As he prepares to take the stage for his first Labour Party conference speech as leader and as prime minister (an unusual sequence of events), Andy Burnham must know that he’s had luck on his side - so far.

Nigel Farage’s Reform, the juggernaut he forced a Mancunian by-election to stop, held a shambolic party conference earlier this month, overshadowed by an international row over his £72m in donations from two billionaire crypto-tech benefactors.

Violence breaking out after the arrival of protesters did little to make Farage look like a prime minister in waiting when compared to the relaxed and clearly joyful work ethic of the Labour incomer.

Luckily for Burnham, the people of Piddington hadn’t managed to hold their performative little referendum in time for the party to capitalise on immigration and migrant rights being back on the news agenda. That luck won’t hold out long; Kemi Badenoch has already been on a personal pilgrimage to the Oxfordshire village.

Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats, a challenger for Labour’s 2024 Middle England vote, held a lacklustre meeting in Brighton this week where they locked themselves in endless disagreement over strategy. The only headlines that broke through focused on EHRC and trans rights - important issues, but ones unlikely to make them the next party of government.

So Burnham travels to his hometown, grieving the loss of his father but in a position of relative confidence. Even three years out, performance in the leader’s speech and his ability to unite the gathered party after two years of bickering and backstabbing could determine the result of the next general election. It is a very serious moment for him, and for the country.

Burnham’s cheap giveaway policies and nice bloke persona have built goodwill but he will need to demonstrate something more solid in Liverpool to secure his position. The first area he will have to tackle is foreign affairs. He meets Trump ahead of the conference and will be watched closely to see if he is able to build a rapport with the notoriously brittle president. He might be able to pull this off.

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Although they are ideological opposites, there are some similarities between the two men in their communication style. Burnham appeals to his ordinariness when setting out his point of view: “that’s just me”, he says, as if anyone can relate.

You can hear the same tactic employed by Trump when he prefaces every controversial statement with “I don’t know about you, but…”

There is a hokeyness about them both. They may find common ground, and if they do Burnham can rest easier leaving the hard policy talk at conference to his foreign secretary Ed Miliband. (He did the same when Miliband was subjected to a brutal interview by Radio 4’s Today programme over the decision to ban UK trade with Israeli settlements.)

Elsewhere there are more tripwires. On immigration, Burnham has so far been careful to marginalise the issue in his social media to remove the oxygen from the debate, while also acknowledging how important this one topic has become to the voting public.

Luckily (that word again!) for him, the news crews will have moved on from Piddington by his big speech next Tuesday. That doesn’t mean he can get away without mentioning migration. He will no doubt talk up the drop in small boats, but he needs an announcement that appeals to both his critics and those who share his compassion on this issue. A new resettlement strategy wouldn’t be a surprise.

The prime minister will also need to tackle the issue of welfare. It is one of the first subjects that undid his predecessor, causing Starmer’s first major rebellion, but critics of a tax-and-spend state are out and proud after the revelation that due to inflation Britain’s debt is now £3.5bn higher than previously forecast. Of course, no mention of the fact that the economy expanded by 0.4 per cent in July, against a prediction of flatlining.

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Tackling this issue is likely to force Burnham down a Blairite avenue, talking about a balance between “rights” and “responsibilities”. Taking this route requires delicacy of touch from the PM: if he pushes too hard he will alienate the Labour base currently flirting with Zack Polanski’s Green Party, but there are a growing number of Liberal Democrat waverers too. If he keeps one, he might lose the other.

The Lib Dem-curious will also be looking for clarification on whether their lives will become more predictable after next month’s Budget. The row over the cost of university is ongoing. Most families with teenage and young adult offspring understand Burnham’s motivation in creating new routes into practical career paths and avoiding the assumption that a university education is the only acceptable route into work.

If he fails to address that for those who were always best suited to higher education, the economics no longer work then he is at risk of angering an overstretched generation of centre-left mid-lifers, whose children are heading for university and who in the current economic climate can’t afford to help them avoiding decades of debt. I think this is a most likely rabbit in John Healey’s hat come October. The Liberal Democrat vote is strongest between the ages of 45 and 54. Burnham needs Britain’s parents on side to win the next election.

The prime minister has been leading on easy mode since he took office in early summer. This autumn, consolidating his power will require a strength of belief in his strategy that Starmer was unable to demonstrate. The party conference speech is a curtain raiser for the forthcoming Budget. Both will have to be well received if he is to have any chance of secondary success in 2029. ■

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

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Editor’s note: Zoë Grünewald is away, having recently got married and is enjoying some well earned time off as well as appearing on Sky’s The Wargame(!). All of us at The Lead wish her and her husband many many congratulations on their honeymoon and congrats to Zoe on her new ‘role’ in the government too ;)

In his first address to the House of Commons as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham attempted to strike a hopeful tone, demonstrating the kind of positivity that has helped him surge past Reform in recent polling.

Many of his latest speeches have centred around broad calls for national renewal; he’s returned again and again to a diagnosis of ‘40 years of wrong turns’, and the fact that many communities around the country have never recovered from the process of deindustrialisation accelerated under Margaret Thatcher’s reign.

According to Burnham, the response should be “a more intentional approach to the reindustrialisation of Britain.” But what does this mean in practice?

From George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ to Keir Starmer’s pledge to invest £28bn in green industries (a commitment he later U-turned on), British prime ministers have repeatedly talked about returning to the UK to its industrial heyday. None of them have succeeded.

So is reindustrialisation actually possible for the UK, and if so, what is the most likely path?

How deindustrialised is Britain?

At the height of its Empire, Britain was labelled “the workshop of the world”, a nation which made huge profits from cheaply importing raw ingredients from global colonies and turning them into finished products for export.

The post-Second World War breakup of empire kickstarted the UK’s rapid industrial decline, which was accelerated when Margaret Thatcher came to power and pursued a ruthless shift towards a services-based economy: unions weakened, coal mines shut, the country’s manufacturing base massively reduced.

The UK’s manufacturing sector was responsible for nearly 30 per cent of national income in 1979, employing 6.8 million people; by 2010, this was down to 11 per cent and a workforce of 2.5 million. This represents one of the most seismic declines in manufacturing capacity any modern developed nation has experienced.

Today, over 80 per cent of GDP comes from service-based jobs like finance, legal services, IT, and arts and culture (an often overlooked sector — the UK is the world’s 2nd-biggest music exporter and creative industries contribute £145bn to the economy). Much of our industry may have gone; but we have replaced it with some extremely valuable alternatives.

What would reindustrialisation mean?

Burnham’s team — with its emphasis on devolution — appears to be aiming to move away from a top-down approach to reindustrialisation, instead leaving different regions to identify how to boost their productive capacity and work with Number 10 North to build their own industrial economies.

In practice, this means the Oxford-Cambridge corridor continuing to specialise in artificial intelligence, life sciences and biotech. It could mean ramping up the aerospace and advanced robotics industries in Sheffield and South Yorkshire.

The Centre for Cities think-tank says it takes reindustrialisation to be a joint focus on both manufacturing and knowledge businesses. It says the focus in Greater Manchester was on ‘tradable sectors’ such as knowledge-intensive services and manufacturing. It has ranked major towns and cities in the UK based on how they perform for these two types of businesses with Slough coming out on top and it shows for most there is a long way to go.

For the West Midlands, it could mean an increase in electric vehicle production, and up and down the North Sea, continued investment in offshore wind.

As the last two points demonstrate, reindustrialisation in the UK would likely be centred around green technology. Certainly, many of the biggest advocates of a renewed industrial base use this argument readily. But one of the key issues with this is that green industries don’t necessarily create an abundance of jobs.

Things like retrofitting houses and heat pump installation provide lots of work for plumbers, electricians and builders, but once you’ve got an offshore wind farm running, it doesn’t take many workers to look after it. By the same token, solar farms require lots of workers for installation and construction, but offer very few permanent jobs.

A far more concerning area of the UK economy that some reindustrialisation advocates promote — which could create more lasting jobs — is military production. The government’s 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy marked defence as an “engine for growth” and argued that a “move to warfighting readiness” could reinvigorate the UK’s industrial base.

In reality, this means attempting to revive Britain’s economy by investing in drones, missiles, ammunition, AI, and robotics designed to wreak havoc and destruction on war-torn countries across the world.

The UK is already the world’s eighth-largest major arms exporter; in addition to supplying Israel with significant military components, we sell large amounts of arms to countries like Saudi Arabia, and in Gaza and Yemen respectively, the human cost of these sales has been horrific.

Besides the damage a military-led reindustrialisation would inflict abroad, it’s worth noting that channelling funds this way would also mean billions of pounds that isn’t spent on housing, high-speed rail, and green energy at home.

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What people are saying

“Number 10 North will oversee the rewiring of the British state, the rebuilding of resilience in our communities and the re-industrialisation of our regions... a more intentional approach to the reindustrialisation of Britain is required” — Andy Burnham, Prime Minister

“Our economic and national security relies on us not being agnostic about where we make stuff. That doesn’t mean splendid isolation. It means taking the Prime Minister at his word and working with him to reindustrialise Britain.” — Paul Nowak, TUC general

“This is not about a return to the 1970s or feather-bedding failing enterprises. Rather, it is a recognition that there can be no genuine and sustained prosperity without a strong manufacturing base.” — Larry Elliott, author and journalist

“Our politicians may not like it, but the truth is the country they seek to govern is a broad-based services economy. The fact is almost never celebrated, but the UK is the second largest exporter of services in the world. Reindustrialisation is not the route out of stagnation.” — Torsten Bell, economist and Labour MP

“New manufacturing ventures in countries like the UK tend to be capital intensive without creating many jobs. The nostalgia for manufacturing jobs is understandable but unimaginative. We can’t reverse history, but we can learn from it.” — Sarah O’Connor, Financial Times journalist

“British industry has the talent, discipline and ambition to compete. What it does not have is a Government on its side… [the] net zero agenda is making energy more expensive, pushing jobs abroad and accelerating Britain’s deindustrialisation.” — Kemi Badenoch, Leader of the Opposition

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What happens next?

According to policy platform The Burnham Programme, the government’s reindustrialisation programme is about “productive capacity: advanced materials, low carbon energy, life sciences, digital systems, creative production, construction, transport engineering and the supply chains around them.”

This suggests an understanding that the UK’s manufacturing heyday is over, coupled with a desire to double down on the areas of industry that the UK already has levels of expertise in. But often, the impact this reindustrialisation could have in terms of job creation is overstated.

Regardless of what Burnham’s government does in office, industry will remain a relatively small part of the UK economy compared to services. Once an economy specialises in something, it’s very hard to change that basic structure — instead, the UK should arguably focus on further boosting its services sector, with more investment in the creative industries, for example.

This is hopefully an indication that the UK wouldn’t seek to boost its industrial capacity by focusing on the military; however, it’s still unclear exactly what reindustrialisation means for this government. ■

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About the author: Fred Garratt-Stanley is a freelance journalist who writes about culture, politics, football, and pubs.

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

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

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A government review of PIP found the system “no longer fit for purpose” — what does that mean for the millions who rely on it every day?

After gathering evidence from disabled people across the country, the first report from a major review of the government’s Personal Independence Payment (PIP) scheme found the system was “no longer fit for purpose”.

Now the committee behind the Timms Review has set out its first ‘emerging recommendations’ for what could be a major overhaul of the benefit, which millions rely on to help shoulder the additional costs of life with a disability.

But while the proposals are provisional for now, a number of organisations are already concerned that changes could lead to some people being treated “less favourably” than others.

What is the Timms Review?

The Timms Review is the first comprehensive examination of the government's PIP assessment process since it was introduced in 2013.

The non-means-tested benefit is intended to help with the additional costs of disability and long-term health conditions, with eligibility assessed based on how a person’s condition affects them rather than only their diagnosis.

The review is co-chaired by Minister for Social Security and Disability Sir Stephen Timms, Sharon Brennan, and Dr Clenton Farquharson CBE, and is being guided by a steering group made up of disabled people, organisations, and people with expertise and experience of the system.

Why is PIP being reviewed?

Around 10 million people (24 per cent) of working-age people now report living with a disability, compared with under 17 per cent in 2013/14.

As of April 2026, around four million people were receiving PIP in England and Wales, with government spending increasing from £14.4 billion to £23.8 billion in real terms between 2020 and 2025.

The rise in the number of people claiming PIP was at the heart of a political row last year when Labour introduced the Universal Credit Act 2025, a set of reforms designed to reduce welfare spending, including proposed changes to the PIP eligibility process.

But backbench MPs blocked the plans, prompting the government to commission a review look more ‘fundamentally’ at PIP.

Other welfare reforms are going ahead, such as the reduction in the health benefit of Universal Credit, which The Lead revealed is likely to hit the over-50s hardest.

What’s wrong with the current system?

The assessment process itself has not changed in over a decade, despite significant shifts in how disability and health – particularly mental health and neurodivergence – are understood.

