscape is unrecognisable compared to even a decade ago. The government has a duty to engage with the public where they are, and we continuously review our communications channels to ensure all citizens can access important information.”

Government websites are among the most trusted digital spaces in the country. When they link out to external platforms, they confer legitimacy and embed those platforms into the architecture of public communication. In the case of X, that means actively sustaining a channel into a system that regulators are struggling to contain.

There is also the deeper issue of fragmentation. No single department appears to hold a full picture of how much traffic the government as a whole sends to X. Analytics are scattered across domains, teams and agencies, meaning the state itself lacks visibility over its own digital footprint.

This is the blind spot at the heart of the current debate. While policymakers debate online harms, AI safety and the regulation of major platforms, the government’s own communications infrastructure is reinforcing those platforms’ centrality. The focus remains overwhelmingly on user behaviour, while far less attention is paid to the older, institutional actors who sustain and legitimise the platforms where that behaviour is shaped.

As we aim to show time and time again at The Lead, the most consequential radicalising forces in Britain are not only found in fringe communities, but in the systems of power that quietly amplify them. X is one of those systems. And the FOI data makes it clear that whatever ministers say about it, they are still feeding 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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The Lead is on the frontline of the ongoing debate around online safety – where policy failures translate into real-world harm for the most vulnerable. Back in January, we made the case to leave X as abuse material spread unchecked. We’ve pressed for meaningful age restrictions on social media, and this week’s announcement is a step forward. The test now is enforcement – whether legislators act with resolve, and whether tech companies are finally compelled to answer for the damage they enable.

If you want journalism that challenges the insidious creep of power in Silicon Valley – and exposes the systems that allow it – support us. Become a paid subscriber of The Lead today and claim 30% off for the first year.

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👏Congratulations to The Lead contributor Adam Bychawski who has been longlisted for the prestigious Paul Foot Award for his vital reporting on how the UK fails victims of miscarriages of justice. His investigation for The Lead in March last year uncovered the plight of Ahmed Adan, wrongly imprisoned for 13 years, and the government’s failure to compensate people like him. You can read his report here. From the longlist of 12, a shortlist of six will be selected next month. The winner of the annual prize, worth £8,000, will be announced on 1 June. Best of luck Adam!

🗳️Ahead of the upcoming local elections, Zoë will be diving into what to expect in England’s council elections along with Wales and Scotland’s Parliamentary elections in a special report published on Saturday 2 May and across our Lead Local network we’ll be covering what’s to come and all the fall-out with a focus on the Valleys of South Wales, Calderdale Council elections, the battle for Sefton and Lancashire district council elections. We’ve also been out on the streets speaking to voters – so keep an eye on our TikTok and Instagram to see what people had to say ahead of the 7 May polls.

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Adam Bychawski’s reporting is in the running for the Paul Foot Award 2026 - the most prestigious prize in investigative and campaigning journalism.

Published in March last year, Adam’s powerful investigation tells the story of Ahmed Adan who spent 13 years in prison for an assault he didn’t commit.

It details he and his father’s fight for compensation over the miscarriage of justice - and how few people are successful.

Adam said on the Paul Foot Award longlisting: “I’m absolutely delighted that my work has been recognised by the Paul Foot Award, particularly given the calibre of stories produced by my fellow nominees.

“I hope the nomination brings greater public attention to how the state continues to fail victims of miscarriages of justice. Their stories, and the injustices they’ve suffered, too often go untold. That’s why I’m grateful to editors at The Lead for taking an interest in them. In a fast-moving industry, it’s rare for editors to back a story that isn’t already on the news agenda, particularly from a freelancer they haven’t worked with before.”

The Paul Foot Award, run by Private Eye, began in 2006 and is in memory of revered investigative journalist Paul Foot, who died in 2004. See the full longlist for this year’s awards.

National Editor of The Lead, Natalie Morris, said: “We’re incredibly proud to see Adam Bychawski’s reporting recognised with a longlisting for the Paul Foot Award. It’s a testament to the depth and determination he brought to this story. At The Lead, we knew this investigation exposed an underreported injustice, and Adam pursued it with rigour and humanity.

“His work epitomises the kind of journalism we’re committed to commissioning: stories that challenge power and centre overlooked voices. So it is especially gratifying to see that commitment recognised, and we hope this helps to bring wider attention to the systemic failures his reporting has uncovered.”

Our archive has a paywall on it - to help support our independent original journalism - but to mark Adam’s longlisting we have removed the paywall on the story so people can see the award-nominated journalism we publish. Please support The Lead today with a subscription to help us tell more stories like Ahmed Adan’s and help reporters like Adam expose injustice.

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The Lead’s journalism has been catching the eye of the media industry with our The Lead North team winning best specialist/regional newsletter at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards and our regular contributor Hannah Fearn winning two awards at the Freelance Journalism Awards for her writing in The Lead.

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You will hear varying analyses of the importance of the King’s visit to Washington this week.

Some will tell you King Charles III is taking on a high-stakes diplomatic role, smoothing tensions and placating the doddery toddler in the White House with a dose of old-fashioned pomp and ceremony.

Others will argue the whole pursuit is pointless, perhaps even dangerous – the diplomatic equivalent of throwing a chew toy to a barking dog: a brief distraction, quickly abandoned the moment something louder comes along.

Either way, there is a particular tone that takes over political analysis at moments like this. It is serious, measured, pragmatic, weighing risk against reward. It presents itself as the language of grown-ups in the room; statecraft that cannot be understood without a certain level of experience.

Yet it has a glaring omission. Because while Westminster and Washington pore over strategy and optics, something else slips out of frame. Largely absent from the language of state visits and special relationships are the people who rarely get to shape these narratives at all.

The women abused and trafficked by Epstein have still received nothing resembling justice. The long shadow cast by his network – one that touched this president, billionaires and, unavoidably, the British Royal Family itself through Prince Andrew – persists. Notably, the King and Queen have declined to meet the survivors of Epstein during this visit, with a Buckingham Palace source claiming it could compromise ongoing investigations. For survivors, this is a bitter disappointment.

Instead of centring their reality, we revert to abstract debate. The visit becomes a “challenge”, and the scandal becomes a “complication”. It is a deliberate way of talking about power that quietly removes the people it hurts.

This is not confined to royal diplomacy. Take the furore around Mandelson’s appointment, and the appearance today of the prime minister’s former chief adviser, Morgan McSweeney, before the Foreign Affairs Committee. It may seem like an entirely different arena, proper parliamentary scrutiny rather than royal diplomacy, but the framing is strikingly similar. Peter Mandelson’s defenders have never argued that he was an uncontroversial appointment, just that he was necessary. He understood Washington in a way that can only benefit the British state; he had the networks, instincts and fluency of power required for this new, hyper-masculine and dangerous world.

What is not being said – but tacitly admitted – is that morality does not feature in these decisions. It may count for something, sometimes, but in certain moments, it may need to be quietly set aside for something more fitting for the moment.

We are told the King must go to Washington and make nice with a president who has set armed officers on his own people, trampled on international norms, used economic and military coercion to achieve his aims, and taken little meaningful accountability, because the stakes are too high, relationships must be maintained, and influence must be preserved.

We are also told certain political appointments must be made because the world is dangerous, because experience matters and this is not the moment for idealism.

In both cases, the conclusion is that the system must be protected at all costs. What rarely follows is the second question: protected for whom?

Because for the victims of Epstein’s abuse – and for those who have spent years watching powerful men evade meaningful consequences – this reads as closing ranks. Sending members of the Royal Family, themselves shadowed by their association with Epstein, to shake hands with Trump, named 38,000 times in the files, is as striking an illustration of how power protects itself as you may ever need.

This instinct to close ranks, to reframe uncomfortable truths as strategic dilemmas, is the thread that connects a royal visit to Washington and a committee hearing in Westminster.

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And looming over all of it – still, stubbornly – is Epstein. Not simply as an individual, but as a system; a world of untouchable, back-slapping networks of power, where reputations are laundered collectively. He has become less a figure than a pattern, the name we reach for when we are really describing how power behaves when it believes itself unaccountable.

The consequences, of course, are no longer abstract. Trump – the epitome of Epsteinism – continues to test the boundaries of international law, emboldened by a political culture that has chosen expediency over accountability. In Britain, Keir Starmer faces growing unrest from his own MPs, who are no longer willing to defend decisions that feel politically strategic but morally thin. A fresh row over whether Parliament was misled on Mandelson’s vetting – now heading for a possible Commons vote on an inquiry – has only sharpened that sense of drift. The sad fact is that another prime ministerial resignation would hardly feel exceptional anymore, more an increasingly familiar quality of our parliamentary democracy.

There is, of course, always a case for pragmatism in politics. But pragmatism without principle hasn’t done us very well thus far. And that is how you end up with your King dragged to Washington – and a revolving door in Downing Street.■

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

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🗳️Ahead of the upcoming local elections, Zoë will be diving into what to expect in England’s council elections along with Wales and Scotland’s Parliamentary elections in a special report published on Saturday 2 May and across our Lead Local network we’ll be covering what’s to come and all the fall-out with a focus on the Valleys of South Wales, Calderdale Council elections, the battle for Sefton and Lancashire district council elections. We’ve also been out on the streets speaking to voters – so keep an eye on our TikTok and Instagram to see what people had to say ahead of the 7 May polls.