Following a call for evidence that collected over 38,000 responses from disabled people, carers, organisations, and others with experience of the system, the interim report found the process ‘fails to reflect real-life impacts’, particularly for those with multiple or fluctuating conditions.

PIP was widely valued, and ‘vital’ for many, but the assessment and decision-making process was described as ‘stressful’ and ‘dehumanising’, while others said it created barriers to ‘participating fully in work, social and community life’.

Alice Billin, head of policy and public affairs at the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, highlighted how current assessments reduce a complex condition that changes over time to “a snapshot of someone’s health”, describing the system as “stressful, inconsistent and deeply upsetting” and “damaging” for claimants’ physical and mental health.

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What could actually change?

At the end of last week, the committee published its ‘emerging recommendations’ ahead of a series of ‘shaping workshops’ between 15 September and 7 October.

Initial proposals include reducing the number of reassessments for people with lifelong or degenerative conditions, introducing a fast-track process for new claimants with a terminal illness, and reviewing strict and ‘unnecessarily stressful’ rules that suspend PIP automatically when someone has spent more than 28 consecutive days in hospital.

People who struggle to articulate how their condition affects them could access advocacy, while the DWP would make better use of evidence from health and social care services, and a proposed ‘Tell Us Once’ system could avoid claimants having to repeatedly provide the same information.

Potential improvements to the way PIP assesses fluctuating conditions to better capture their impact over time have also been welcomed by charities.

Ross Barrett, policy manager at the MS Society told The Lead that the recommendations acknowledge problems people with MS have been raising “for years”.

“We’re particularly glad to see emerging thinking on how fluctuating symptoms are assessed, reducing unnecessary reassessments, and making the process more supportive and person-centred,” he said.

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Why are some disabled groups concerned?

While the review explicitly says PIP should remain non-means-tested and “cash will remain the foundation of the award”, the proposals suggest that some could receive “non-cash support,” such as services, equipment and aids, transport, clothing and bedding.

There is no detail at this stage about which claimants might receive non-cash support, or how this would work in practice, but Barrett warned that having the flexibility of cash was particularly important for those living with “unpredictable” and “fluctuating” conditions like MS.

“People with MS consistently tell us how important it is that PIP is a cash benefit, and is non means tested, to allow them the flexibility to use it in different ways to meet their extra costs,” he said.

The charity also raised concerns that the proposals could see people asked to estimate their own extra disability-related costs to help inform the level of PIP they receive.

“It can be hard for people, especially those with fluctuating conditions, to know what these will be from one week to the next,” Barrett added.

“It could mean more challenges for those already struggling to navigate a complex system.”

In a separate response, Disability Rights UK warned that the “vague and ambiguous language” used in the recommendations leaves room for speculation that some disabled people could be treated “less favourably than others”.

The organisation added that the proposed “light touch” initial assessment could create a “tick-box exercise” to divide impairment groups, who then follow different application pathways.

Does this mean PIP is being cut?

So far there is nothing to indicate that the level of PIP awarded will be reduced, and the recommendations confirm that it will remain non-means-tested. Neither is there anything to suggest it will be increased from the maximum of £187.45 per week, despite the “growing additional costs disabled people face”, noted Disability Rights UK.

The government is pursuing separate welfare reforms which aim to save £1.9 billion by the end of 2030/31, including changes to Universal Credit and health assessments, alongside operational changes to PIP. These measures are separate from the Timms Review, but any final recommendations must remain within the Office for Budget Responsibility’s projections for future PIP spending.

The Department for Work and Pensions forecasts that this will increase to over £41 billion by 2031 — a level of spending that many consider to be unsustainable.

But public opinion is not as divided as the political debate would suggest.

Findings from the National Centre for Social Research suggest that just under half of the British public thought the government should spend more on disability benefits even if it meant higher taxes, compared with just 7 per cent who wanted spending reduced. Those most likely to support cuts to disability benefits were Reform UK (7 per cent) and Conservative voters (11 per cent), but these were still in the minority.

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What happens next?

The Timms Review is now sharing its recommendations, with disabled people and others with experience of the system, with almost 4,000 people registering to take part in workshops over the next few weeks.

The committee will consult with participants to understand whether the proposals are “fair, workable and capable of improving people’s experience of PIP”, as well as “supporting people to participate in everyday life”. The final recommendations are expected in November.

Barrett said any changes to the process should be built on “fairness, dignity and respect” and must “better reflect the reality of fluctuating symptoms, reduce unnecessary assessments, and improve how mobility is assessed”.

“The draft recommendations reflect a lot of the issues people with MS raise time and time again – and we’re pleased the Review has committed to work with disabled people to shape its final recommendations,” he added.

“It must continue to prioritise this co-production so that the final outcome of the review is a PIP system that is fit for purpose.” ■

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About the author: Sarah Sinclair is a journalist specialising in health, drug policy and social affairs. She also writes regularly for The Teesside Lead where she’s reported on the local impact of PIP reforms.

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

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

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Our Burnham’s Britain series continues this weekend, as we look at the phrase reindustrialisation (featuring regularly in the government’s plans and what that means). Make sure you’re subscribed to receive the next instalment of Burnham’s Britain first to your inbox.

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For a major donor to a political party - and one who has had the ear of environmental policymakers as a result - the green energy entrepreneur Dale Vince is surprisingly willing to give up his influence. As Westminster wrangles over what to do about billionaire donors, the founder of Ecotricity has himself given up political philanthropy.

After giving more than £5m to Labour since 2020 (to, in his words, “level the playing field”), he now believes it’s up to all of us to make our politics work.

He wants us all to pay more tax to keep all political parties, from the three central institutions to the full wave of rising incomers, to be funded by us.

He’s got a point; something has to change. When two hyper rich men can on the face of it appear to buy into a political party (albeit one registered as a company), then the function of democracy is at stake. The £72m that Farage has received from former offshore crypto investors Christopher Harbourne and Ben Delo may be deemed unlawful if the government’s own legislation is passed capping ex-pat and overseas donations at £100,000.

Farage objects to a clause in the bill that means it will be applied retrospectively, leaving him at risk of being forced to pay back some of the sums.

The debate has been injected with rocket fuel by the sheer size of the gifts involved this time, but the principles behind the race for donor funding remains the same, whatever the ceiling.

Farage’s political paint-by-numbers response is to claim that major windfalls from single individuals exert no different level of influence than those representing thousands of individual members coordinated through a handful of union leaders.

That might not pass the sniff test, but it does explain why more than two decades ago Gordon Brown got cold feet over significantly capping donations to political parties. If Labour can’t survive the tussle of Westminster without the money of the unions, can it really afford to take a moralistic tone over major gifts elsewhere?

Labour also has to grapple with another growing problem. The argument for membership as a funding mechanism looks unsustainable in a political world that has become increasingly fragmented. It would be naïve for Labour to assume that union funding will mean so much, and be so easily available, in another decade’s time.

There are other options for removing the power of private money from British democracy. One is to ban big donors, capping gifts at a relatively low figure such as £100,000, and replacing the immediate gap that would emerge in our political system with public funding.

Perhaps in time public funding could be reduced as the number of people participating in gifting into our political system was increased, but the initial financial upheaval would be worth the cost to the public purse. It’s not so radical a suggestion: a small-scale system like this is already in place with the allocation of “short money”, funding for opposition parties to help them meet their parliamentary responsibilities.

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This is a plan endorsed by the Electoral Reform Society, and would prevent the creeping privatisation of political influence. Today, major donations over £1m account for 35 per cent of all private donations. Just a decade ago they made up 1%. A radical shift is needed to stop that process from accelerating, a process which is disenfranchising ordinary voters.

Another suggestion is to offer tax relief on political donations, similar to the ‘gift aid’ mechanism that grants tax back on charitable donations or the tax free childcare scheme. This would mean that, for example, a donation of £100 would only cost the donor £80. Combined with an overall cap on donations, it could introduce more people to get involved in party politics and take responsibility for co-funding our democracy.

A similar alternative could be for the government to give all individual voters a small annual political credit (say, £20) which they could then allocate to any registered political party of their choice. This shifts the onus of the party from donor hunting, courting influence, to the engagement of millions of ordinary people, fostering participation.

The Electoral Commission has analysed the strengths and weaknesses of all these approaches. But none of these suggestions overcome the biggest problem that is raised by the existence of political donations, whatever their size - and that of fairness. The principle of our democracy is one adult citizen, one vote. In order to participate fairly we should all have equal ability to influence, and the core structures of our democratic practice should not rely on the whims of private wealth and the fluctuations of the world economy to remain stable and functional.

If all political parties became part-public funded institutions that would allow the Treasury to allocate taxpayers’ money from general taxation, according to a formula based on votes received or the share of seats won in the House of Commons. We would all have a stake in how the democratic system works, representing fairly the most recent political will of the country. It is, fundamentally, a fair and democratic solution.

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But this costs money, and the latest polling shows that attitudes towards welfare are hardening even though social support through benefits and public services are relied upon by a growing percentage of the population. Making the case for raising tax just to keep politics moving is a very tough sell. Dale Vince describes the rise as the equivalent to the cost of a packet of crisps, per person per year: small, but still potentially unpalatable. But how does timidity taste?

Retrospective caps on overseas or ex-pat donors might force Farage, the most destabilising political influence of our times, to hand money back. It won’t affect the relationship he has with those donors of the power they arguably hold over him. And it certainly won’t prevent future wealthy individuals engaging in a cash in/control out relationship with politics.

An overhaul of the political funding system is overdue, but the strength to wrestle with that question also appears to be in short supply. ■

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

👫Agree with Hannah? 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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We keep a watchful eye on Reform, and others, as we’ve unpacked how it’s the end of Reform as we know it, reported in-depth from the streets of Clacton during the sham by-election and dug into what’s next for Nigel Farage. The more supporters we have for The Lead, the more we can expose what Reform and co are up to - and how they are spending that mega money too.

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Editor’s note: Zoë Grünewald is away, having recently got married and is enjoying some well earned time off. All of us at The Lead wish her and her husband many many congratulations!

Labour’s savage benefit cuts are about to hit older disabled people the hardest — with more than a third of those potentially affected aged 50 or over, according to new figures obtained by The Lead.

The health element of Universal Credit is paid to working age people on low incomes — usually but not always unemployed — who are assessed as too sick or disabled either to work or prepare for a return to the workplace, writes Chaminda Jayanetti.

Last year MPs voted to slash it by nearly 50 percent for most new claimants from this April, cutting it from £423.26 to £217.26 a month and freezing its cash value until 2030 – effectively a further cut due to annual inflation.

The DWP forecast that around 730,000 disabled people would lose an average of £3,000 a year by 2029/30 due to the cuts to Universal Credit health payments.

Today, figures obtained by The Lead from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) under the Freedom of Information Act show that between January 2024 and November 2025, 36 percent – more than a third – of all new claimants of the Universal Credit health element were aged 50 or over.

Pre-existing claimants, and new claimants who got their applications in before 6^th April this year, aren’t affected by the cuts (unless their claim stops and they later reapply). As a result, no data is yet available on exactly who is being hit.

But data on previous applicants shows the kind of people who are likely to be affected now the cuts have taken effect, given there is unlikely to be a sudden change in the type of people who become too sick or disabled to work.

While the government claimed the benefit cuts would create an incentive for disabled people to find paid work, older disabled people face three barriers to employment – their own health, discriminatory policies and attitudes towards disabled people, and employers’ reluctance to hire older workers. But regardless of this, most new claimants over 50 will now lose out on thousands of pounds a year due to Labour’s benefit cuts.

The FOI data shows that out of the 582,115 new applicants in 2024 and 2025 who were found to have limited capacity for work and work-related activity (LCWRA), qualifying them for the Universal Credit health element, 212,129 were aged 50 or over.

Of the 11 age bands in the DWP data, running from 16-19 all the way up to 65+, the three most common were 60-64, 55-59 and 50-54, together accounting for 33 percent of all new LCWRA claims.

“Unreachable” waiting lists

“Who can survive on 50-odd pound a week? It’s absolutely terrible,” Michelle Cardno, founder of benefits advice service Fightback4Justice, told The Lead.

“The majority of the demographics of our clients, most of them are over 50,” Cardno said. “Many of them have had to give up work, and that’s the only reason they’ve claimed.”

A lot of Cardno’s clients have arthritis, back problems or fibromyalgia, with many requiring hip or knee replacements.

“The waiting lists are so long now for some of the replacements – we’ve got clients that are on them for years,” she said. “A lot of manual workers we get. I’ve got a lot of decorators, a lot of builders – people that have worked all their lives, they’ve had their hands in the air, they’ve lent on their knees. They’ve done manual jobs that have basically worn the joints away.”

She added that the shock of no longer being able to work can then lead to mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.

Last year’s proposed disability benefit cuts saw the largest revolt among Labour MPs since the general election, with the Labour government forced to ditch cuts to the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), the non-means-tested disability benefit.

Far less attention was paid to the cuts to the Universal Credit health element, which were voted through with relatively little opposition from Labour MPs.