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The Lead Untangles focuses on a different complex, divisive issue with each edition. The entirety of The Lead Untangles will always be free for all subscribers.

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At a glance facts

Water bills rose in April by an average of £33, or 5.4 per cent. This brings a typical annual bill to between £606 to £639, according to industry body Water UK. What you actually pay will vary depending on where you live, whether you are eligible for a reduced tariff and how much water you use.

Last year, Thames Water – Britain’s biggest provider, serving 16 million customers – increased bills by 35 per cent – well above the industry average. According to analysis from Martin Lewis, this year they implemented a further 3.4 per cent, which amounts to an average increase of £3.

The biggest increase this year is from Severn Trent Water at £52 or 10 per cent. United Utilities, which serves the North West, has increased bills by £57 (9 per cent) and Southern Water has increased them by £55 (8 per cent).

These are smaller increases than the average 26 per cent that were implemented in 2025-26.

Complaints to the Consumer Council for Water increased by 50 per cent in 2025 with the lack of affordability of bills the biggest issue by some distance.

All of this is set against a backdrop of a winter of discontent for water users (read: everyone) in which thousands were left without water, and the ongoing scandal of Britain’s waterways being polluted on a daily basis due to creaking infrastructure that needed investment long ago.

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Context

Ofwat, which will be abolished and replaced under government plans announced in 2025 after an independent review found that the current regulatory system was failing, said that the bills are supporting long-term improvements in the water sector by 2030.

These improvements will, in theory, tackle issues like the water supply failures seen across parts of Kent and Sussex in January, which South East Water attributed to Storm Goretti.

That’s a high profile issue – 30,000 were left without water and it’s close to London – but reporting by The Lancashire Lead highlighted thousands were faced with the same issues to start 2026. These are not isolated incidents.

Water companies say that the increase in bills will pay for investment that will prevent issues like this from being so common.

But River Action, which campaigns for cleaner waterways, says households are paying twice for investment that should have been funded from previous bills.

The investment is not just to pay for water that comes from our taps, but also to prevent sewage overflows of the like which mean that Windermere is literally full of faeces. Only 14 per cent of England’s rivers and lakes meet good ecological standards. The Blackpool Lead recently reported that raw sewage is routinely pumped into the sea despite continued public outrage.

And while investment is welcome, the total amount water companies have paid out to shareholders in dividends since privatisation over 30 years ago grew to £72.8bn by 2024.

Those same companies have accumulated over £60bn in debt over the same period, with Thames Water holding the largest share.

According to YouGov polling in 2024, 82 per cent of the public want to see water companies brought into the public sector. Throw in consecutive bill increases and it doesn’t take much imagination to see that number increasing.

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About those bonuses

While investment needs were clearly not being met over the last decade, water companies paid over £112m in bonuses and incentives.

The government attempted to ban those bonuses being paid to chief executives and chief financial officers with legislation passed in the Water (Special Measures) Act in 2025.

But this only referred to ‘performance-related’ bonuses, and loopholes have been exploited by water companies by labelling payments differently or paying through linked companies. The Guardian reports that Thames Water, for example, is banned from paying bonuses and instead plans to pay staff millions in ‘retention payments’.

Elsewhere, Yorkshire Water chief executive Nicola Shaw received £1.3m in undisclosed pay via Yorkshire Water’s Jersey-registered parent company, Kelda Holdings. South East Water boss David Hinton is set for £400,000 in bonus pay despite tens of thousands being without water for weeks. Wessex Water’s former boss Colin Skellett received a £170,000 bonus in the same year as the bonus ban came in – it was allowed because it was made by a parent company.

Tougher measures are expected in May.

What people are saying

“As people continue to face a cost-of-living crisis, it’s important that the water industry demonstrates value for money at the same time as investing in the infrastructure needed to meet the demands of the growing population and climate change.” – Maya Ellis, Labour MP for Ribble Valley to The Lancashire Lead

“We will continue to monitor performance and hold companies to account as they progress on this journey. Money received by companies from customers is ringfenced for improvements, so if they do not deliver on their commitments, they will be made to return money to customers in their future bills.

“However, we also recognise that these bill increases may be difficult for some people. That is why we approved a doubling of company support available for customers who are struggling to pay and now, more than 2 million households are accessing this help.” – Chris Walters, Ofwat’s interim chief executive

“It is fundamental that the public should not be made to pay twice for water companies’ past failures to invest in improvements to stop sewage pollution.

“Meanwhile, degraded infrastructure keeps spewing pollution into rivers and lakes across the country that should have been clean decades ago.” – Emma Dearnley, head of legal, River Action

“The water companies were never going to operate within the spirit of the law. They have always tested the limits of the law. They have misled governments and polluted the environment, so they were never going to do the right thing. I was not surprised at all. They were warned before the Water (Special Measures) Act became law that this would happen.” – Fergal Sharkey, water campaigner and former Undertones frontman

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What happens next

Water bills are set to rise by roughly 30-36 per cent between 2025-30, which means most bills will be over £700 in real terms.

A new regulator is to be established to replace Ofwat, the Drinking Water Inspectorate and other functions from the Environment Agency and Natural England.

The goal is to shift from solving issues as they happen to ‘prevention-first’ – which you would hope that the planned investment funded by increased bills would already achieve.■

About the author: Luke Beardsworth is Senior Editor of our Lead Local network and writes the award-winning editions of The Blackpool Lead and The Lancashire Lead.

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 would like us to untangle, email ella@thelead.uk.

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“Trust in politics is so low, so degraded, that nobody believes anyone can make a difference any more […] People think we’re all just in it for ourselves.”

That was Keir Starmer’s diagnosis of politics before he entered office. Then came the important promise that followed: to clean it up and strip out the cronyism. What a difference two-and-a-half years makes.

The prime minister came into office with few defining slogans, but one pledge many believed in: he would dismantle the informal networks and cronyism that had corroded Westminster under the Conservatives. After partygate, peerages for allies, and a revolving door culture around government contracts, Labour’s would be a clean break from the old politics of favour and familiarity.

Yet almost two years in, something familiar has crept up on us. Not the loud, boarding school boys’ club of Westminster cliché, but a quieter, more managerial version: tightly controlled, centralised, but equally as insulated from the Parliament and voters it governs.

This week’s Westminster row has thrown light on this culture. Former Foreign Office chief Sir Olly Robbins has described pressure around the handling of Peter Mandelson’s vetting ahead of his appointment as US ambassador, alongside discussions at senior levels about an ambassadorial role for former No 10 communications chief Matthew Doyle. The reported language — “just f****** approve it” — sits uneasily with Starmer’s mirage of a calm, process-driven centre. Instead, something familiar groans: decisions shaped inside a small inner circle, where informal influence carries real weight.

Here at The Lead we are not in the business of Westminster tittle-tattle or political gossip, which too often distracts from the larger questions of policy, justice and power. But these episodes should not be read as such. They point to something structural that shapes how and why decisions are being made: tight internal networks where proximity and trust matter more than process.

That should concern anyone who believes in accountable government. This is the quieter operating system that now defines the modern political “boys’ club”: not necessarily who is excluded from the room, but how decisions are shaped long before anyone else is allowed to see them.

Unlike the Tories, it is a system defined less by personality than by structure. A small inner circle of trusted advisers, who prefer top-down control over consultation, and a tendency to treat dissent — particularly from backbench MPs or those with lived experience — as friction rather than input.

And this is where the culture reaches beyond Westminster itself. Some in the parliamentary Labour party have long complained of policy being developed and announced with minimal warning, followed by a clear expectation of loyalty, barely earned, rather than debate. Whether on welfare reform, winter fuel payments, or the two-child benefit cap, the pattern has been one where decisions are made centrally, then defended rigidly, with little tolerance for reconsideration. The result is acrimony and flailing: rebellions so unruly the leadership is forced into repeated climbdowns, so much time spent fighting its own MPs that the government begins looks utterly directionless.

This matters to all of us, because this government has wasted too much precious time fighting itself, and made too little use of the expertise on its own backbenches. Governance works best when it is porous — and when a party remembers it is just that: a party of members with different views and interests, where conflict and disagreement are not distractions, but the foundations of better, stronger ideas.

In opposition, Starmer explicitly positioned himself against informal power networks and backstage politics. He lambasted Boris Johnson for his shameless self-interest and the cronyism of his administration. Now, this was meant to be the government that broke with Westminster’s old habits. Instead, it has reproduced them in a more efficient form.

And that is what makes it feel so inevitable. The boys’ club is often imagined as something outdated, but in practice it shape-shifts: from old-boy networks to special adviser circles, from informal drinking cultures to tightly run inner circles. From the exclusion of women in important rooms to their inclusion, but without really caring about what they have to say.

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What remains constant is the concentration of power within a small group, and the gradual exclusion of those outside it from shaping decisions while they are still being formed.

The result is governance that can feel disciplined from the inside, but increasingly closed from the outside. As we have seen, debate becomes reactive rather than generative. Those closest to the impact of policy — MPs, frontline services, communities — are left responding to their outcomes rather than shaping them. Eventually, loyalty disintegrates. Energy fades, and motivation disappears. What is left is a party barely united, and a leader thoroughly alone. From this, nothing productive can emerge. The UK deserves better than that.