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The government claimed that cutting the Universal Credit health element, so it provides a much smaller income boost compared to the amount paid to non-disabled claimants, will act as an “incentive” to people to find work.

Last November Pat McFadden - Kendall’s successor as welfare secretary - told the House of Commons work and pensions committee that under the old system, while non-disabled claimants had to undertake weekly job search activity, ”you go through the other door [as an LCWRA claimant] and you do not have any of that and you get double the money”.

Ministerial rhetoric targeted young claimants not entering the workplace. This has been criticised as demonising younger disabled people, who like all claimants can only receive the Universal Credit health element if they have been assessed as too sick, disabled or mentally unwell to undertake any work-related activity.

But in any case, The Lead’s FOI data shows just 16 percent of new Universal Credit health element claims went to people aged 16-24 between January 2024 and November 2025.

The barriers older people face

The cuts will hit far more older people, who face high barriers to re-entering the workplace. Academic studies have found significant hiring discrimination against older applicants in Western Europe, while a British survey found 42 percent of human resources managers had faced pressure to hire younger workers, with one in seven job candidates over 50 having faced rejection explicitly due to their age.

Meanwhile, separate research found that wheelchair users in the UK were 15 percent less likely to receive a “callback” from applications for accountancy roles. The Centre for Ageing Better reported last year that “the disability employment gap rises with age” – around two-thirds of disabled people aged 25-34 are in work, compared to less than half of disabled people aged 50-65.

But despite these intersecting barriers and prejudices faced by older disabled people, Labour’s benefit cuts assume that most of them can replace their lost income with paid work.

“A lot of our clients have got osteoarthritis, things like that,” said Cardno. “And they just literally are at the point where they’re at breaking point. They wouldn’t possibly be able to take on extra hours. They’ve cut their hours because they can’t do it.”

Lin Connor started claiming the Universal Credit health element a couple of years ago in her mid-50s, meaning she’s not affected by the latest cuts. Her claim is based on a range of mental health issues and neurodiversity, exacerbated by bad experiences as a peer support worker at the crisis-ridden Norfolk and Suffolk NHS mental health trust, while ongoing mental health challenges and life traumas culminated in her attempting to end her life. Unable to secure adequate support from her employer, she subsequently resigned from her job.

She told The Lead the only way she could ever return to work would be through part-time self-employment. “I could go back to work, I could go and apply for a nine to five job,” she said. “[But] my neurodiversity, my burnout, my residual mental health – because there’s an impact there – the trauma, means that I have a limit of time, effort, energy, ability. At a point in time I would just break again.”

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The safety net that isn’t

The supposed safeguards against the Universal Credit cuts are the severe conditions criteria – any new claimants covered by these criteria will get the old, higher rate of the Universal Credit health element, protecting them from the cuts.

But the criteria are tight. Under section 40A of the Universal Credit regulations, a claimant must be assessed as LCWRA and meet all the following in order to qualify as having a severe condition:

• have a life-long condition diagnosed by, or accepted by, the NHS

• one of the “descriptors” used in the disability benefit assessment must constantly apply to the claimant for the rest of their life

• the claimant will have the disability or illness that gives rise to their benefit claim for the rest of their life

Published DWP guidance shows how it intends these criteria to be applied. It provides an explicitly non-exhaustive list of conditions that “might” meet the criteria – motor neurone disease, severe autism, Parkinson’s, all dementias, all chromosomal conditions, Huntington’s, severe irreversible cardiorespiratory failure, and severe acquired brain injury.

The guidance then sets out examples of conditions that “might not” meet the criteria:

• “Conditions which might be severe at times, but recovery of function might be present for substantial periods, such as the early stages of multiple sclerosis or some people with less severe mental health conditions with periods of reasonable function”

• “Conditions which might be cured by transplant / surgery / treatments or conditions which might resolve”, based on currently available treatment on the NHS

• “A person within the first 12 months following a significant stroke who may recover function during rehabilitation, so whilst the condition is lifelong, function might improve”

• “Some pain syndromes might not be fully understood or investigated. Unexplained symptoms might later be found to be part of a treatable condition”

The severe conditions criteria actually pre-date the Universal Credit cuts – they were used to decide which claimants would not need to be periodically reassessed to continue receiving benefits. The DWP guidance has not changed in response to the cuts.

This guidance didn’t say one of the descriptors must “constantly” apply to the claimant. That word only came in when the criteria were specifically defined in law for the first time to coincide with the cuts – section 40A of the Universal Credit regulations was only introduced in April this year.

This led to concerns that the severe conditions criteria would not protect people with fluctuating conditions, as these do not have a “constant” impact.

What “constantly” really means

Work and pensions minister Baroness Sherlock refuted these claims when the cuts were debated in the House of Lords last summer: “The assessment includes provisions to ensure consideration of how someone’s condition might fluctuate, hence the use of the terms ‘reliably’ and ‘repeatedly’ in some of the descriptors. This Bill does not change that. The idea that we have somehow changed that through using the word ‘constantly’ is not the case … The bottom line is that, if a person cannot repeat an activity within a reasonable time, they should be considered unable to complete the task at all.”

But of the 16 descriptors by which applications for the Universal Credit health element are assessed, only one uses the word “repeatedly” in a way that opens the door to fluctuating conditions (by asking if applicants can “repeatedly mobilise 50 metres within a reasonable timescale”), and only one uses the word “reliably” at all. Two other descriptors also factor in fluctuations – the descriptor relating to incontinence specifies that this should occur “at least once a week”, while another stipulates that the applicant must be supervised “for the majority of the time” for safety reasons.

The other 12 descriptors do not factor in fluctuating conditions at all – some specifically exclude them with words such as “always” and “on a daily basis”.

The DWP’s severe conditions guidance was designed around their original purpose – deciding if claimants should be periodically reassessed, not whether they should face benefit cuts. It might be reasonable that someone with a condition that can be “cured” by surgery should be reassessed after recovering from that surgery to see if they still need benefits. But that is different to saying the same person should receive vastly lower benefits while they sit on an NHS waiting list, as an incentive to find work they are unable to do.

“Mental health is going to have a right chop.[...] It’s going to be chopped. Because somebody with schizophrenia, somebody might have spent 70, 80 per cent% of their life in a mental institution or in a home, and then they do get chucked out periodically,” said Cardno. “Somebody like that won’t qualify because obviously they’ve had very brief periods of lucidity, and they’re not on [the DWP guidance list]. So I think the list is unreachable, basically. And in all the years we’ve been doing this, we do not come across people with any of those conditions.”

Connor warned that cutting benefits would make it less likely that people return to work.

“Even if you cut a tenner off, you are saying to someone, if it’s so tight for them, they’re going to have to cut down on their food or their electric or something basic,” she said. “So their aim is to get people back to work – that makes that less doable, because you can’t find the coping, the managing, the ways to enable that when you’re financially insecure. It increases the sense of insecurity, which impacts your mental health, which makes you not able to engage, makes phone calls difficult.

“And I’d say it’s dangerous because people who push through, when we push through, we may do it for a little while, but then we will end up harming ourselves to the point where some of us will actually end our lives, we might end up harming someone else.”

Disability benefit cuts and rejected applications have been linked to numerous suicides over the last 20 years.

“That’s why you call it a disability”

Valerie (not her real name), from East London, taught English as a second language for 20 years before nearly dying of Covid in the first wave of the pandemic in early 2020. She returned to her job, but was eventually forced out by Long Covid in 2022.

Trying to stay in work made her health worse. “I desperately tried to stay at work,” she told The Lead. “I think possibly a bit of stigma about going on benefits and stuff, but also I genuinely did really like my job.”

Long Covid left her with exhaustion, brain fog, breathlessness, joint inflammation, a damaged immune system and – at the time she was forced to quit work – she could no longer walk, although she has since recovered that function.

She started claiming the Universal Credit health element aged 50. Were she to have applied now, she would likely not be protected from the cuts by the severe conditions criteria because her conditions fluctuate.

“My disability is not always straightforward and predictable. I have developed some mobility problems that are related, but I didn’t expect that to happen. You can get issues.”

She has tried applying for part-time roles – the closest she got was a teaching position requiring 90 minutes a week, but the interview was cancelled on the morning it was due to take place.

“Unless they come up with a cure I think full-time work is probably out of the picture for me,” she added. “I think quite a lot of the government’s attitude to the whole thing with benefits is being angry at people for not being able to do things. But people are not just being annoying – people have disabilities, that means they can’t do things. That’s what it means, that’s why you call it a disability.”

A DWP spokesperson said: “We’re committed to moving from a welfare state to a working state, so that work always pays and people can move into good, secure jobs, and out of poverty, including those aged 50 and over.

“That’s why we’ve deployed 1,000 Pathways to Work advisers who are supporting people left behind by the previous government, are helping sick or disabled people into jobs backed by £3.5bn by the end of the parliament and removing the sickness incentive in Universal Credit.

“Those with the most severe, life-long health conditions, who will never be able to work, will see their incomes protected.” ■

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

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Prison capacity provided Andy Burnham with his first crisis as prime minister following an outcry over the potential early release of two of the killers of a policeman.

Ministers believe the early release scheme is necessary because adult men’s prisons are 97 per cent full.

Early release is a sticking plaster while new prison places are built. But deeper questions remain about why so many people are being imprisoned in the UK and, as has long been asked, whether prison really works?

Background

Keir Starmer’s government introduced the early release scheme because Britain’s prisons are nearly full, but Burnham was forced to amend the rules after reports that Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, sentenced in 2020 to 13 years for the manslaughter of PC Harper, could be released next year.

Ministers responded to the subsequent protest, including criticism from PC Harper’s family and a petition of more than one million signatures, by excluding anyone convicted of unlawful killing from early release, on top of earlier announced restrictions. But the scheme, which comes into force next month, remains in place, intended to ease overcrowding until new prison places can be provided.

Many offenders already leave prison after serving 40-50 per cent of their sentences. They will generally now leave after a third. Those currently scheduled to serve two-thirds of their sentence in prison could be released after half. Prisoners convicted of the most serious crimes, including specified sexual offences, are excluded.

There are approximately 82,508 men and 3,350 women in prison in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland have devolved systems). This is less than the 2024 total – the highest figure since 1900 – but recent growth suggests there are only 1,500 adult men’s places available this month, down from 3,040 in June, with the pressure expected to continue through the year.

Last year the government said 5,000 new prison places are under construction, adding to 2,900 created since July 2024 and contributing to a target of 14,000 additional places by 2031 through new build and expansion of current facilities.

In what Justice Secretary Alex Norris called a “creative look” at the prison estate, there are also proposals for hundreds of new cells converted from unused office and storage space and laundry rooms. Some transfers of 18 year olds from youth institutions to adult prisons will be delayed and more foreign prisoners – who number about 12 percent of the total, a figure no greater than in 2015 – will be deported.

Norris told the Commons last week Labour inherited a prison system on the brink of failure. “We would like to have gone further, but due to the lack of investment in the previous government’s 14 years, we are unable to do so,” he said.

But staff shortages are already leading to unused cells in prisons such as the privately-run HMP Millsike, opened last year. Mark Fairhurst, chair of the Prison Officers Association, said creating additional space would be ineffective without more staff. “Nobody wants to be a prison officer anymore.”

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Why are prisons so full?

The recent crisis has been blamed on longer average sentences, a backlog of cases in the courts since the Covid pandemic, and a record high in prisoner recalls. But underlying the specific circumstances is the fact that England and Wales imprison so many more people per head of population than other western European countries, making them an “outlier”, according to the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research. The Netherlands imprisons less than half the England and Wales figure.

Despite the tabloid belief that criminals often get away with short sentences, the average length rose from 18 months in 2013 to almost 23 months in 2024 – a period when crime actually fell. This sentence inflation does not include the rising number of people on indeterminate sentences, which has risen from 9 per cent of the total prison population in 1993 to 16 per cent in 2024.

In a paper published by the Howard League for Penal Reform, five former senior judges argued that sentence lengths had approximately doubled in the half-century that they had been involved in the law, and so had the prison population. They attributed this to legislative changes that increased maximum sentences for some crimes and introduced mandatory minimum sentences for others. Few politicians dare risk being seen as soft on crime.

“Successive governments have failed to grasp the nettle of sentence inflation over many years and the end result is a prison system unable to deliver what it is designed for,” said Howard League chief executive Andrea Coomber KC.

In these circumstances, campaigners warn that building prison capacity is treating the symptom rather than the cause of the crisis.

“Without more concerted action to reduce unnecessary imprisonment, improve community alternatives and tackle the drivers of reoffending, new prison places will simply fill up as quickly as they are built,” said Pia Sinha, chief executive of the Prison Reform Trust.

“We are now witnessing the consequences of decades of penal expansion. Prisons are overcrowded, staff are stretched, access to education, healthcare and rehabilitative support is often severely limited, and too many people leave prison no better equipped to live crime-free lives than when they entered.”