The most uncomfortable conclusion may be that this is not a deviation from Starmerism at all, but its original sin: in seeking to eliminate the chaos of Westminster politics, it reproduced it in a different form.

The question is now existential: can this government loosen control and reopen itself — to backbenchers, lived experience, and disagreement? If it cannot, then something at the top will have to give: a leadership prepared to loosen the centre, widen the circle, and let consensus in. ■

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

👫Agree with Zoë? 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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🗳️A heads up too ahead of the upcoming local elections - Zoë will be diving into what to expect in England’s council elections along with Wales and Scotland’s Parliamentary elections in a special report published on Saturday 2 May and across our Lead Local network we’ll be covering what’s to come and all the fall-out with a focus on the Valleys of South Wales, Calderdale Council elections, the battle for Sefton and Lancashire district council elections. We’ve also been out on the streets speaking to voters - so keep an eye on our TikTok and Instagram to see what people had to say ahead of the 7 May polls.

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“Supervillain” rhetoric belongs in films – or, increasingly, in the speeches of certain world leaders. It should not be coming from companies entrusted with the infrastructure of the state.

And yet, when MPs described Palantir’s recent X post as “the ramblings of a supervillain”, the instinct is almost to laugh. The US data firm published its manifesto, set out in great detail on the social media app, declaring that “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive”, calling for an end to the “post-war neutering” of major powers, and insisting that “the question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them”.

It is an extraordinary proclamation of the confidence and growing impunity of US tech firms that sit uncomfortably close to state power and military capability. And while it might be tempting to dismiss this as Silicon Valley tech-bro provocations, a little overwrought, ultimately harmless, it becomes harder to laugh when you follow the money — and the access.

Palantir is not a distant object of eye-rolling. Rather, it is wiring itself deep into the infrastructure of the British state, having secured more than £500m in UK public sector contracts across the NHS, defence, policing and financial regulation.

And at the very moment Palantir’s worrying ideological posture is becoming more explicit, scrutiny is shrinking. Today, political attention is consumed once again by Westminster drama, as yet more unfolds about who knew what, and when, about Peter Mandelson.

But in the background: a legal challenge, backed by Democracy for Sale and the Good Law Project, over the government’s refusal to release key ministerial briefings on Palantir’s NHS contract. These are vital internal assessments that informed decisions about handing one of Britain’s most sensitive data systems to a private company, and yet, the government is asking the public to accept the deal based on trust, while denying them access to the evidence.

Palantir’s tightening grip on UK democracy should worry us all. The core issue is not only what its executives believe in, but the scale of its access, the opacity of its contracts, and the depth of its roots.

Start with access. The NHS data platform is designed to pull together huge volumes of patient information from across the system into one place. While this might increase efficiency, it is not without risk. Centralisation of such important data raises the stakes of any security or privacy violations, and makes it easier for data to be repurposed in ways patients never expected.

While Palantir maintains it does not “own” this data, it inevitably controls it because it decides how the data is organised, prioritised and analysed, shaping how that information is understood and used.

Then there is opacity. The government has a troubling track record here. When Palantir’s NHS contract was first published, hundreds of pages were heavily redacted. Now, ministers are keeping further briefings secret, arguing they fall under “policy development”. But the system is already being rolled out: these are not hypothetical plans.

And finally, dependency. Once a company like Palantir becomes embedded, it is extraordinarily difficult to unpick. Systems are built around their software, staff are trained on its platforms, and entire workflows depend on its architecture. Even governments that grow uneasy find themselves locked in, politically, financially and technically.

This is what makes the UK’s approach so alarming. Other countries, like Switzerland, have taken a more cautious line, rejecting Palantir after concluding there was a possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government. That caution looks increasingly wise in the context of Donald Trump and his devil-may-care approach to diplomacy, where the use of economic pressure and political coercion against close partners is no longer unthinkable.

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In Britain, we have accelerated. We now have a situation in which a company with deep roots in US defence and intelligence — and an increasingly explicit worldview about which societies are “vital” and which are “regressive” — is being handed responsibility for the UK’s civilian data infrastructure, while the public is denied sight of the documents that justify that decision.

Palantir’s defenders may argue that the UK has little choice; that there are few domestic alternatives, and global tech giants dominate this space. But dependency does not have to become an inevitability, and the more sunlight on these systems, the better our chances are of preventing dependency and control.

The real danger is not just how sinister Palantir sounds, but that Britain is giving this company such deep, durable access to the inner workings of the state, without meaningful transparency, robust public debate, or a credible exit strategy.

Even now, the government is reluctant to fully explain its decision. By the time the public gets a clear picture of what has been signed away, it may already be too late to take it back. ■

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

👫Agree with Zoë? 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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Prisons are not adequately equipped to diagnose and treat cancer to the same standard as the NHS in the community – and female prisoners are at the sharp end of this crisis.

People diagnosed with cancer while in prison are 28 per cent less likely to receive curative treatment – particularly surgery to remove tumours, radiotherapy and chemotherapy – contributing to a nine per cent higher risk of death from cancer. And for women in prison, this inequality is compounded by existing within a system that is still designed around the needs of male prisoners, and lacking gender-specific care.

Leslie was first diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer in 2018. In March 2022, she was remanded for five and a half months at HMP Bronzefield, shortly after discovering a new lump that she feared signalled her cancer had returned.

Leslie was referred to her consultant in April and underwent biopsies, but the results were never shared with her for reasons unknown to Leslie. By mid-May, nothing had happened. Eventually, her husband informed her she had already missed her May appointment.

“The prison insisted they had not received an appointment letter although the hospital had sent one,” Leslie tells The Lead. “I still don’t understand why I was not informed or taken to my consultant.”

Due to the missed appointment, she did not see her consultant again until late June, more than ten and a half weeks after the biopsies. For suspected cancer, NHS policy aims for patients to be seen by a specialist within two weeks of urgent referral as part of the Faster Diagnosis Standard. Depending on the type of cancer, biopsy results typically take one-three weeks.

Unequal care behind bars

“Quite often you’ve got women who haven’t been through cancer screening or even got a good relationship with a GP,” explains Lucy Russell, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at campaign group Women in Prison. While around 70 per cent of women in the community have attended breast cancer screening, women in prison are up to three times less likely to be diagnosed through screening than those in the general population.

In England, women in prison are supposed to be included in the NHS Breast Screening Programme, but in practice, incarcerated women rarely receive screening in a timely way due to failures in delivery by both NHS England and HM Prison and Probation Service. These failures include staffing shortages, limited on-site facilities for screening which leads to sole reliance on external appointments, and poor coordination of appointments between NHS and prisons.

Most end up being diagnosed through emergency presentation, which is associated with more advanced disease and poorer outcomes, explains Elizabeth Davies, lead researcher of the King's College London study.

Delays continue after diagnosis, often because prisons struggle to provide escorts – like in Leslie’s case. “Each external appointment requires two officers, and court appearances or staffing pressures routinely take precedence over healthcare,” Davies says.

Even after surgery or treatment, basic aftercare is still missing. “One woman we spoke to came back from a breast lumpectomy with blood all over her clothes,” Russell says. “She hadn’t been given anything to clean the wound. She couldn’t get additional medication or wound coverage, and because laundry is restricted in prison, she couldn’t even wash the blood out of her clothes.”

These concerning examples stand in stark contrast to the government’s 2023 National Women’s Prisons Health & Social Care Review, which promised reforms including gender-specific healthcare, access to evidence-based talking therapies for women with trauma, and improved data and outcomes monitoring. More than two years on, many of these reforms have yet to materialise.

Allegations of neglect at HMP Bronzefield

Leslie received her breast cancer diagnosis alone without family or support. The May appointment wasn’t the only one she couldn’t attend. Court dates would take precedence over critical medical appointments due to shortage of prison staff to accompany her, while in other cases, officers would mix up her appointments with those of other inmates.

Before she was allowed to keep her own medication, Leslie did not consistently receive her daily anti-cancer endocrine tablets from the staff. “My medications sometimes ran out due to not being re-ordered by staff. If the prison was short-staffed or there was a medical emergency, which happened on more than a handful of occasions, I would not get the evening medications. On occasion, I was given medication from someone else’s supply.”

By the time Leslie was released in November 2022, she had missed the window for radiotherapy. Although radiotherapy should be available to people in custody consistent delays and a long prison admission meant Leslie couldn’t access this treatment. Her cancer had now progressed to stage three. She later underwent 18 cycles of chemotherapy between 2023 and 2024. When Leslie was remanded again in 2024, her health deteriorated even further. Hospital appointments now took place while she was restrained.

During one echocardiogram to check for chemotherapy-induced heart failure, she was chained and partially undressed while an officer sat inside the privacy screen. “I was stripped to the waist in a hospital gown which had to be open at the front,” she recalls. “We were all clearly embarrassed. After that, I cancelled all future hospital appointments. I’m not going to the hospital in chains which put me in humiliating situations.”

Leslie has still not received the results of the echocardiogram. Neither the consultations nor any of her test results were added to the NHS app during the time she was incarcerated. Now back in the community in Surrey and diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, she believes prison compounded both her illness and trauma.

A spokesperson from HMP Bronzefield, told The Lead: “As a general principle, prisoners are not treated any differently regarding their medical needs, whether they are on remand or convicted, and can expect a level of medical treatment equivalent to that provided in the community.”

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Leslie’s case was first brought to public attention by The View, a campaigning platform that focuses on the extreme costs of mass incarceration. In September 2025, HMP Bronzefield came under public scrutiny when The View, along with survivors and allies, launched the Stop the Torture campaign, alleging prisoners with cancer were being chained during hospital treatment, denied medical escorts, left malnourished, and forced to wait months for diagnosis or pain relief.

Michelle Wetherall, who has lived with cancer for 20 years, was sentenced in November 2025 to three years and nine months for offences related to the supply of drugs. Initially, she started taking cannabis to ease the chronic pain associated with the cancer which eventually led to her dealing other drugs. While in custody at HMP Eastwood Park, doctors identified a liver lump, an extended bladder and severely enlarged kidneys, and she is currently still waiting for an oncology appointment to determine whether the cancer has returned.

On 28 November last year, she was taken to Southmead Hospital, a hospital local to the prison, for an appointment, during which she was restrained by two officers. She was in A&E from midnight until 7am without pain medication before discharging herself. Michelle is still waiting for the results of a January scan to confirm whether the cancer has returned. Her legal team is now pursuing early release on compassionate grounds under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Fragmented responsibility

According to Russell, these failures stem from fragmented responsibility between NHS England and HM Prison and Probation Service, where split roles mean neither body is fully held accountable when care for women with cancer in prison breaks down. While healthcare is commissioned by NHS England, prisons still control staffing, food contracts, and the daily conditions in which care is delivered.

“There’s an intersection between health and justice, and there are growing questions about what happens as NHS England changes and who will ensure the right staff and resources are in place,” Russell says.

The restructuring of NHS England, following plans to fold its functions into the Department of Health and Social Care, risks further complicating an already fragmented system.

On one hand, Russell explains, individual prisons operate under rules set by governors, but these are constrained by a wider system of national policies and contracts set at the top level of HMPPS, which cannot easily be adapted to meet local needs. This has limited flexibility and has slowed any meaningful change. On the other hand, she notes, healthcare staff commissioned by NHS England are overstretched, with near-daily emergencies such as suicide attempts requiring immediate attention, meaning routine appointments are frequently cancelled and have to be restarted from scratch.

The Ministry of Justice also ultimately determines the conditions in which healthcare is delivered in women’s prisons since it oversees funding. Long-term underfunding has left prisons short-staffed. As of December 2023, prisons in England were operating below target staffing levels.

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When The Lead contacted the Ministry of Justice, a representative said in an email that healthcare in prisons is delivered by NHS and private providers, directing queries to those services.

NHS England is yet to issue a response.

According to Dr Jake Hard of NHS England, the next move should begin with evidence of what works and what doesn’t, and right now, that evidence base is dangerously thin.

“Large-scale epidemiological studies of the population could allow health services to properly plan cancer care accordingly but research for patient benefit studies is very low in number,” he says. “Historically, these issues have been related to the relative unattractiveness of undertaking research in prisons, complicated ethical approval processes, lack of funding, and access to data.”

A December 2025 report by Inquest suggested that to curb these gaps, women’s prisons should be dismantled and resources redirected to community-based support.

Russell agrees: “Most of the women in prison should just not be there. Prison sets women up to fail every time yet community support can prevent criminalisation altogether.”

The Feminist Justice Coalition [FJC], a human rights initiative for incarcerated women is currently leading an independent report on cancer care in women’s prisons, one campaigners hope will move the issue toward enforceable change. The report – launched at the United Nations in March – documents delays in diagnosis, disrupted treatment, and builds a national evidence base on how women with cancer are failed in custody. It will be presented to the UK Parliament this month (April 2026).

There are other signs of progress. The Chief Medical Officer of England’s report on prisons acknowledged these gaps, and the National Institute for Health and Care Research review has issued a new funding call focused on improving physical health services in prisons.

Until women’s bodies, lives, and realities are taken seriously by a prison system still built around accommodating men, the cycle will likely continue. Campaigners reiterate the need for concrete change, including clearer safeguarding thresholds, automatic early release pathways for people with serious illnesses like cancer, and mandatory continuity of cancer care equivalent to that available in the community.■

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About the author: Tabby Kibugi is a journalist and writer who reports on culture, health, and social justice. Her work has been featured in Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Black Ballad, Sierra, Reader’s Digest, and more.

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As the dust settles after the publication of the findings of Phase One of The Southport Inquiry, what happens next is of the utmost importance – and the victims and their families cannot be failed again.

On Monday, inquiry chair Sir Adrian Fulford delivered a 700-page report, the culmination of months spent hearing deeply harrowing testimonies. As we reported in The Southport Lead, the families of the victims are steadfast in their belief that this must be a turning point.

During emotional hearings at Liverpool Town Hall, the surviving victims and relatives detailed their experiences of the attack and their lasting trauma in heartbreaking detail, as did emergency services and members of the public who witnessed – or were suddenly drawn into – the events of the day.

Conversely, representatives of the agencies and services which dealt with Axel Rudakubana before he carried out his attack exposed how he was able to slip through the cracks and avoid proper intervention. Online retailers who sold weapons to the teenager also revealed an alarming lack of curiosity and care for what happened with their products.

Sir Adrian’s conclusions are direct, damning, and deeply troubling. Across his report, versions of the word ‘fail’ appear nearly 300 times. Almost every agency or service which came into contact with Rudakubana was found to be in some way culpable for not doing more.

Presenting his findings on Monday, Sir Adrian said: “Putting out of mind the so called benefits of hindsight, I have no doubt that if appropriate procedures had been in place, and if sensible steps had been taken by the agencies and AR’s parents, this dreadful event would not have happened.

“It could have been, and it should have been, prevented.”

For those who have followed the inquiry, Sir Adrian’s conclusions will not come as a shock, but to see them all together, in black and white, is stark.

Sir Adrian delivered 67 recommendations and a clear message that he will be expecting action and demanding answers during Phase 2, which will also last for around a year and examine in detail the role of internet and social media on potential violent individuals and how they are monitored.

The families of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar have been unimaginably brave and determined in their efforts to create legacies for their children. Each of the girls has a charity set up in their name – Bebe’s Hive, Elsie’s Story and Alice’s Wonderdance – as their families find ways to help other children live the lives theirs did not get to.

Whether it be for supporting children to be able to dance, creating a safe space for young people to talk about their grief or creating other opportunities, the charities work tirelessly to enrich the lives of other children. Their work is visible here in Southport and has been openly and widely embraced by the community.

But it is another goal which means so much to the families: stopping anyone else from suffering the same fate.

As Sir Adrian said in the report: “A consistent concern raised by the victims of the attack has been that recommendations from past reviews and inquiries have not led to meaningful change. It is therefore essential that they are informed, in concrete terms, of the action to be taken in response to the Phase 1 recommendations.”

For the families and for all those others affected by the heinous attack, it is essential that real change takes place and that another preventable atrocity like this does not happen again. We should see reform of those services identified and their cultures to ensure greater accountability; systemic changes such as greater information sharing and potential law changes to compel parents with similar concerns to report their child

That is the legacy they deserve. Not apologies – but change.

Chris Walker, the lawyer representing the three families at the inquiry, made clear they want to see action and accountability: “Let us be clear now these reforms require urgent and full implementation. On behalf of the families, we repeat the chair’s hope that this marks a genuine turning point.

“Our clients have endured unimaginable loss, and their priority has always been preventing this from happening to another family while seeking individual and systemic accountability.

“This fight does not end today. We call for immediate action, clear accountability and real change - not simply reassurances that ‘lessons have been learned’. The public deserves systems capable of identifying escalating risk, protecting the vulnerable and preventing acts of mass violence. We, alongside our clients, will continue to push for that change until it is achieved.”

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Mr Walker went further when speaking to the BBC, saying he was “aghast” at the actions of five state entities –counter-terrorism agency Prevent, Lancashire Police, Lancashire social services, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, and Forensic Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services – and took the extraordinary step of saying he would publicly name individuals from these if disciplinary action, reform and job losses did not occur.

Vera Baird KC, a former victims’ commissioner, echoed those remarks as she said it is “pointless” to carry out such exercises if people are not held accountable.

She added: “You can’t be sure, if you’re living in Southport, that the people who made the mistakes won’t be making the same mistakes again today.”

In the background of these efforts, we can see attempts to attach very different meanings and responses to what happened. Robert Jenrick, former Conservative minister and Reform UK MP called for Rudakubana’s parents – who were granted asylum in the UK in 2002 – to be deported, arguing that “the fear of being smeared as racist is costing lives”.

The killer’s parents were condemned by Sir Adrian, after the report found that they bore “considerable blame” for the tragedy by creating “significant obstructions to constructive engagement” with authorities as their son’s behaviour was escalating, and were “too ready to excuse and defend his actions”.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch made similar overtures about deportation as an avenue to repeat her call for the government to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights.

While there should be no effort to downplay the extent to which they failed their moral and parental duties, these comments smack of political opportunism, repeating party lines rather than truly focusing on the people at the heart of what happened.