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Prison isn’t working

In 1993 Michael Howard, then hard-line Conservative home secretary, famously said “prison works”, shifting policy from rehabilitation to sentencing and setting the prison population on its rising trajectory. But more than 30 years later, Howard’s assertion remains questioned by many, including, in 2023, his former boss Sir John Major, who admitted: “We over-use prison and under value alternative sentences.”

A key measure of whether prison works is recidivism. According to a report last year by the Justice Committee 80 per cent of all offending in England and Wales is reoffending, with “growing concerns about persistently high” rates. It said overcrowding, staffing shortages and deteriorating infrastructure are having a “profound impact on the ability of prisons to deliver rehabilitation”.

The Sentencing Council, former prison governor and inspector John Podmore and the Independent Monitoring Boards are among many warning that prison isn’t working.

What people are saying

“Without intervention, we risked running out of prison places, leaving courts unable to sentence offenders and police unable to make arrests.” - Alex Norris, Justice Secretary

“I am very clear in my belief that prison works and that we need to use prison far more than we do.” - Nick Timothy, Shadow Justice Secretary

“For those convicted we need alternatives to incarceration especially for women, young people and offenders whose crimes are linked to poverty or destitution, and a greater use of community-based penalties.” - Green Party peer Jenny Jones

What happens next

As well as increasing prison capacity and the early release scheme, Norris intends to end indeterminate imprisonment for public protection sentences – following a review – and reduce the number of women in prison and the number of children in custody.

“Lasting public safety will come from a balanced approach that reserves custody for those who genuinely need to be there, while investing in the services that prevent crime, reduce reoffending and help people rebuild their lives,” said Sinha. ■

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

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

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Our Burnham’s Britain series continues this weekend, as we look at the challenges faced on welfare and benefits. We will also return to prisons, when we report on what alternatives to prison there are and whether these could be the key to solving the crisis in prisons capacity. Make sure you’re subscribed to receive the next installment of Burnham’s Britain first to your inbox.

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It’s been a busy weekend for the far-right.

Over the weekend, hundreds of men descended on Dover, many wearing black and concealing their faces, as part of an anti-immigration demonstration. Less a protest than a show of force, vans of masked men dressed in black poured into the streets, blocking roads around Britain’s busiest port and trapping families in their cars – all in the name of “patriotism”.

A day earlier, footage emerged from the Reform UK party conference of young female protesters being physically manhandled as they tried to interrupt proceedings. One woman had her face and hair grabbed and was hit by a walking stick as she attempted to draw attention to Nigel Farage’s donations during his keynote speech. Farage mocked the protester as she was forcibly removed, while Lee Anderson joked about buying a new cane for the man who assaulted her.

Meanwhile, across Europe, a terrifying breakthrough in Germany: the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured a historic victory in Saxony-Anhalt, and is now seeking support from other parties to govern. If successful, the party could potentially take control of education, culture and policing in the region.

The AfD — a party that advocates for remigration, hostility toward NATO and is openly ethnonationalist — is widely reported across British media as “far-right”, and rightly so. Nobody seems particularly troubled by the terminology when it comes to Germany. We can see the warning signs and recognise the history. But when something starts to look uncomfortably similar on our own streets, suddenly the vocabulary becomes contested.

The way the government has responded to the masked protestors in Dover, and now in Portsmouth, has been at best remarkably careful and at worst entirely complicit. Government ministers have been at pains to empathise with the vigilante mob — organised by Tommy Robinson’s right-hand man, Danny Tommo — that suddenly poured onto the streets, threatening our infrastructure and operating beyond the realms of our police and common law.

Secretary of State for Business, Jonathan Reynolds called the protestors “intimidating”, and accused them of “dressing up in costumes”. The policing minister Sarah Jones described the protesters – who pushed police officers off motorbikes and threw stones at them – as “thuggish”, only to then add that she did not want to “minimise” the “legitimate” concerns people had about small boat crossings. Crucially, the government, and indeed its spokesperson, have all stopped short of calling it what it is: far-right, fascist, hateful activity.

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The most successful far-right movements of the modern era have understood that to be successful you do not necessarily have to persuade everyone to embrace your politics, but you must start by making people less shocked by them.

So you move the boundary little by little, so that something that would once have been regarded as beyond the pale becomes simply another legitimate position in the political debate.

Here in the UK, that process is well underway. Social media has hastened the spread of fascist ideas, aided by unregulated algorithms and abetted by shadowy actors. Gross misinformation is allowed to spread unchecked, and hate is normalised under the guise of free speech.

Think about how routinely we now hear politicians talk about “taking our country back”, or describe immigration as an “invasion”, or migrants as “fighting age men”. Three phrases once confined to the red-flag check list of the far-right have become almost entirely banal.

And once we accept the gradual demonisation of these groups; the implication that immigrants or people of colour are intrinsically a threat to our way of life, masked militias soon become a logical, even rational, response.

This is why the government must be decisive with how it responds to and defines the scenes at Dover and the behaviour at the Reform party conference.

Political movements are defined not only by the policies they put in a manifesto, but by the political culture they create around themselves: who they portray as the enemy, what behaviour they legitimise and what they persuade their supporters is normal.

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But as it stands, Andy Burnham’s administration is failing its first real test to stand up to the far-right. While Reform present themselves as something else entirely — populist, anti-establishment, patriotic — ministers acquiesce, triangulating for fear of offending voters if they call a spade a spade. Reform has proven it will fight any such terminology vociferously: Richard Tice has previously threatened the BBC over its description of the party as "far-right.".

The party has fought hard against the label — no surprise — because the people most invested in moving the Overton window have an interest in pretending there is no window to move.

They understand that words matter. “Far-right” is delegitimising, as is “racist” and “fascist”. They carry the unfortunate weight of a political tradition most people do not want to associate themselves with. That is why there is such a relentless effort to make these words seem unreasonable or perhaps even hysterical.

But that does not mean we should be frightened of the word when it is warranted. Because there is something much bigger happening than a disagreement over terminology. The right is engaged in a long battle over what is considered acceptable, and it is not necessarily trying to make you wake up tomorrow and become an extremist.

Instead, it is trying to make you wake up tomorrow and think: well, perhaps that’s not so extreme after all. ■

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

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We keep a watchful eye on Reform, and others, as we’ve unpacked how it’s the end of Reform as we know it, reported in-depth from the streets of Clacton during the sham by-election and dug into what’s next for Nigel Farage. The more supporters we have for The Lead, the more we can expose what Reform and co are up to.

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Two weeks ago news alerts were sent on apps to millions of us about seven deaths on the A66 between Middlesbrough and Redcar. For many people outside the area huge question marks remain about what’s actually going on thanks to arrests, counterattacks, car rammings, a deadly house fire and burned out cars at a supposed “vigil”.

To many outsiders the last fortnight of events on Teesside have been a spectacle of violence, with Middlesbrough being perceived as lawless to those from afar. But as somebody who’s reported in-depth from the area for years I can say there’s no novelty to recent events, only the coverage they’ve received.

The A66 runs east-west from Middlesbrough to Redcar - a typical English seaside town in that it has high deprivation and faces the same social problems of other towns just like it. The two towns are not separated by greenbelt land, but by huge swaths of industrial land. The former ICI chemical works was sold in the 90s, divested and now hugely diminished, employing a fraction of the people it once did.

On the other side of the A66 to that site is where the steelworks along the river Tees once were. Thousands of acres of this land is reclaimed from the river by steelmaking slag. At steelmaking’s height around 100 years ago there were 91 blast furnaces on Teesside. By the 1970s only one remained. It closed in 2015, causing 2,000 job losses overnight - a huge blow in one fell swoop, but a fraction of the jobs that had been lost over the decades before.

The old steelworks land is now the site of Teesworks - a regeneration project that’s had around £600m of public money invested over eight years only to see at least £120m going into the pockets of two local businessmen and very few jobs in return.

Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost over the last five decades, and the workers lived in places like South Bank and Grangetown, where the national media’s attention has been over the last fortnight.

Grangetown and South Bank technically lie just across the border in Redcar and Cleveland, but are considered by most to be part of suburban Middlesbrough.

The town centre in Middlesbrough has seen better days. Huge numbers of commercial units are empty, and those shoppers who remain seem to barely outnumber those with addiction problems, rough sleepers and beggars.

The town’s market cross is emblematic of the area’s problems. Two huge department stores sit opposite each other - a Debenhams and a House of Fraser - which have been closed and shuttered for five and eight years, respectively.

Towns across the UK have suffered in the wake of deindustrialisation, with similar social problems to those seen in Teesside. But while deprivation exists in all towns and rural areas, it’s there in pockets, while across Teesside the depth and spread of deprivation is unlike anywhere else in the country.

It took Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen eight days to publicly respond to the A66 crash in any meaningful way. In his Mail on Sunday article last week he argued the events which captured a national spotlight weren’t unique to Teesside, “but symptomatic of Underclass Britain”.

He lamented “the slow death of personal responsibility” and added: “It is a national failure that just happened to be on show in the North East last week.”

But the statistics don’t back that up.

If you want to talk about national failures, the government’s latest statistics show 31% of children live in poverty. In the Middlesbrough and Thornaby East constituency the number is 44.1%.

According to the Government’s index of multiple deprivation Grangetown is ranked the 99th most deprived area in England out of 33,755. South Bank is number 60.

When there’s so much deprivation, there are more people who are vulnerable to being groomed into gangs and selling drugs. As my colleague, The Lead’s Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald argued earlier this week - the new Prime Minister when he talks of hope must ensure it is these young people who are front of mind when building a future for the country.

Whenever I’ve reported from these areas, I’ve been met by friendly, open people who are keen to share their stories. The burning cars and buildings being rammed are part of a picture of antisocial behaviour that includes dirt bikes and quads being driven through streets and across fields that people have been putting up with for years.

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It’s taken a tragedy - and the deaths of two police officers - to pile enough political pressure on Cleveland Police to actually take action against offenders.

More than 20 people have been arrested since the crash in relation to offences linked to organised crime. It suggests the police have the intelligence relating to offending in Teesside, but not the resources to do anything about it.

A year ago the force launched Operation Galvanise, and almost immediately tracked a suspected stolen motorbike to an allotment in Grangetown where 4 kilograms of heroin were found under a shed.

A tip-off at the start of this year saw an eight-day search of scrub land near Grangetown - a huge operation - which turned up what police called “a significant firearms haul” buried alongside “large quantities of ammunition”.

If Cleveland Police’s budget in 2010 had remained the same, but adjusted for inflation, it would be £246m this year. Instead they have only £196m to spend.

In his Mail on Sunday article, Conservative Lord Houchen demanded “Cleveland should be given the fairer share of funding they’ve been denied for years”.

The latest crime statistics show Cleveland Police’s area has 124 crimes per 1,000 residents - the highest in the country. The Metropolitan Police has 101 crimes per 1,000 people.

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The gulf between police demand and their budget has been snappily described by local politicians as Cleveland being treated as a rural force because of its population, but with metropolitan levels of crime.

In 2009 Cleveland Police had 1,756 officers, by 2017 the number had dropped to 1,204. This year numbers have climbed back to 1,524, so the 200 extra officers deployed from other forces to reinforce Cleveland over the last fortnight barely gets policing levels back to where they were nearly two decades ago.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced an extra £2m of funding for Cleveland Police this week to help them tackle organised crime. Within half an hour of the announcement, the area’s Police and Crime Commissioner - a Labour politician - Matt Storey, told me that amount “won’t touch the sides”.

While the force’s budget hasn’t kept up with inflation, the increase in employer’s National Insurance contributions has left a £2.4m shortfall in this year’s budget - something Storey and other local politicians had made clear to the Home Office.

It’s impossible to think that Anna Turley - the Home Office minister in whom’s constituency these events took place - didn’t make her boss aware of this sort of detail.

This sort of sticking plaster resolution from Westminster over decades has led to Teesside being in the situation it finds itself today. More of the same from this government, with a promise to fix things through its white paper on police reform - which will take years - does not fill the people of this region with hope when they’re facing immediate and acute issues. ■

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About the author: Leigh Jones is editor of The Teesside Lead, which reports extensively on Teesside’s politics and life there each Sunday.

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At The Lead we’ve been building a truly local network of new local independent newsletters producing agenda-setting award-winning local journalism which is done by journalists who know their towns and communities. See more about what we’ve been creating since 2024 and crucially how you can support our mission too. Every subscriber to The Lead is helping to make that rigorous local reporting, which is so crucially needed, stronger.

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This year’s historically rainless UK summer, fuelled by the climate crisis, saw hosepipe bans and two thirds of England officially in a state of drought, putting water security top of mind.

The UK gets most of its water from rivers, lakes and reservoirs. But climate change, a growing population, and rising demand from irrigation for crops and (controversially) for AI data centres, have fuelled concerns about the country running short of water, with some projecting a 5 billion litre deficit every day by 2055.