This opportunism was evident in the days following the attack. As misinformation spread online about the perpetrator’s religion and immigration status, tensions escalated into racist violence: riots broke out, a mosque was attacked with fire and bricks and communities across the country felt the impact.

In total, 1,876 people were arrested for the violence, with over one thousand charged, and it took days to restore order. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, was all too willing to amplify the rhetoric that helped to fuel the unrest. At the same time, Elsie’s grieving mum felt compelled to beg people to stop rioting.

Almost two years on, it is again clear whose voices we should be listening to.

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What happened in July 2024 will always be a part of Southport. The town’s MP Patrick Hurley, who was elected just weeks before the attack, said in Westminster this week: “The families affected do not want their lives to be defined by the attack, and we must not allow my great town to be defined by it either.”

In the nearly two years since, the aim has been clear: build a legacy that shows good can still triumph over evil. It is evident in the extraordinary work done by the charities; in Alice’s dad Sergio completing six marathons to raise funds, and in the planned £10m redesign of the Town Hall Gardens in their memory.

What will matter most though, is not words but change – change that ensures nothing like this can ever happen again. ■

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About the author: Jamie Lopez is editor of The Southport Lead and a freelance journalist based in Southport.

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On Monday, inquiry chair Sir Adrian Fulford delivered a 700-page report, the culmination of months spent hearing deeply harrowing testimonies. As we rep…

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It’s not often I reach for sporting analogies, for obvious reasons. But here’s one, courtesy of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky: you miss 100 per cent of the shots you don’t take.

Keir Starmer, it seems, is determined not to take any.

Since coming into power, Labour has acted as a team permanently hovering on the edge of a radical decision it cannot bring itself to make. The discovery of the £22bn “black hole” was the perfect moment to level with the public about the state of the government’s finances. After fourteen years of austerity, Brexit and Covid, the state simply did not have enough money to provide the services we expect. Instead, it was fumbled.

The Budgets that followed could have reset the conversation and the way we handle our finances. Instead, a cautious Rachel Reeves tinkered: a little here and there, the burden falling on working people who are less organised, less vocal, and more accustomed to absorbing the hit, rather than anywhere structural. On farmers, winter fuel, and the deeper questions of wealth and assets, the instinct has been to retreat.

But politics in difficult times does not reward caution. Britain, like much of the world, is in a permanent state of crisis: a fractious, weary population, geopolitical instability, and a creaking economy. Even establishment voices are now saying the quiet part out loud. Today, former NATO chief, Lord Robertson, will warn that the UK’s security is “in peril”, describing a country that is “underprepared” and “not safe”.

The uncomfortable truth is that we cannot get where we need to go without raising lots more money. Borrowing alone will not cut it either. Markets have limits, debt interest is already swallowing billions, and the era of cheap money is over. So that means tax, not the politically convenient kind, or another round of stealth freezes, but a serious rethink of how the state raises revenue in the 21st-century.

The case is overwhelming. Start with the economy. Britain is less productive, less healthy and less resilient than it should be. Investment in infrastructure, in the transition to renewables, and in the basic capacity of the state has been deferred for too long.

Then there is defence. If Donald Trump has taught Europe anything, it is that the old security guarantees can no longer be taken for granted. Even British military chiefs are warning that “the cavalry is not coming”. A more dangerous world demands a more serious state, and that costs money.

Even here, the debate is being skewed. Too often, defence is set against “welfare”, as if national security depends on cutting support for the most vulnerable. Lord Robertson is expected to make exactly this argument, warning: “We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget.”

Firstly, it is a false choice, not least because when politicians say “welfare”, they rarely mean pensions or the triple lock, which are the largest and most protected parts of that bill. But the deeper problem is that a country cannot be secure abroad if it is failing at home. Britain has a sick, ageing population, rising inactivity and deep regional inequalities. Further stripping back support, without fixing those underlying problems, will undoubtedly leave a weaker workforce, higher long-term costs and a less resilient state.

There is no reason to accept this framing in the first place. Britain is a wealthy country. The question is not whether we can afford to invest in defence, resilience and renewal, but whether we are willing to make the tough choices to do so.

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And there is the simple matter of fairness. The current tax system is riddled with distortions: work is taxed heavily, while wealth – particularly unearned wealth – is treated far more generously. Across the political spectrum, there is growing agreement on the direction of travel: reform capital gains tax, revisit land and property, close loopholes, and consider windfalls where appropriate. These are not radical ideas; in fact, are increasingly mainstream.

For too long, British politics has been shaped by the fear of being labelled “tax and spend”. Especially in Labour circles, that reflex lingers even as the ground beneath it has shifted.

But the Government cannot keep telling us everything has changed for the worse while insisting the same approach will suffice. People feel the urgency of the moment, and it is jarring to watch a government respond as if nothing has.

Of course, raising taxes is not easy. It requires trade-offs and strong leadership. But the alternative is far worse: an erosion of state capacity, and a weak, defenceless Britain.

I’d love to say moments like this do not come around often. But it seems they do – with increasing frequency and greater urgency each time. That is exactly why Starmer cannot look away. Moments like this demand that you take the shot.■

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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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At a glance facts

The Government has selected seven areas across the country as potential sites for its proposed wave of new towns. It has whittled down the list from the 12 initially put forward by its New Towns Taskforce, and there will be a consultation before the final locations are decided.

Ministers claim the new towns are important if the Government is to reach its target of building 1.5 million new homes within this parliament – even though only three are likely to get off the ground in that time. Labour has pledged at least 40 per cent affordable housing in each town, half of which to be available at social rent. The intention is for each new town to include a minimum of 10,000 new homes, set in communities in which amenities can be reached easily without a car.

But the policy raises a central question: can a small number of long-term developments meaningfully ease the UK’s ongoing housing shortage? Or are ministers betting on a solution that will take decades to deliver – while the crisis deepens now?

Context

Keir Starmer invoked the post-war era of new towns when he promised to start building a new generation at the Labour conference in 2023.

Despite constrained finances, communities and housing secretary Steve Reed recently underlined the Government’s continued ambition to recreate the boom that brought us Welwyn Garden City, Skelmersdale and Milton Keynes when he said: “The only time the UK’s economy has consistently grown at above 3 per cent per annum was during the period of post-war reconstruction.”

Labour’s New Towns Taskforce made a series of recommendations in its report last year that also put forward 12 potential sites: that they should be built at scale, create thriving communities with the right infrastructure, and be located in areas where they could boost economic growth or address a particularly high demand for housing.

Taskforce chair Sir Michael Lyons said there was a “compelling argument” for new towns both to meet housing need and stimulate growth. He believed its 12 recommended sites could contribute at least 300,000 new homes.

The seven new towns – a mix of new settlements, extensions to existing towns and even inner-city districts – are: Tempsford, Bedfordshire; Leeds South Bank; Crews Hill and Chase Park, Enfield; Thamesmead, Greenwich; Manchester Victoria North; Brabazon and the West Innovation Arc, South Gloucestershire; and Milton Keynes.

Former new town Milton Keynes is to get its own new town, with a plan to extend it by 40,000 homes and build a new local transport centre.

Tempsford, a genuinely new new town built around a new rail station in what is currently just a village, would also have around 40,000 homes.

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Some eyebrows were raised when two of the country’s biggest cities, Leeds and Manchester, were earmarked for “new towns” – a label generally associated with entirely new settlements rather than regeneration schemes within existing urban areas.

At Manchester Victoria North, for example, developers have already started handing over homes – meaning newly built properties are being completed and occupied by residents – leading some to question whether this is genuinely a “new town” or simply an ongoing housing development being rebadged. Lyons argues this is consistent with the Government’s economic objectives and that there has never been a settled definition of new towns in legislation.

Of the five sites excluded from the Taskforce’s original list, Adlington in Cheshire drew the most attention because of local opposition. Last December, Cheshire East Council passed a motion opposing the new town plan for green belt land around Adlington. Councillors had been blindsided because of a non-disclosure agreement between the Government and the landowner that prevented public consultation.

Removing it from the list, the Government said only that Adlington was unlikely to offer the same level of “nationally significant economic growth” as the other northern sites. It added that other sites outside the 12 may yet come under consideration.

Can new towns tackle the housing crisis?

For Labour’s other objective, tackling the housing crisis, new towns could be a “unique opportunity”, according to a joint report by Shelter and the New Economics Foundation, if they put social housing at the centre of them.

New towns could be “great places to live”, argue the two organisations, but only if they follow the lessons of post-war history by putting development corporations at the head of them, with extensive powers of land assembly and planning, and back them up with public investment.

The private sector’s willingness to provide most of the funding, on which the Government is relying, is a “key question”, warns their report.

Ministers have promised that part of Homes England’s new Social and Affordable Housing Programme will fund new towns, and point to grant funding to the country’s mayoral authorities, the new National Housing Bank and the Brownfield Housing Bank as other possible sources of funding. But for any genuinely new money, we will have to wait until the final locations are confirmed, according to Reed.

He has also said that the aim of 40 per cent affordable housing in new towns, with half of that at social rent, is only an aspiration the Government will push for and it can’t be certain of reaching it. Nor has he explained how new town homes will contribute to the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes by the end of this parliament. Even if its preferred three – Crews Hill and Chase Park, Leeds South Bank and Tempsford – do get spades in the ground before 2029, they are unlikely to be completed by then.

What will new towns actually do?

The Government calls the new town programme the “biggest housebuilding programme in over fifty years”, helping people live close to jobs and transport links.

More than 100 sites were submitted to the New Towns Taskforces’s call for evidence.

In an explainer on its website, the Ministry of Housing, Community and Local Government is already making its pitch to first-time buyers, renters or people in search of a family home, offering an environment designed for “modern, everyday life”, with shared green spaces and vibrant high streets.

Ministers are promising new towns will have an “appropriate” geographical spread across England, be sustainable in transport and environmental terms, and aligned to the government’s Net Zero agenda.

The Taskforce was “concerned” to note the extent of poor water and power infrastructure across the country and made its recommendations accordingly, but said the government must continue to take steps to improve it – a need only heightened by the current oil shock.

What people are saying

“New towns must be built with existing communities in mind. They should be designed to bring real opportunity, identity and community to the people who will live there. Engagement must go beyond consultation: young people, families and future residents should help to shape the identity of the place from the start.” – Abena Oppong-Asare, Labour MP for Erith and Thamesmead

“The Government needs to look further and faster at the proper development of brownfield land, rather than ripping up the green belt and steamrolling over local democracy, local voices and local communities.” – Gareth Bacon, Conservative MP for Orpington

“The first wave of new towns showed what can be achieved when government and planners work at scale, but they also highlight the importance of getting design, infrastructure, and community voice right from the very start. Public support for new towns will depend on learning those lessons and making sure they reflect the aspirations of the people who will live and work in them.” – Dr Victoria Hills, chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute

What happens next

The public consultation on new towns runs until 19 May, while further environmental and habitat assessments are taking place. The Government wants to publish final proposals and confirm the new towns locations later in the summer. The timeline beyond that is not clear yet and there is little indication of when the first homes might be built.

The consultation says once the locations have been decided the Government will use “every lever at its disposal to prioritise early delivery of homes and infrastructure.” That will mean setting up delivery bodies such as development corporations, and funding the planning of new infrastructure.■

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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.

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 would like us to untangle, email ella@thelead.uk.

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After a long Easter weekend of rest, routine resumes. But for millions of workers across the UK, something has shifted. They return to their offices, factories and workplaces with greater security than they had just days ago.

A suite of new employment rights marks one of the most meaningful upgrades to labour protections in a generation. Workers now have day-one rights to paternity leave and sick pay, stronger whistleblowing protections, and access to a new enforcement body with real teeth. Taken together, this is the most significant uplift to workers’ rights in decades and a recognition that the balance of power at work was tilted too far for too long.

For years, British workers were asked to accept a quiet erosion of their rights at the price of economic growth. Under the Conservatives’ fourteen years in office, those rights were hollowed out. Zero-hours contracts proliferated, insecure work spread and enforcement withered. The result was a labour market that left workers sicker, more anxious and more insecure.

This Labour government promised to reverse that trend, and it is moving in the right direction. The expansion of statutory sick pay is perhaps the clearest example. Removing the lower earnings threshold and waiting period means the lowest-paid are no longer forced to choose between their health and their income. It is a long-overdue correction, and one that campaigners, including we at The Lead, have previously pushed for.

Then there is the extension of day-one rights to paternity leave, allowing someone to give notice of leave from the first day of their employment. Of course, care responsibilities do not begin after six months in a job, and nor should the right to meet them. For younger workers in insecure roles, this is a meaningful step forward.

Other changes matter too. Whistleblowers making sexual harassment disclosures now have protection from detrimental and unfair dismissal. And the creation of the Fair Work Agency shows that this government understands how rights can only be upheld if there is a body there to enforce them.

All of this deserves credit. After years in which flexibility came at the expense of security, the dial is starting to move back.

But, as ever, there are still areas where the government must go further. Britain does not lack regulators; it lacks regulators with teeth, and the Fair Work Agency will only succeed if it is properly resourced. Without serious investment, enforcement could well remain patchy and the most vulnerable workers are susceptible to slipping through the cracks.

Statutory sick pay, meanwhile, is still too low. Expanding access is important, but adequacy matters too. At a time where the cost of living remains the highest concern for workers across the country, if employees still cannot afford to take time off, the underlying problem persists.

More fundamentally, the reforms stop short of addressing the central feature of Britain’s labour market: the normalisation of insecurity itself. Zero-hours contracts remain legal. While their worst excesses will be curbed through rights to guaranteed hours and compensation, questions persist about who exactly qualifies and how guaranteed hours are calculated, while the underlying model of insecure work remains intact. And while much will be shaped through implementation, the long-standing imbalance of power means unions and workers will face an uphill battle to ensure these rights are meaningfully upheld.

That tension is evident in the Government’s approach. Even as it strengthens protections, it remains sensitive to the costs imposed on business, with estimates of up to £5bn frequently referenced. Businesses are – like the rest of Britain – undoubtedly struggling at the moment, but what is described as a cost in this context is more of a rebalancing. For years, workers have absorbed the hidden costs of flexibility through unstable incomes and limited protections. These reforms begin to modestly reverse that.

There is also a conspicuous gap where the future of work should be. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in everything from recruitment to performance monitoring, a new imbalance is emerging between worker and machine. Decisions about hiring, scheduling and performance are increasingly being made by opaque systems, often with little explanation or recourse. Without clear rights around transparency and accountability, artificial intelligence risks trampling over these reforms and entrenching exactly the kind of insecurity this is set to address.

None of that diminishes what has been achieved, and the direction of travel is clear. But the question now is whether the Government is prepared to go further. Because a labour market that is more productive, more stable and more humane requires a deliberate rebalancing of power, and the political will to see it through.■

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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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When GB News published an article listing 11 organisations “thwarting” the Government’s deportation plans last September, a wave of fear spread across charities that work with refugee and immigrant women.

Many felt forced to scramble together risk mitigation plans and some even closed their offices.

Women For Refugee Women [WRW], a charity set up to support refugee and asylum-seeking women who have fled persecution, was forced to close its offices for two weeks. It also brought in new safety measures such as disallowing lone-working in the office, implementing a “buddy system” instead and is working towards having CCTV installed.

WRW, which has successfully campaigned for the Government to introduce, and maintain, a 72-hour limit on the detention of pregnant women, and is currently campaigning to end the use of asylum hotels, made the decision to remove all staff and trustee details from its website, and created new impersonal email addresses.

Around the same time, the Charity Commission took the highly unusual step of removing the names of trustees from several charities listed on its website. This was because the Home Office gave a far-right influencer the names of some organisations with which it had had meetings about asylum accommodation, following a freedom of information [FOI] request. WRW had also had a meeting with the Home Office about the malicious use of FOI requests in this context.

Such tactics – deployed by a movement claiming to protect women and girls – are leaving workers anxious, angry and unable to offer the service they want to. “I’ve worked in the refugee sector for over 10 years and this feels like the most hostile it’s ever been,” Natalie*, who works WRW, tells The Lead.

Over summer, Natalie’s own work email was shared online – and although it isn’t clear by who, it is assumed it was by the far-right. “I received thousands and thousands of spam emails over a couple of days that completely clogged my inbox,” which stopped her from being able to do her work efficiently.

“It did cause quite a lot of anxiety,” she says. “I was more angry in the moment, but then I was quite worried, and my mum and my partner were very concerned.”

Southall Black Sisters [SBS], who provides holistic specialist support services for all forms of violence against women and girls, also closed its offices last year. The charity has organised safety measures for staff including rape alarms and lone-working policies.

Set up in the face of the rise of the National Front in the 1970s, the organisation continues to focus on the needs of Black, minoritised and migrant women and campaigns on migrant rights as well as violence against women and girls.

“Southall Black Sisters is a by-and-for organisation, which means that our staff are from the communities that we work with, and many have had experience of the immigration system, says Aditi*, who works for the charity.

“In the context of increasing far-right aggression and mobilisation, it’s a triple threat. Some of us are on temporary visas, and the current political climate and the immigration changes and the precarity of the system are also really concerning for them.”

Priya*, who also works for SBS, says she feels “fearful just walking around” at the moment. “I feel more vulnerable than ever just being out and about, especially knowing where I’m working,” she tells The Lead.

Women and girls at risk

These fears are very much rooted in reality. Marie*, who works for the charity Derbyshire Refugee Action, frequently came face-to-face with far-right protesters between September and December last year.

“Every Thursday and Saturday morning for the last three years, I pick up a group of asylum seekers from their accommodation and take them to our charity for English classes and help with anything else they need, but once the protests started, it became problematic to be dropping them off during protest windows,” Marie tells The Lead.

“Whenever I dropped the guys, I’d be hurled abuse and called a ‘fucking traitor’,” she says. “One time, one of the protesters blocked my view of the road using a flag, which is very unsafe because it’s a busy road at the national speed limit, and I couldn’t pull out.”

She reported this incident – which was caught on video and posted online by the perpetrators themselves – to the police, who gave her a crime number and took him in for questioning. She was also concerned because she realised the protesters figured out the location of her charity, but no one ever showed up.

“I have C-PTSD [complex post-traumatic stress disorder] and it was very distressing to me, and left me a bit shaky, and it did affect my sleep when it first happened,” she says.