The government’s 2025 National Framework for Water Resources has steps to tackle this, including funds to build ten new reservoirs, nine water transfer schemes, and two desalination plants.

What is desalination?

Desalination is the process of removing salt from seawater (mostly from the ocean) to produce freshwater which can be used for drinking, cooking, and washing.

In the most common method, desalination plants force seawater through a membrane which lets water molecules through but blocks most salts and other unwanted bits, producing usable freshwater and a dense salt solution called brine. An older method heats saltwater into vapour, and condences it back into saltless liquid.

Desalination is widely used in areas without access to freshwater such as the Middle East and parts of Africa, Asia and the United States, with roughly 20,000 desalination plants around the world.

This makes the process an essential source of the water people rely on to survive. However, it does have some negative effects on climate and the environment.

Desalination uses a lot of energy, producing between 500 and 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions every year according to a 2025 study. The leftover brine is also dumped in the ocean, where it damages coral reefs. However, there are efforts to clean up the process, for example by powering it with electricity from renewable sources.

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Will desalination help the UK’s water supply?

There are some reasons to worry about whether the UK can become a desalination nation. Right now the country only has one desalination plant, the Thames Gateway plant in Beckton, east London, operated by Thames Water, best known for pumping sewage into UK rivers.

Despite Thames water flows dropping to 3,000 megalitres per day – the company’s trigger for action under its own drought plan – the plant has not produced any water all summer, with the company citing technical issues it hopes to resolve by the winter. This is obviously too late to help the summer drought. The plant has reportedly only been used five times since 2010, producing the equivalent of seven days’ water in 15 years.

Some campaigners argue that it would be better to focus on building more reservoirs, which can store fresh water and capture extra rainfall without needing so much energy or emitting as much carbon dioxide.

No new reservoirs have been built in the UK since 1991, with planning and financial constraints blamed. In Oxfordshire, an ongoing planning row continues over the proposals for the White Horse Reservoir, with more than 8,000 people having opposed its construction. Thames Water has said it will only be available to use from 2040 if the government approves plans.

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What happens next?

There are plans to build several desalination plants around the country, with Anglian Water proposing sites in Norfolk and Lincolnshire, and Southwest Water looking to open a plant in Cornwall.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham this week called the UK’s water industry “a leaking monument” to the failure of “a country run in the private rather than public interest”, adding: “This summer has shown us very clearly that water companies are failing to rise to the climate challenge.” He has suggested he might nationalise Thames Water, or at least put it into special administration. A “ten point plan for Britain” will be published later this year and include “plans for stronger public control over these essentials”. ■

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About the author: Adam Barnett is UK News Reporter at DeSmog and a freelance journalist. He writes a politics column for the Big Issue and has reported for The Guardian and Private Eye

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

👫Found this edition of The Lead Untangles useful? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place. And catch up on the series so far where we looked at the human cost of extreme heatwaves, the growth of regenerative farming, the environmental impact of data centres and the pressure growing for North Sea drilling.

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September is the month of new beginnings.

A fresh school year: new pencil cases, new shoes, new teachers. The sense that, whatever happened before, this year might be different. September is a season of possibility.

And right on cue, Andy Burnham bounds into Westminster today, full of optimism, to tell us that things really will get better.

But for an increasing number of young people, that sense of possibility is becoming harder to find.

New research from our friends at the IPPR lays the scale of that crisis bare. Young people are becoming dramatically more isolated. One in 20 now says they have no close friends at all, up from one in 100 in 2014. Nearly half of young women aged 16 to 24 meet the threshold for psychological distress, alongside more than a third of young men. And the proportion of young people saying their mental health has prevented them from accomplishing what they otherwise would have has more than quadrupled since the early 2010s.

These extraordinary numbers should make us question the creeping political tendency to talk about young people as if they were a problem to be solved.

The debate around NEETs and the welfare bill is the sharpest example. There are of course legitimate questions about why so many young people are economically inactive and how we get them into work, but it is striking how often the conversation stops there. Successive governments have spent years dismantling the institutions and circumstances that allow young people to flourish in the first place. In England, spending on youth clubs has fallen by 73 per cent since 2010, with the YMCA charity, the most established provider of youth services in England and Wales, pointing to a real-term cut of more than £1.2bn pounds between 2010 and 2024.

In the absence of places to gather and grow, and priced out of cafes, cinemas and leisure centres, young people flock to their phones and computers; an unregulated wild west of algorithmic manipulation and data harvesting. Add to that the usual suspects: austerity, Covid, insecure work, expensive rents and unaffordable homes, and here lies a generation disconnected from themselves, each other and wider society.

Look at what has happened in places such as Middlesbrough over the summer, where industrial decline, poverty and years of underinvestment have helped create the conditions in which organised crime can take root. Recent violence there has been horrific, but it is not simply a story about bad individuals making bad choices. Local politicians have pointed to the loss of youth provision and the impact of austerity, while one former mayor described the decline of the youth clubs that once brought together “the good and the bad lads”.

That is why, while creating good jobs for young people should be an important part of Burnham’s offer, it cannot be the entirety of his youth policy. They need work, but they also need places to go, communities to belong to and institutions that help them build confidence and connection. They need decent housing, functioning public services and an education system that gives them a sense of possibility. And they need to believe that the world they are being asked to build a life in is worth investing in.

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That last question is becoming harder to ignore.

This summer has offered a particularly brutal preview of the climate young people will inherit: drought, wildfires, extreme heat and the increasingly obvious health consequences of a changing climate. Meanwhile, politicians on the right are engaged in an extraordinary exercise in cognitive dissonance, with Kemi Badenoch purging her frontbench of so-called “eco-zealots” while Richard Tice celebrates the prospect of warmer temperatures for fizzy wine.

Burnham, meanwhile, is reportedly considering further North Sea drilling as part of his efforts to bring down the cost of living. There is an entirely legitimate political imperative to make people’s lives more affordable now, but he must resist the trap that has caught governments for decades: sacrificing the long-term interests of the young to relieve the immediate pressures of the present.

Has there ever been a more dominant thread stringing together the patchwork of modern British politics? Again and again, younger generations have been asked to carry the consequences of decisions made by people with more wealth, assets and political power.

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Burnham has an opportunity to do something different. Today he will make optimism the centrepiece of his pitch to Britain. That optimism must mean hope for the future – not just tomorrow or at the next election, but the country in five, twenty or fifty years time.

That means building affordable homes and investing in communities, something that Burnham already pledged to do. But it also means treating this epidemic of loneliness and disconnection as symptoms of a wider social problem, and it means making decisions on everything from welfare to energy to climate with an eye not just to the next election, but to the people who will still be living with them decades from now.

The kids are going back to school this week. Let’s give them something to look forward to. ■

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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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Holly has complex health conditions, including fibromyalgia and the long-term side effects of childhood cancer. They have never had a full-time job, despite years spent applying.

Holly’s experience is not unusual. At the end of 2025, the disability employment gap stood at 29.7 per cent, meaning just 52.8 per cent of disabled people were in work compared with 82.8 per cent of non-disabled people. The figure has remained largely stagnant for three decades.

“So many of us want to work – even if it’s just three hours a day,” Holly tells The Lead. “I want to use my skills and contribute to something bigger than just surviving day to day. It would help my mental health, my sense of purpose. Instead, it’s just this aimless nothingness.”

Hope is on the horizon with Andy Burnham entering Downing Street and Labour on a mission to regain the public’s trust and rebuild a broken Britain. As always, reforming welfare is on top of the list, but employment is getting second billing.

Labour’s ‘Back to Work’ plan promised to get one million people into employment, with a particular emphasis on disabled and chronically ill people, and Burnham is planning an overhaul of welfare to funnel more people into work. But is it possible to change the landscape of employment for disabled people without first addressing the causes of the gap?

Who is counted as disabled?

Part of Britain’s ongoing issue with disability is the confusion over “who counts” as a disabled person.

Under the Equality Act 2010, a disabled person is someone with a physical or mental health condition that has a substantial, long-term impact on daily activities. That definition includes 16.8 million disabled people in the UK and many of the 25 million people living with a chronic illness.

However, disability employment figures may not include all of them. A self-reported census tells us who is disabled, but respondents don’t always know that they qualify under the Equality Act, resulting in people with chronic conditions, like endometriosis, failing to flag their disability.

Failed by the education system

“For many disabled people with complex needs, the barriers to employment start in our education system,” says Evan John, policy advisor at national disability charity Sense, citing research by the Nuffield Foundation that showed disabled people were nearly three times as likely to leave school without qualifications as non-disabled students.

Holly says teachers assumed that they would never work full-time so did not invest time in their education.

“I ended up teaching myself from a textbook in bed and if I hadn’t done that, nothing would have been done to help me,” Holly says. “I was let down by my school, my sixth form, my GP, my consultants, mental health services – it felt like I was just left to rot.”

Underachieving and low expectations are common themes in many disabled and chronically ill people’s experiences in education, often leading to difficulty finding employment as adults.

But when support is given to disabled students, it works, helping to transition disabled students into employment.

Dylan Kelsall, 23, from Stoke-on-Trent, works as a marketing assistant and supports the work of Caudwell Children, which secured the funds for Dylan’s electric-powered wheelchair.

“When the right support was in place, I thrived,” says Dylan.“The biggest barrier wasn’t my disability itself, but low expectations and environments that weren’t designed with disabled students in mind.”

Dylan credits a robust Education, Health and Care Plan (EHC) – a legal document for children and young people with complex educational needs that outlines the mandatory support required – with preventing him from falling behind after major surgery during school.

EHCs aren’t easy to come by, though. Some 6,000 students wait over a year to receive one, far beyond the target wait time of 20 weeks, leaving countless disabled students to fall behind at school and later, on the career ladder.

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Bias in the hiring process

Around one million or more disabled people in the UK who are out of work say they want a job. Among people with learning disabilities, 86 per cent want to work, but only 5 per cent are employed.

The same willingness to work was found amongst NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) with 84 per cent of young people wanting a job or training. However, disabled and chronically ill people run a gauntlet of bias when attaining employment, exacerbated by rhetoric about disability and benefits.

“The Government talks about benefit fraud and it feeds straight into how employers see us – disposable, annoying, risky,” explains Holly. “If you see someone tick ‘disabled’ on an application, of course, that stigma affects your decision.”

Josh Bullmore, the UK Government’s Disability and Access Ambassador for the advertising sector, agrees that many industries are stuck in a “vicious circle” because “there are few examples of successful disabled people to challenge the unconscious bias about what success looks like.”

“And at times of ongoing financial pressure on businesses, people are less likely to take what they perceive as a ‘risk’, as inaccurate as that perception of disabled people is,” he says.

Closing the disability employment gap will require intervention to overcome employers’ biases. Successive governments have attempted to do so through schemes like ‘Disability Confident’.

Launched in 2013, Disability Confident pledged to transform recruitment by encouraging employers to adopt inclusive practices. Critics within the disability sector argue that the scheme has become a box-ticking exercise because it only requires employers to say the right things without following it up with tangible action.

The numbers prove its failure: less than a third of employers with the Disability Confident badge have actually hired a disabled person. The employment gap has not budged since the scheme was introduced.

With government schemes failing to tackle bias in the hiring process, others are taking up the fight.

Tab Ahmad OBE founded EmployAbility to bridge the gap between disabled jobseekers and employers through training and advocacy.

“A lot of [these schemes] have become symbolic. Everyone is talking the talk, but what actually changes on the ground for disabled people? Not enough,” Ahmad says. “When you apply a blanket approach, it doesn’t level the playing field – it just shifts it.

“Disability isn’t a homogeneous group. You can’t design one system and pretend it works for everyone.”

With most employment policies relying on old practices that may not have weeded out the ableism, government schemes like Disability Confident struggle to move beyond tick-boxing and influence lasting change.

Ahmad also emphasises that the conversation needs to widen its scope. “The whole disability policy space is still very white. Very middle-class. Very dominated by a particular type of experience,” she says. Until that changes, Ahmad argues, those facing the greatest barriers will remain unheard.

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Staying in work

Getting the job is only half the battle. Though reasonable adjustments – like flexible hours or accessible equipment – are legally required, many employers view them as an expensive inconvenience, even with Government support to fund adjustments.

Reasonable adjustments make the workplace more accessible and ensure disabled people can stay in work without compromising their health. Dylan says these accommodations make his position sustainable.

“With a few adjustments, I would shine”, Holly says – a sentiment echoed by Dylan.

“My employer has worked collaboratively with me, asking what I need rather than assuming, and adapting as things evolve,” Dylan says. “That approach removes barriers before they become problems and allows me to focus on doing my job well.

“It’s not a lack of skill or commitment that pushes people out of work; it’s inflexible systems that don’t account for different needs.”

Government grant scheme Access to Work funds essential adjustments for disabled people in employment, but delays plague the system. Some applicants wait almost a year for an assessment, with those waiting too long losing job opportunities; the lack of timely support forces disabled people to choose between protecting their health and earning an income.

“It took nine months just to speak to someone from Access to Work,” says Melody*, who works in administration. “They sent a report and that was it. No follow-up, no checking if my employer actually did anything. You’re left to fight for yourself.”

When employers fail to collaborate with their disabled and chronically ill employees, it pushes them out of work. Melody left one job when it became too much to physically handle, failed probation on the next one due to illness, and is now facing pressure in her current role to complete a rapid phased return before she’s ready to avoid losing another position.

“I won’t be able to contribute to a pension like a non-disabled person,” she says. “It’s not just about getting a job – it’s about whether you can stay in work long enough to have any security.”

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For the gap to close, schemes like Access to Work need major investment to effectively support disabled workers. DWP whistleblowers have reported covert funding cuts wherein previous claimants are seeing their award slashed by up to 70 per cent without due cause.

Burnham has also inferred that Personal Independence Payment (PIP), a non-work-related, non-means-tested benefit, will face cuts. The benefit is designed to help disabled people cope with the additional cost of living with disability, not to help them into work.

Scope estimates that disabled people spend, on average, an £1095 per month. The maximum PIP payment someone can receive is £778.40 every four weeks.

Government schemes: lots of headlines, little change

Though it’s yet to disappear, successive governments have tried to address the gap with varying levels of success. New initiatives arrive with a flurry of press attention, then quietly fail to deliver change.

Besides the efforts of Disability Confident and Access to Work, there are a few programmes available to help disabled job seekers. But there is no evidence of any impact on the employment gap.

Take the government-funded Work and Health Programme, a voluntary scheme that provides tailored support for disabled job seekers in England and Wales. It held promise for Holly when they stepped up their search for a job. It failed to deliver.

“It took four months just to get onto the programme,” they say. “At first, my job centre didn’t even know what I was talking about. When I did get on it, they helped me get a CV, interview skills, training – but I still don’t have a job.”

Government reforms to welfare also threaten to drive more disabled people into poverty rather than into work. Plans announced under Starmer’s leadership included removing the health element of Universal Credit for new claimants aged 16-21. The change will impact approximately 72,000 young people.

Where does Burnham stand?

Burnham’s plans are still unclear, but he has promised to improve support for people trying to get into work, particularly young people, saying that they had been “quite seriously let down because the support wasn’t there for them”. However, so far, there are no details on what shape the support will take, only that it may become conditional on “people taking opportunities that are presented in front of them”.

He has, so far, made one concrete move: disabled bus pass holders can now use them 24/7; having been previously restricted to 9:30am and 11pm, which stopped many disabled people using free travel to get to work. Access to Work, the scheme most directly tied to staying in employment, has gone unmentioned.

“Sanctions don’t encourage disabled people to seek employment,” says Kieran Aldred, policy manager at disability equality charity Scope. “They erode trust in the Department of Work and Pensions [DWP] and deter engagement with employment support.”

A DWP spokesperson told The Lead: “We’re unlocking job opportunities for disabled people through our £1bn a year of employment support, and by redeploying 1,000 Work Coaches to help sick or disabled people who have been unfairly left behind.”

Based in Jobcentre Plus offices and GP surgeries, work coaches will help individuals find and stay in work by assisting with CV development, job searches and facilitating access to training.

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What will really make the difference?

The landscape looks dismal for disabled and chronically ill people locked out of work, but there is hope. Seemingly, the most effective solutions are coming from charities and the private sector instead of from the government.

Tab’s grassroots model working directly with disabled people in need of support mirrors what many disability charities have long argued: personalised support is far more effective than wide-sweeping box-ticking schemes.

However, to permanently move the needle on the disability employment gap, society needs a re-education on disability and chronic illness.

“Disabled people don’t need fixing, workplaces do,” says Dylan. “When disabled people are trusted, supported, and given the opportunity to grow, they succeed. The gap exists not because of a lack of talent, but because accessible opportunities are still too limited.”

The disability employment gap will remain as it’s been for three decades unless non-disabled minds start to change.

Until then, the people most affected by the gap are doing their best to build a job market that gives everyone a fair chance to work – with little evidence yet that Burham’s government is listening. ■

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About the author: Hannah Shewan Stevens is an award-nominated freelance feature journalist specialising in disability and health. Her work also focuses on shining a spotlight on underreported issues to make people look at topics from a new perspective. Hannah's work can be seen on Glamour, Cosmopolitan UK, Independent, Refinery29 UK, Metro UK, Telegraph, iNews, and more.

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AI’s thirst for water has quickly achieved a sort of folk status, from memes online to protests against the data centres. But tech companies claim AI can help solve the world’s problems, including climate change.

What is the real impact of AI data centres on climate and the environment? And how reliable are the tech industry’s claims?

Background: A data with destiny?

The Labour government has supported AI on the promise of economic growth, blessing data centres as “critical national infrastructure”, creating “AI growth zones”, and signing a (currently shelved) “tech prosperity deal” with the U.S.

But the attempt to make the UK an “AI superpower” faces growing opposition from Labour MPs and campaigners over its resource consumption and climate impact.

Data centres are large warehouses full of computers which store and process information. There are around 500 data centres in the UK, with hundreds more planned in the next few years.

The UK has said it needs at least 6 gigawatts (GW) of new AI data centre capacity by 2030, which is three times what it has now, (roughly 1.8 GW). It is argued that this would provide high-quality processing power, support AI technologies, and allow the UK to regulate the data centres.

But critics say this would blow a hole in the UK’s climate targets, and use water and energy which could be better used elsewhere.

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What are AI data centres’ climate impact?

Data centres use a huge amount of energy. In July, energy regulator Ofgem said there were 315 data centre projects waiting to be connected to the electricity grid, with a total capacity of 73 GW. For context, average electricity demand for the whole of the UK in 2025 was 37 GW. In other words, the data centres could overwhelm the grid.

They also, famously, need a lot of water to cool their machines. By some estimates, a typical data centre can use 11-19 million litres of water per day, roughly the same as a town of 30-50,000 people.

Water industry trade body Water UK wrote to MPs this summer to warn that the country does not have enough water for the data centres being proposed. This is especially relevant when climate change is causing hosepipe bans and droughts across the UK.

The data centres also have an important carbon footprint. For example, a proposed “hyperscale” (read: very big) East Havering data centre in North Ockendon would produce more than 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year, the equivalent of 8,480 flights from London to New York. The project’s own developer admitted that the project “does not align with a science-based 1.5C compatible trajectory and achieving net zero by 2050”.

Analysis by non-profit Foxglove finds that two planned data centres – Wapseys Wood in Buckinghamshire and Quest Park in Bedfordshire – would emit a total of 4.5 million tonnes of CO2, more than U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil’s entire emissions for 2023 (3.9 million tonnes).

In April, the UK government said energy use by AI data centres could emit 123 million tonnes of CO2 over the next ten years – as much as 2.7 million people. This was a revision of earlier government numbers, which underestimated the emissions by a factor of more than 100.

This could still be low-balling it. Analysis by climate outlet Carbon Brief suggests that data centres could produce 20 percent of the UK’s emissions by 2035, the equivalent of a third of all UK households.

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Will AI ‘solve’ climate change?

Tech companies defend data centre emissions by claiming that AI will solve climate change by various kinds of efficiency. However, these claims are not supported by evidence. In March, a study of the industry’s claims of AI climate benefits found that only a quarter cited any published academic research, while more than a third (36 percent) did not present any evidence at all.

The industry has also argued that data centres help to speed up electrification and the transition to renewables. But in practice, gas-fired power plants are being used, revamped, and built to power data centres across the United States and Europe – increasing AI’s emissions, and giving gas a new lease on life. More than 100 of the data centres planned for the UK will be powered by gas, according to Ofgem.

Meanwhile, tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s carbon emissions have increased by a fifth in the year to March 2026, largely due to the energy needs of their AI products. Companies have also watered down or dropped their climate targets.

If the goal is to electrify and cut emissions, it would be better to focus on building infrastructure for solar and wind power, heat pumps, and electric vehicles, rather than AI data centres which harm the climate, and which the public increasingly views as part of an anti-democratic trend in society and politics.

What happens next?

Plans to build “hyperscale” data centres in Scotland have prompted large protests and political opposition of the kind we have seen in the U.S. The Scottish parliament will face a big demonstration when it returns from summer recess in September. Ministers in Scotland are taking note, with new rules for data centres to submit an “environmental impact assessment” as a first step. There have been calls for a New York-style moratorium on new data centres.

This opposition could spread to the rest of the UK, where the government’s support for AI could bump into its housing plans. The decision by the new Andy Burnham team to build a data centre in Brick Lane instead of hundreds of homes has met local opposition. Labour MPs have already raised concerns about AI data centres being left out of the UK’s carbon budget. If the U.S. is a sign of things to come, we can expect this opposition to grow into a major election issue. ■

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About the author: Adam Barnett is UK News Reporter at DeSmog and a freelance journalist. He writes a politics column for the Big Issue and has reported for The Guardian and Private Eye

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

👫Found this edition of The Lead Untangles useful? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place. And catch up on the series so far where we looked at the human cost of extreme heatwaves, the growth of regenerative farming and the pressure growing for North Sea drilling

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We're starting somewhere personal, because that's where The Lead always tries to start from. When the prime minister announced his social care plans back in July, he spoke movingly about his own father's care, about the workforce who "should be the best paid people in society, not the worst," and about family carers being "broken" without support. He announced an accelerated Casey Commission review, a fair pay deal for care workers, and cross-party talks. What he didn't announce was any respite for the estimated millions of unpaid carers already propping up the system he's trying to fix.

Jacqui Hylton spent more than thirty years as an NHS midwife before she became a full-time unpaid carer for her mother. She hasn’t stopped working. She’s just stopped being paid properly for it.

Here, she writes about what it means to lose a salary, a professional identity and financial independence, all while navigating a cliff-edge benefit system, where earning a few pounds too much can cost you your entire Carer’s Allowance overnight.

Over the coming weeks, months (or however long it takes), this series will look at the policies Burnham is betting his political capital on, from social care to devolution. But today we begin with the people those policies are meant to serve, and the gap between what the system assumes about their lives and what it’s actually like to live them.

— Zoe Grunewald, Westminster Editor

For more than 30 years, I worked in the NHS as a midwife.

Then my life changed, and I changed too.

I left the career I had known for most of my adult life to become a full-time unpaid carer for my mum. I didn’t stop working. The work changed.

As a midwife, I was used to responsibility, long hours and being needed at all times of the day and night. Caring is different, but it also does not conveniently fit between nine and five. Now there is no end of a shift when somebody else takes over.

I am grateful that I am able to care for my mum. But I have also had to adjust to losing my salary, some financial independence and a professional life that had been part of my identity for decades.

That is why the debate about encouraging unpaid carers into employment interests me. I do not lack the desire or skills to work, in fact, I have worked throughout my adult life. The problem is making paid work fit around caring – and a benefits system that can make earning more feel like a financial risk rather than an opportunity.

To put Carer’s Allowance into perspective, someone like me receives £86.45 a week for providing at least 35 hours of care. For those on the National Living Wage, the equivalent amount can be earned in less than seven hours. And while Carer’s Allowance is not a wage, the comparison is difficult to ignore.

After more than 30 years as a midwife, I have decades of professional experience. Yet combining regular midwifery work with caring would be extremely difficult.

If I wanted to earn a little while caring for my mum, I might have to look outside my profession simply to find sufficiently flexible hours. That could mean accepting work at a much lower rate of pay.

It is not the work itself I would find demeaning. It is the feeling that becoming a carer can leave decades of professional experience with so little room to be used.

Stepping away from a regulated profession also has longer-term consequences. Remaining professionally connected as a midwife requires maintaining practice and continuing professional development. Caring can affect not only what I earn today, but how easily I might return to my profession.

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Then comes the Carer’s Allowance earnings cliff edge. A carer can currently earn up to £204 a week after specified deductions and remain eligible. Cross that limit by even a penny and you can lose the entire £86.45 weekly payment. There is no gradual reduction: it is a cliff edge. How does that encourage work?

An extra shift or a better-paid week should be good news. Instead, someone with fluctuating earnings can worry about crossing the limit, losing their Carer’s Allowance and potentially facing an overpayment that later has to be repaid.

The Department for Work and Pensions has been asking whether earnings should be averaged more predictably and whether a taper could replace this cliff edge. Both deserve serious consideration.

Caring is rarely predictable. Appointments arise, needs change. A difficult night affects the following day. Care arrangements fall through. Someone may work more one week and less the next. The system should reflect that reality.

But there is also a more fundamental question. Someone who checks on a relative for a few hours each week and someone who cannot safely leave the person they care for alone may both be unpaid carers. Their ability to take on paid employment is clearly very different.

Carer’s Allowance draws one important line: to qualify, you must provide at least 35 hours of care a week – almost the equivalent, in hours, of a conventional full-time working week. Many provide considerably more.

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There are only 168 hours in a week. Carers need to sleep, eat and rest like everyone else. There must be a point at which fitting more work into an already demanding caring role becomes unsustainable.