She adds: “I’m determined not to let anybody hurt me. I am protecting these lads who have done nothing wrong and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”

A National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson said: “We are committed to tackling any and all ideologies which pose a threat to the public’s safety and security, and treat the threat from the far right in exactly the same way as any other ideology used to spread mistrust and fear in our communities.

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“Forces work closely with local communities to respond to concerns and put measures in place to keep people safe. We would encourage anyone who has concerns for their safety or has been the victim of any crime to contact their local force so that they can help you.”

The increased focus on safeguarding means charities and organisations are being pulled away from doing vital work, and closing their offices meant services can’t be accessed by those who needed them.

“Ideally, we wouldn’t need to do all of the safeguarding,” says Aditi. “It takes time and resources away from our service provision, our support provision, which is our primary function.”

Charities at breaking point

Charities all over the UK are struggling to make ends meet. A recent report from the Charity Commission found that around two in five charities (41 per cent) had expenditure that exceeded income in the last financial year. There were also 139,725 fewer jobs reported in 2024 than in 2023. The rising cost of living has led to cost cutting measures across the majority of UK charities over the last two years.

Aditi points out that services were already stretched prior to the service having to make adjustments. “There’s always extreme demand for our service... and of course, we don’t have more funding for that.”

Natalie agrees: “It is distracting from the vital work that we should be doing, and we don’t have the resources to put in place for lots of things that we would like to.” She notes the charity will need to find the money to install CCTV.

Everyone who spoke to The Lead for this story made the same point: it’s the Government’s immigration policy itself that is not just fuelling the far-right but also harming those working in the immigration sector.

Following the 2024 riots, Southall Black Sisters and Women For Refugee Women, along with Latin American Women’s Rights Service, Safety4Sisters and Imkaan, sent a list of demands to the Government to tackle the far-right.

They called for the immediate protection of immigration centers and the suspension of in-person reporting to shield minoritised communities from violence, a total dismantling of “hostile environment” policies and a reversal of austerity measures to fund community cohesion. They also demanded an investigation into social media’s role in spreading misinformation and a formal acknowledgment that decades of institutional hostility and alarmist rhetoric have directly fueled the current unrest.

“The Government has a really important role to play because I think so much of this undermines how civil society can function, and I really think that the government needs to stand firm and call this out ” says Natalie. “The Government needs to realise that they are chasing a vote that they’re never going to receive and they’re actually just adding to the hostility and racism that’s proliferating in the UK at the moment.”

This comes in the context of a raft of sweeping changes introduced by the Home Secretary last spring, that drastically reduce the rights and entitlements of asylum seekers, such as lengthening the time required to secure Indefinite Leave to Remain, making it harder for refugees to bring family members to the UK and accelerating the removal of individuals with no right to be in the UK.

Women for Refugee Women is calling on the Government to act decisively to protect women’s charities.

“Civil society organisations play a vital role in upholding human rights, supporting marginalised communities, and holding power to account,” she says. When the far-right targets charities like ours, it is not just organisations under attack, but the democratic space that allows civil society to function at all.

“The Government must act decisively to protect charities, publicly condemn far-right intimidation, and safeguard the legitimacy of civil society.

“Women-led organisations like ours should be able to focus on supporting refugee women to recover from violence and persecution, not be forced to divert scarce resources into security simply to stay safe.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “It is widely known that the Home Office engages with a broad range of stakeholders, including NGOs, when developing asylum policy. This is a well-established and transparent part of our policymaking process.

“We strongly condemn any form of harassment or intimidation. Anyone who engages in such behaviour can expect to face the full force of the law.”■

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About the author: Ella is a freelance journalist specialising in worker's rights, housing, health, harm reduction and lifestyle. You can find her work in Prospect Magazine, Dazed, Observer Magazine, Women’s Health and - most importantly - here at The Lead.

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At a glance facts

Shared ownership is meant to offer an answer to the housing crisis for aspiring homeowners, including lower-income households.

The National Audit Office [NAO]has highlighted problems with shared ownership, including rising service charges and the transaction costs of buying bigger shares of a property, amid claims by residents they are trapped by the model.

How does shared ownership work?

Shared ownership allows eligible buyers to purchase a portion of a home – typically between 10 per cent and 75 per cent – while paying rent on the remainder to a housing provider, usually a housing association.

To qualify, households must earn £80,000 a year or less (£90,000 in London) and be unable to afford a suitable home on the open market.

Buyers take out a mortgage on their share and pay a deposit, usually between 5-10 per cent of that portion. Alongside mortgage repayments and rent, they also cover service charges and ground rent – costs that can rise over time.

Owners can increase their stake through “staircasing”, gradually buying additional shares in the property. But each step typically involves valuation and legal fees, which can make it costly to progress to full ownership.

All shared ownership homes are leasehold. Residents are responsible for their interiors and, if they live in flats or new build estates, may be liable to pay a share of exterior and communal area maintenance and repairs.

The context

Annual delivery of shared ownership homes has increased over the last decade from 11,128 homes in 2014-15 to 20,353 homes in 2024-25, according to the NAO, making it the largest affordable housing scheme in the country.

There are around 250,000 shared ownership homes in the country – a mix of new build and resale. Most are in London and the South East, where it is even harder to get on the housing ladder than the rest of the country.

Many residents are content with shared ownership, and analysis for the Leeds Building Society last year found a number of benefits. Its report said that after shared owners had been in their property for 10 years, it would cost less than renting in 93 per cent of areas. Growing equity value meant shared owners would be on average £29,000 better off than private renters by the 10-year mark – £42,000 in London. “Shared ownership delivers strongly,” concluded the report’s authors.

The NAO conclusion was less glowing, saying: “Complexities around service charges and the ‘staircasing’ model (whereby customers increase the proportion of the property they own rather than rent) mean many who take up the scheme don’t fully understand the longer-term financial risks.”

Shared owners bear the full brunt of maintaining their property and, particularly if they are living in flats, uncapped service charges – even though they only own a share of it.

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The NAO added: “Customers report concerns with rising costs such as increased service charges over time, along with transaction costs that apply each time shared owners want to buy a bigger portion of their property.”

Others have been more damning. In a 2024 report, the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee said, “rising rents, uncapped service charges, liability for repairs and maintenance costs and complex leases make shared ownership an unbearable reality for many people seeking to become 100 per cent homeowners”.

Repairs and maintenance services are often not done in good time and are of poor quality, the committee found, and shared owners face difficulty in selling their shares if properties are affected by remediation issues, “with many people ending up ‘trapped’ in properties they can no longer afford.”

Speaking to the BBC last week after the release of the NAO report, single parent Jamie, who bought a 25 per cent share of a three‑bedroom flat in north London, said her service charge had increased by 50 per cent in less than four years – to more than £8,000 a year – meaning her housing costs were more than half her income.

Complaints to the Housing Ombudsman have risen sharply in recent years, proportionately more than the increase in shared ownership properties. But there are wider questions too – whether shared ownership is a progressive use of taxpayers’ money as a response to the housing crisis, and how sustainable it will be as the market changes.

A shared ownership-only development by housing association subsidiary Gecko Homes in the desirable South Manchester suburb Chorlton currently lists available flats (one- and two-bed) from £265,000 to £403,000, which might stretch some people’s definition of “affordable”. The average price of a two-bed flat in Chorlton is £210,000.

These flats are also not guaranteed to hold their price. In the North West, 41.6 per cent of flats were sold for a loss last year, according to the HomeOwners Alliance. In London it’s 40.9 per cent and in the North East 63.6 per cent.

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What people are saying

“Shared ownership remains an important route into home ownership, but it is complex, and weaknesses in information, affordability, data quality and redress mean that Government does not yet have a full understanding of how the model works for consumers.” – Gareth Davies, head of the NAO

“If we really want to help people own their own home, it is incumbent on the Government to see how they can make this scheme work better.” – Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chairman of the Public Accounts Committee

What happens next?

Housing minister Matthew Pennycook says he expects providers to improve conditions for shared owners under the new social and affordable homes programme launching this year, “giving greater consideration to long-term customer affordability, increasing transparency and fairness on costs, and giving customers the ability to opt out of fees for services that are optional”.■

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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.

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 would like us to untangle, email ella@thelead.uk.

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You may have noticed that the prime minister has struggled somewhat to bring the country together.

For much of the past two years of this Labour government, politics has felt like a prolonged exercise in risk management. Little coherent vision, no clear sense of purpose, no common enemies or allegiances. Keir Starmer has inched cautiously from one position to the next, wary of saying anything too clearly or doing anything too boldly.

But occasionally, fate hands you something rare: a win. If Starmer plays his cards right, he could have two of them.

The first is the war in Iran: a conflict so vast, so unnecessary, so destabilising that it threatens to pull the entire global economy into its orbit. In the face of escalation, oil shocks and geopolitical brinkmanship, the smallness of domestic political management is exposed.

The idea that Britain can quietly chart its own course in a stable, post-Brexit world begins to look faintly naïve. We are, once again, subject to the decisions of more powerful actors elsewhere. For a government that clearly wants to bring us closer to Europe and to neutralise the allure of populism, that presents an opportunity. This is what strong men do: they snap decades of alliances in half for a moment of self-serving power. Our best defence is shared values, practices and strength in numbers.