Before asking how many additional hours a carer could work, perhaps we should first ask how many hours of care they already provide — and how much of their week is actually left.

None of this means carers should be discouraged from employment. Quite the opposite.

Those of us who can and want to work should have a system that makes it possible: predictable earnings rules, a gradual reduction in support rather than a cliff edge, genuinely flexible employment and affordable replacement care.

But we must also recognise carers for whom paid employment simply is not possible. Some are already caring for far more than 35 hours a week. They are already working. The difference is that their work is unpaid.

I do not regret caring for my mum. But caring for someone you love should not require you to surrender your financial independence, professional identity or future choices.

If the government genuinely wants carers to work when we can, it first needs to understand the work we are already doing. ■

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About the author: Jacqui Hylton is a former NHS midwife from Leeds who left a career of more than 30 years to become a full-time unpaid carer for her mum.

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We are one month into Andy Burnham’s premiership, which is — clearly — not enough time to write anything of note about his achievements as prime minister.

What we can say is his ambitions are large.

On his first day in Downing Street, Burnham announced that his government had committed £340m to a programme intended to end long-term rough sleeping, with 1,200 homes and intensive support for at least 3,000 people.

Then came social care. He pledged to use all his political capital to finally tackle the elephant in the room, a system which has historically lurched from crisis to crisis, while calling for cross-party agreement on a lasting settlement.

He has pushed on devolution too, launching No.10 North as a symbolic first act to show his commitment to removing the concentration of power from Westminster. Burnham has made clear his focus on youth unemployment, and has promised more council housing and a government that would “invest in people’s success, rather than paying for failure”.

It is a remarkably coherent first pitch. After years of governments that seemed incapable of fixing anything, here is prime minister who believes government can and should tackle problems previously deemed beyond hope.

But of course, prime ministers do not get to choose what lands on their desk. The prisons crisis is a case in point. Burnham has already found himself dealing with the politically toxic question of early release, and while the political pressure to intervene in individual cases is understandable, doing so comes with immense risk.

If ministers begin creating bespoke exemptions for certain cases — particularly where names and faces become part of the political campaign — there is an obvious question about where that ends.

And then there are the problems he has not yet really begun to confront. Defence will demand decisions about Britain’s role in a much more dangerous world. Welfare and taxation will test the durability of Burnham’s promises. And immigration — an issue that arguably destroyed the last two prime ministers — will require more than managerialism.

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And then there is climate change: a thus far glaring omission. As Burnham approached his first month in office, almost three-quarters of England is officially in drought, affecting around 45 million people. The country has endured repeated heatwaves, while the consequences are being felt in agriculture, water, wildlife and public health. Yet, climate has barely featured in the new prime minister’s agenda. That is a strange place for a supposedly transformative government to find itself.

The biggest challenges facing Britain don’t sit neatly inside the boundaries of domestic policy. Climate change, immigration and even Britain’s economic future are al tied to our relationship with the EU, the United States and the rest of the world.

Even the events in Thetford earlier this month — where anti-migrant protests descended into several nights of racist violence — are a reminder that the pressures facing Britain are not simply questions of administration and policy, but deeper rifts over national identity, social cohesion and Britain’s place in a changing world.

Burham’s great political strength has always been his instinct for the concrete: the roof over someone’s head, the care package that is not there, the young person who cannot find a job, the power that has been hoarded in Westminster. But a prime minister has to be able to see beyond the immediate problem too.

One month in, our King from the North has given us a pretty good idea of what he wants his premiership to be about. The question is whether he has yet demonstrated that he understands the full scale of the job. That is what we at The Lead are going to spend the coming months finding out.

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The record temperatures during this summer’s heatwave, which have caused drought across the UK, are a stark reminder of how climate change threatens food security.

The agriculture industry has jumped on “regenerative farming” — a term with its roots in the organic movement — as a way to make the sector more climate-friendly. But does it actually curb the industry’s huge planet-warming emissions, or are companies using it to greenwash their polluting business models? And should we be eating less meat and dairy?

Background: What is ‘regenerative farming’?

The term “regenerative agriculture” refers to a range of environment-friendly farming practices, such as protecting soil from tillage, which can help store carbon in the ground and support biodiversity.

Experts tend to agree that these methods can have environmental benefits, and many farmers are using them to improve how they produce food.

But the lack of an agreed upon definition means companies can use “regenerative” for small changes which don’t begin to address the sector’s massive effects on the climate.

Agriculture is responsible for 25-30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and nearly 12 percent of all UK greenhouse gas emissions. It is a major source of methane, which is responsible for one third of all human-caused global warming to date. The methane is produced after livestock digest food, and mostly from cow belches.

Methane warms the planet 27 times faster than CO2, but it breaks down more quickly. For this reason, scientists say cutting methane is the fastest way to curb global heating, which is why agriculture emissions are so important.

Agricultural production is the cause of 80 percent of deforestation, according to Greenpeace, with carbon-hungry trees being cut down to make way for cattle ranches.

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For a sense of scale, emissions from a single company, industry giant Nestlé, are three times the size of that of its home country Switzerland. The beef industry’s emissions are roughly equivalent to all emissions produced by India, one of the world’s most populous countries.

Despite the size of its emissions, the evidence for agriculture’s power to cut them by regenerative practices is less than compelling. For example, one major industry argument is that agriculture’s methane emissions from livestock can be balanced by carbon sequestration – storing carbon in soil and plant material. However, a 2024 study in the journal Nature Communications found that it was “not feasible” that you could store enough carbon to cancel out these huge emissions.

It is also sometimes claimed that regenerative agriculture can protect small farms from the burden of changes to curb emissions. But a look at the damage from heatwaves and droughts to crops makes it clear that the main threat to farms is not climate action, but climate change and the failure to slow rising temperatures.

There is a simple answer to the question of how to cut emissions from livestock – and it’s the one the industry is actively opposing.

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So, do we need to eat less meat?

The main driver of agriculture’s climate impact is methane from livestock, and scientists are clear that the only way to tackle this is by reducing demand.

A 2024 survey of 200 experts found 85 percent agreed that rich and middle income nations would need to eat fewer “animal-sourced” foods to halve livestock’s emissions by 2030 if the world was to meet the Paris climate goals.

The UK’s independent Climate Change Committee has recommended a 20 percent reduction in meat and dairy consumption by 2030, and 25 percent for meat by 2050. There are signs this trend is slowly happening, partly due to high prices.

Household purchases of beef and lamb fell five percent between 2024 and 2025, and are down nine percent on 2021, as part of a 21 percent fall between 2002 and 2023. The public could be educated about the health and climate benefits of less meat and dairy, and of plant-based alternatives.

A landmark report in 2019 by EAT-Lancet said that global red meat consumption should be cut by 50 percent, which would not only cut emissions but be much better for people’s health.

Far from helping to make these reductions, the meat industry has worked hard to squash these proposals. As climate outlet DeSmog revealed, the EAT-Lancet report was attacked by PR firm Red Flag on behalf of Animal Agriculture Alliance, a meat and dairy industry group. Meanwhile, the industry has funded or backed studies which promote the health and nutrition benefits of meat – despite most independent research finding the opposite.

Despite its claims to be climate-friendly, the agribusiness industry has been lobbying against meaningful climate action more broadly. Agribusiness has spent a fortune on public relations agencies and celebrity influencers to convince the public that agribusiness is fighting climate change, and to encourage people to continue to buy lots of meat and dairy products.

Food and farming organisations including industry giants JBS, Bayer, and Nestle sent more than 300 lobbyists to the COP30 climate summit in Brazil last November, where deforestation was on the agenda. ■

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About the author: Adam Barnett is UK News Reporter at DeSmog and a freelance journalist. He writes a politics column for the Big Issue and has reported for The Guardian and Private Eye

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

👫Found this edition of The Lead Untangles useful? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place. And catch up on the series so far where we looked at the human cost of extreme heatwaves and the pressure growing for North Sea drilling.

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Andy Burnham’s home address has been publicly available for years on a government website - leaving the new Prime Minister dangerously exposed.

The huge house in Cheshire, bought for less than £300,000 in the early 2000s and now thought to be worth more than triple that, could until yesterday be easily found online. The Lead has agreed not to name the site for security reasons.

The revelation, revealed today by The Lead, comes days after Burnham was duped into swapping messages with someone pretending to be US President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles.

And it follows last month’s death of Ann Widdecombe, the former Conservative MP allegedly killed at her home in Devon, and the jailing in June of two men for conspiring to torch a car and two houses linked to then-PM Sir Keir Starmer in London for Russia.

The security gaffe raises major safety fears at a time when the current UK terror threat level stands at severe - meaning an attack is considered “highly likely”.

Security expert Chris Phillips, former head of the National Counter-Terrorism Security Office, told The Lead: “It’s most definitely a security breach. Even if he’s not living there full time, it’s the fact the address is out there.

“His wife and kids are all under some kind of security blanket now but that’s not necessarily enough if you get firebombed in the middle of the night.

“It’s one of the things that really should have been picked up by security teams when it looked like he was going to become Prime Minister, but it’s clearly fallen through the net.”

Phillips added: “Even as a mayor you wouldn’t want your address put up.”

Burnham’s address was only removed after The Lead contacted No 10. Officials have been scrambling to get the address taken down, with a number of security meetings also held over the past 24 hours, it is understood.

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“We don’t comment on security matters,” a Downing Street spokesperson said.

Although linked to a previous business venture, the address had remained public since 2008, including when Burnham was mayor of Greater Manchester and since he became PM.

The safety of MPs has been called into question several times in recent years, especially after the murders of Jo Cox in 2016 by a right-wing extremist, Sir David Amess in 2021 by a sympathiser of the so-called Islamic State, and Widdecombe last month.

The 78-year-old Reform UK spokeswoman was found dead at her home after allegedly being beaten to death.

Her home was on television less than a week before her body was found, with the bungalow shown in detail on an episode of Celebrity Yorkshire Auction House on Quest.

Joshua Kerry, 28, of Rotherham in South Yorkshire, is charged with her murder, with a court told during his first appearance that Widdecombe was hit on the head 21 times with a hammer.

Last year, a car and two houses linked to Sir Keir were set on fire in north London by Ukrainian Roman Lavrynovych, 22, who had been recruited by a Russian online sabotage network.

Romanian Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, helped his friend, egging him on and offering to help convert £3,000 in cryptocurrency into cash.

A Toyota Rav4 once owned by Sir Keir and the front doors of two houses were set alight - with one owned by the then-Labour leader and occupied by his sister-in-law.

The arsonists were jailed for seven and two years respectively.

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The Lead’s sister title The Blackpool Lead earlier this year told how councillors in the seaside town have been forced to go into hiding - with three-quarters now keeping their home addresses secret from the public - following physical attacks and violent threats.

Speaking on Tuesday about exchanging messages with someone pretending to be top White House aide Susie Wiles, Burnham insisted he is not embarrassed.

He is said to have become suspicious after several messages and reported the incident.

“No, I’m not (embarrassed),” Burnham told broadcasters. “Because there was a minimal exchange, nothing of consequence.

“And, actually, quickly I realised that this needed to be reported, and I did so.

“So I handled it in the right way. All politicians are receiving these pressures and these challenges, but I did everything right.” ■

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About the author: Michael Holmes is an award-winning journalist living near Blackpool whose previous roles include investigative reporter, news editor and production editor in the regional and national media. He writes regularly for The Blackpool Lead.

👫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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This weekend we launch our series examining Andy Burnham’s policies and the challenges that await him once the summer ends, led by our Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald we will bring you deep insight, reporting and thought into the key issues shaping the UK and a Burnham premiership. Subscribe now to support us to report on this and get it first to your inbox too.

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Nigel Farage ostensibly got what he wanted in Clacton.

He resigned his seat, forced an unnecessary byelection, spent weeks insisting that the people should judge him rather than Westminster’s “establishment”, and then won comfortably with over 22,000 votes and a 63 per cent vote share.

All in all; a political triumph. But not really. Because despite Farage’s resounding victory, the weeks leading up to the contest will be remembered as the moment Reform UK’s veneer cracked, and all the little pieces began to fall.

The result of the contest was never in doubt. Farage holds one of the safest seats in the country and none of mainstream political parties were prepared to indulge his political stunt. What Farage had maybe really intended to do was simply move the conversation on from finances and shady backers, to the idea of a witch hunt against him backed by an elite intent on destroying Reform.

But the questions surrounding Farage’s finances have hardly disappeared. Almost immediately – and as predicted – the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards resumed the probe into Farage’s finances, while other inquiries and criminal investigations continue unresolved.

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And the summer months, which Farage had once used to command headlines, have felt markedly different this year. Rather than launching major policy announcements, Reform has found itself responding to stories it would rather not be discussing, while Farage has himself went very quiet indeed.

In case you missed it, our special report from Clacton ahead of the by-election heard directly from voters on what they made of Farage with our mini-documentary being watched nearly 10,000 times.