The second moment may feel smaller, but it could prove just as consequential.

Last week’s landmark US ruling against Meta and YouTube is a striking development in the long-running battle over Big Tech. A California jury found that two of the world’s most powerful companies had deliberately designed products that were addictive to children: not harmful by accident, but consciously built to keep users hooked. It is already being described as Big Tech’s “Big Tobacco moment”: a legislated shift in where responsibility lies, and what governments might now feel able to do about it.

For years, social media regulation has been contested. Concern has been widespread, but responsibility has drifted between parents, children, schools and platforms. Policy responses have been paltry: a patchwork of content rules, age limits and parental controls, none of which touch the sides of the problem.

This ruling changes the debate entirely. It makes something long suspected feel concrete: these platforms are not neutral spaces that some people misuse, but systems built with particular incentives, priorities and consequences.

Which means we now have something politics has been missing: clarity. A shared concern, a clear target, and a set of powerful interests shaping the lives of millions. This is exactly the kind of fight Starmer has so far struggled to have.

Successful governments tend, at some point, to define themselves not just by what they are for, but by what they are willing to confront. Not in a crude, populist sense of attacking enemies, but in the sense of identifying where power sits and deciding to challenge it. Big Tech provides that.

This is one of those rare issues where the political conditions are unusually favourable. Public concern is already high, particularly among parents. The harms, from addiction to mental health impacts, are widely documented and increasingly hard to dismiss. Figures across the left and right are united, and globally, governments from Australia to Spain are already moving.

Of course, a ban on its own may not be enough. It risks being a partial answer to a deeper problem, leaving the underlying incentives of these platforms intact. But even this shift in the conversation matters. The balance of power is moving. Now comes the harder part: whether governments are prepared to compel companies to take their duty of care seriously.

From Iran to Silicon Valley, the twin developments of global conflict and a reckoning with the power of Big Tech point to the same question at the heart of this government’s malaise: what will it stand for, and who is it willing to stand up to?

In Iran, the lesson is about alliances, values and the limits of going it alone in a world shaped by erratic strongmen. Britain cannot control events, but it can choose where it stands and who it stands with.

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On tech, the question is different but related, not how to manage the effects of power, but how to confront it.

For much of his premiership, Starmer has seemed intent on avoiding defining moments. Now he has been handed two. One is about Britain’s place in an unstable world, the other is about power much closer to home. Both offer him an opportunity to fight. The question is whether he’s prepared to take 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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Schools are becoming the UK’s “fourth emergency service” – providing food, warmth and crisis support to children as poverty deepens.

A study of more than 100 teachers across the UK – shared exclusively with The Lead – found educators are providing warm spaces, food, clothing, hygiene items, emotional support and crisis navigation, with limited resources and often using their own time and money.

The report authors warn that schools are increasingly absorbing responsibilities previously held by social care, local authorities, health services, and family support services. In interviews, staff repeatedly mention that this was not the role they were trained for, but that they feel “morally compelled” to fill the gaps.

The findings from National Energy Action [NEA] paint a consistently troubling picture of how fuel poverty manifests in UK schools, and reveal that the wider system families should be able to rely on is failing to reach those most in need.

According to the findings, 62 per cent of teachers have heard children talking about skipping meals, and almost 40 per cent have heard kids mention being cold at home. Clothing is a big issue, with 79 per cent saying pupils do not have weather-appropriate clothing, and 82 per cent noticing children repeatedly wearing unwashed clothes.

All educators interviewed described in some way how schools are now operating as an “emergency service”, with teachers providing everything from free breakfast clubs to snacks throughout the day, spare uniform banks, washing clothes for students, food parcels and blankets. And teachers overwhelmingly came to the same conclusion – that the situation is worsening and increasingly unsustainable.

“The findings were not surprising to me,” Michala Sullivan, NEA training programme delivery manager and former secondary school teacher, tells The Lead. “The statistics reflect what I witnessed daily as a teacher.

“The fuel poverty crisis is affecting more aspects of people’s lives, and these impacts are not supporting our young people to achieve their potential. You can see that in this research. It used to be more of a hidden problem, whereas I think it is becoming much more visible.”

No breakfast, no coat

Latest estimates suggest there are 6 million children in the UK living in fuel poverty, many in the country’s least efficient homes. It translates to a terrible start in life. Missing school because of illness, doing homework in bed with numb fingers, too hungry to concentrate or learn. These realities are directly reflected in the report’s findings.

One school-based community liaison officer shared: “I’ve heard from young people who use wood stoves at home, just for mum to save money, they go into the woods and cut trees.”

Another teacher said: “Every day, basically, kids are walking into school and they haven’t had their breakfast and they’re freezing cold and they haven’t got the appropriate clothing on. They haven’t got a coat.”

Some explicitly mentioned children coming in with a noticeable damp smell, or wearing pyjamas under uniforms for warmth. They also raised visible poor hygiene, including lack of deodorant, unwashed hair or clothes, and dirty collars. They reported seeing students who had limited ability to shower or bathe due to a lack of hot water.

A ‘constellation’ of deepening need

The impact on educators is significant, with teachers describing guilt and burnout, alongside personal spending and expanded roles. Teachers are already struggling. Unions have warned that the Government’s latest proposals for pay awards amount to a “real terms pay cut”. Some teachers – themselves in financial difficulty – have sacrificed things for their own children to make sure their pupils have what they need.

For the children, the ramifications of living in financial hardship are countless and devastating. From low self-esteem and depression, to hypothermia and asthma, to an inability to concentrate and poor attendance – there is no area of their short lives untouched by fuel poverty.

“The findings bring a real, true understanding about how far away the promise of a warm, safe home is for those kids, and without that – just how detrimental it is to their life chances, their wellbeing, and any chance of success,” says Peter Smith, NEA director of policy and advocacy. “When you hear some of those stories, it really is harrowing.”

Study authors say fuel poverty is not a peripheral issue schools occasionally encounter, stating: “It is a structural condition shaping daily classroom reality.” They also describe a “constellation of need” that is “deepening and widening.”

They add: “In this landscape, schools are the most consistent and trusted touchpoint for families, and therefore the most effective launchpad for timely fuel poverty support.”

Read more: See all of our stories in our End Child Poverty campaign

“It should have happened yesterday”

The Warm Homes Plan published in January pledged an investment of £15 billion to upgrade five million homes by 2030. Under the ambitious and optimistic scheme, the Government is promising grants and zero and low-interest loans for clean energy upgrades in homes – for things like heat pumps, batteries and insulation upgrades – including low-interest loans for solar panels, which will be available to everyone regardless of income.

However, Smith says it is vital to target energy efficiency money directly at homes with children. So, the Warm Homes Plan and energy efficiency funding should be used to upgrade the coldest homes where children live first – Smith suggests instructing local authorities and delivery bodies to prioritise those properties.

“Without doing that, it’s very unlikely that, unless there’s some good luck involved, they’re going to be first beneficiaries of these schemes. And given the urgency of this crisis, we just can’t wait for outcomes to happen naturally.”

“This report highlights the tragic reality that many children face daily, and how schools are going above and beyond in supporting those most in need,” Catherine McKinnell MP tells The Lead, adding that she welcomes action already being taken, including scrapping the two-child benefit cap, free breakfast clubs and upgrading homes.

“But these findings are a stark reminder that more must urgently be done. Through our work on the APPG on Warm Homes, we will be working to ensure that every child, no matter their circumstances, has a warm home to return to at the end of the school day.”

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Another key recommendation from the NEA report is that schools must be resourced as frontline referral points. This looks like providing schools with adequate resourcing for safeguarding, pastoral and community liaison provision, as well as implementing a national ‘warm home referral pathway’.

In terms of policy, there are immediate changes that would make a tangible difference to the lives of thousands of vulnerable children. “When you’re dealing with children, it should have happened yesterday. We simply can’t have a meandering approach that takes as long as it takes,” Smith tells us, stressing the need for urgency.

Smith advocates for a much larger, more effective energy debt write‑off scheme – expanding OFGEM’s current scheme could wipe out a meaningful share of the £4.5bn in energy debt. “If you remove that debt level from those households, it would be the equivalent of making energy more affordable,” says Smith.

Smith adds that devolved governments should fill gaps if Westminster doesn’t. He argues Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland can’t wait for UK‑wide action – but should introduce their own extra protections and support for children in cold homes. And, crucially, he says “children’s impact” and a greater sense of compassion must be built into every decision.

“Any risk procedure undertaken at the moment is typically done through the lens of wider vulnerability, and that isn’t sufficient to offset the sorts of risks our research has unveiled,” says Smith. “A child‑specific impact assessment, a bit like the Equalities Act requires for elderly people, could be embedded across government, regulators and industry, to make sure they thought about all the implications their actions could have, and particularly alternatives, if those were possible.”

Schools are absorbing a crisis they did not create. Until vulnerable families are properly supported, classrooms will be forced to fill the gaps left by policy, and children’s futures will depend on how long teachers can keep holding the line.■

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About the author: Natalie Morris is our National Editor here at The Lead. Elsewhere, she is a freelance writer, author, and host covering social justice, inequality, health and community.

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The results – shared exclusively with The Lead – are stark. Children come to school with no coats, they are hungry, unwell, unclean. You c…

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