Meanwhile, internal party tensions are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Farage and his former home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, have publicly clashed in recent weeks after Yusuf described the former Conservative defence secretary Ben Wallace as a “traitor” on social media, prompting a public rebuke from his leader.

Rumours about a breakdown in their relationship have followed, but this is about more than a personal falling-out. Yusuf was a central figure in Reform’s earlier dispute with Rupert Lowe, now leader of Restore UK, exposing ideological and strategic divisions that were never properly resolved.

Some believe Lowe’s return could help Farage reunite the party and shore up support on his right flank. That seems a tad optimistic. Lowe’s supporters occupy an even more extreme political space, embracing figures such as Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk while advocating policies including mass deportations and the return of the death penalty.

If there is one consistent theme running through Farage’s political career, it is his striking ability to make enemies out of friends. He seems to be running out of allies. That helps to explain why rumours about his own future, including speculation that health concerns could eventually force him to step back, carry so much weight.

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Reform is beginning to discover that beyond the man who is starting to falter, the party has remarkably little to say.

This week should have been an opportunity to shape the political conversation, buoyed by the momentum of their Clacton victory. But rather than focusing on welfare and the future of Britain’s benefits system, deputy leader Richard Tice used the accompanying press conference to launch into another broadside against net zero.

“When it’s a bit warm, let’s enjoy it,” he said. If climate change improved English sparkling wine and allowed Britain to “take on the French”, then all the better. It was a remarkable intervention from a party that claims to speak for working people. At a moment when communities are grappling with extreme temperatures, streets have been wiped out by wildfires, and there is growing anxiety about the climate crisis, one of Reform’s most senior figures chose to extol the virtues of champagne.

Aside from being remarkably tone-deaf, Tice’s comments expose the fundamental weakness within Reform UK. A movement built on moaning about immigration, net zero, anti-elite rhetoric and cultural wars does not a proper political party make.

Those issues have undoubtedly proved effective at grabbing attention, but grievance politics has limits. Eventually, voters start asking more difficult questions. What does Reform actually want to build? How would it improve public services? How would it raise living standards? What would a Reform government actually look like?

Reform’s outrage is beginning to falter as an effective governing philosophy. That challenge becomes even more acute when a party is consumed by investigations, internal disputes and questions about its own leadership. The energy that should be spent developing policy is instead spent on firefighting and cooling tempers.

Clacton was supposed to be a demonstration of strength, but Farage failed to silence his critics, consolidate his longevity and renew the party’s offering.

Of course, we all knew that winning a by-election against Count Binface was never going to solve the key challenges facing Farage. Instead, it raised an altogether different question: is Reform itself beginning to crack? ■

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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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This weekend we launch our series examining Andy Burnham’s policies and the challenges that await him once the summer ends, lead by our Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald we will bring you deep insight, reporting and thought into the key issues shaping the UK and a Burnham premiership. Subscribe now to support us to report on this and get it first to your inbox too.

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The Labour government under Prime Minister Andy Burnham has been hinting that it might allow new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea to help with the cost of living crisis.

This follows pressure from the oil and gas industry, right-wing parties (the Conservatives and Reform UK), some media outlets and trade unions, along with U.S. President Donald Trump.

But would new drilling really help cut energy bills or provide “energy security”? And as the UK suffers extreme heat and wildfires, what would this mean for efforts to tackle climate change?

Background: Licence to drill?

Labour was elected in 2024 on a manifesto pledge that it would not issue any new licences to look for and extract oil and gas in the North Sea. But it also said that it would honour licences issued under the previous Conservative government.

Two of these – Jackdaw gas field near Aberdeen and the Rosebank oil and gas field near the Shetland Islands – were blocked by the Scottish court after a legal challenge by Greenpeace. Consultations on both projects are set to conclude in the coming weeks.

The wars in Ukraine and Iran have spiked global oil and gas prices, hitting people’s household energy bills. This has prompted calls for the UK to pause or ditch its climate policies and approve new licences. The argument goes that in a dangerous world, the UK needs its own supply of oil and gas to provide “energy security” and to cut people’s bills.

Would new drilling help the cost of living 0r ‘energy security’?

The evidence for this argument is slim. As both Labour and the previous Conservative governments have acknowledged, the oil and gas drilled in the North Sea is sold at global market prices. Extracting more of it will not change the international cost of oil and gas, which can suddenly jump when the global supply chain is disrupted, as in the Ukraine or Iran wars.

It has been argued that new drilling would provide tax revenue for the Treasury which could presumably be spent on helping the public with the cost of energy bills. Oddly, the most vocal advocates also call for the windfall tax on oil and gas profits to be scrapped. However, revenue is in long-term decline. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts that oil and gas revenue will drop from £4 billion this year (2025/26) to £0.1 billion by 2030/31.

On top of this, despite record profits, oil and gas companies often pay net negative tax thanks to generous government tax relief, as Shell did in 2024. Analysis by campaign group Uplift suggests the Rosebank project could actually end up costing the Treasury money.

New drilling would also not necessarily increase domestic supply. Analysis by Global Witness found that 80 percent of North Sea oil and gas in 2022 was exported to other countries.

On the proposed sites, research suggests that Jackdaw would only provide 2 percent of the UK’s demand for gas over its lifetime (around ten years), while Rosebank would provide around 1 percent, based on the amount the UK currently imports.

Meanwhile, the North Sea is what is called a mature basin. Production reportedly dropped 75 percent between 1999 and 2024. There are some estimates that up to 90 percent of North Sea oil and gas has already been extracted. Analysis by the climate website Carbon Brief estimates UK gas production will be down 99 percent in 2050 compared to 2025 – and that new licences would only cut this to 97 precent.

If the UK is still relying on oil and gas for its energy when its North Sea resources are used up, it will be even more dependent on imports.

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Is UK drilling ‘cleaner’ than imported gas?

Advocates of new North Sea drilling argue that it is “cleaner” than importing oil and gas.

For example, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch wrote in a letter to the Telegraph last week: “Banning oil and gas drilling from Aberdeen, which has a low carbon footprint, only to import oil and gas from places that drill in a dirty fashion, makes no sense whatsoever.” This argument appears to be based on the claim (made under the previous Tory government) that North Sea drilling’s carbon footprint is “four times” smaller than imported gas.

However, this is misleading. The figure is from a 2023 North Sea Transition Authority press release, and compares North Sea gas production with imports of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), which is compressed for sea transport – creating emissions in the process – rather than with gas imported by pipeline.

Most of the UK’s gas imports come via pipelines (mainly from Norway), making up around 70 per cent, compared to 15 percent from LNG (mainly from the U.S. and Qatar).

Fact checks by the BBC and Channel 4 found that total emissions from UK gas production were 17 percent lower, not four times lower (75 percent) than imports. In fact, NSTA data shows that UK gas production releases more than double the CO2 emissions of Norwegian pipeline gas.

Meanwhile, Rosebank alone would create an estimated 250 million tonnes of CO2 emissions over its ten-year lifetime, the equivalent of the UK’s total annual emissions in 2024.

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What about jobs?

Some have argued that, putting aside bills or emissions, new North Sea drilling would “create jobs” in a sector where workers are increasingly insecure. In fact, the Jackdaw field would provide only 27 new full-time jobs for people working directly on the site, according to its owner Adura, a joint venture between Shell and Norweignan company Equinor.

Oil and gas jobs are in long-term decline, with around 100,000 job losses between 2010 and 2024 under the Conservatives. Despite claims by industry groups like OEUK, this trend pre-dates the 2022 windfall tax on oil and gas profits. In a move full of symbolism, BP recently announced it was looking to sell its North Sea oil and gas business.

What’s the alternative?

At the same time, the wind and solar industry employed more than 270,000 people in 2024, plus 670,000 in supply chains, according to the New Economics Foundation. In the same year, the net zero sector grew three times as fast as the rest of the UK economy, according to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

The best way to cut household bills and provide cheap and reliable energy would be to insulate people’s homes, replace dead gas boilers with heat pumps, and continue to invest in wind and solar energy. Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) suggests renewables cut UK wholesale electricity prices by a third in 2025. The government can tweak its targets for clean power and zero-emissions electric vehicles, as it is reportedly doing, but electrification (including EV charging point infrastructure) is the best way to save people money, and to protect them from war-prone oil and gas markets and runaway climate change. ■

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About the author: Adam Barnett is UK News Reporter at DeSmog and a freelance journalist. He writes a politics column for the Big Issue and has reported for The Guardian and Private Eye

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

👫Found this edition of The Lead Untangles useful? Share this story with your friends, family and colleagues to help us reach more people with our independent journalism, always with a focus on people, policy and place. And catch up on last week’s edition where we looked at the human cost of extreme heatwaves (because it is absolutely scorching right now!)

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Get the next instalment of The Lead Untangles direct to your inbox as part of our focus on climate and environment and also get 30 per cent off an annual subscription (usually £49, use this link to get it for £34.30 instead) to help us combat misinformation.

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Clacton watch: Voters go to the polls today in a by-election triggered shamelessly by Nigel Farage as he faces increasing questions over his £5million crypto billionaire donation. Thanks for the kind comments on Fred Garrett-Stanley’s in-depth reporting on how people are feeling there, and our mini documentary has seen more than 5,000 views on YouTube too and a very lively discussion in the comments. Our Westminster Editor, Zoë Grünewald, will be in your inbox early next week examining what next for Nigel and Reform after the by-election result. Make sure you’re signed up to receive it first.

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The sun is blazing, the wind is whipping, and dozens of news crews are down from London. The energy in Clacton town centre ahead of a unique by-election on Thursday 13 August — called after Nigel Farage resigned due to the parliamentary standards investigation into his £5m donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harbourne — is febrile.

Fuelled in part by the scorching weather, local residents are friendly and talkative, navigating the crowds of beach-chasing holidaymakers and Farage-hunting journalists. As you’d expect in a former Tory stronghold that has firmly transferred its allegiances to Reform UK, many of these locals are loyal to Farage.

“He’s the best MP we’ve ever had,” says local gold shop owner, Alex Humphreys. “He buys from local shops, we see him in the town. His business ideas are great, and he’s got loads of charisma.” She adds: “All my friends and family who live in Clacton are voting for Farage. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t support him, other than the odd customer.”

The Reform leader’s backing is even stronger in the more affluent towns of Walton-on-the-Naze and Frinton-on-Sea, located a few miles up the coast from Clacton. Inevitably, it’s primarily immigration that draws them to him. “I don’t agree with people coming into our country. There’s too many people around to look after,” says Walton shop owner, Gail Garbett. “If they’re going to work here and put money into the country, it doesn’t matter who comes in. But they are not helping build it. They’re sitting in these hotels reaping the benefits.”

Asked about Farage’s £5m donation, Gail says: “I think that’s just a bit of nastiness to try and pull him down,” she says. “He has to walk around with bodyguards. They went to his daughter [whose property Sky News approached for comment]. That was disgusting.”

A recurring theme across the constituency is a general lack of trust towards politicians. When asked about Farage’s £5m donation, voters shrug their shoulders and suggest it doesn’t matter, because – in their view – all politicians are on the take.

Farage’s core base (who comprise at least half of the people we speak to) have accepted the Reform leader’s argument that this is a fight against the establishment. That being said, it’s generally difficult to find people who have changed their mind about Farage. Like Donald Trump in the US, it’s hard to put off his staunchest supporters.

Still, he has plenty of critics. Several people tell us that Reform’s leader is rarely seen in Clacton, and suggest he doesn’t care about the town. Since becoming MP, he has mentioned his constituency just four times in the House of Commons; in the same period, he’s visited the United States on eight separate occasions, according to Open Britain. Among the more apathetic voters, there’s a sense that despite whoever represents them in parliament, little will change in the area.

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This feeling is compounded in Jaywick, a seaside village just outside Clacton that’s often cited as England’s most deprived community. Many live in poor quality housing, while job opportunities are scarce. According to the BBC, “two-thirds of the village’s working-age population [are] economically inactive”.

This deprivation is concentrated in the misunderstood area of Brooklands, which although cash-poor, is rich in spirit and community. “I have never, ever lived in a community like this one. I am so proud to be a part of it,” says Ieda Lima Boswell, a Brazilian immigrant and Brooklands resident. “The community embraced us. Look around: this beautiful beach, it’s so quiet, this is paradise. But I didn’t see any candidate coming to Jaywick, particularly Brooklands, until now. Now they come like a swarm, and that’s not right.”

Jaywick was previously the subject of the exploitative 2015 documentary Benefits By The Sea, which was admonished by critics as “poverty porn” for its negative and unbalanced depiction of the village. As a result, it’s hardly surprising that few residents have anything positive to say about mainstream British politicians, Farage included.

“What has he actually done for Clacton? I am yet to come across anyone who can say anything other than ‘he’s a great bloke’” says Jaywick resident Claire Gibson. “I do not buy any of the stuff about the boats because there is no coherent policy behind that. Stopping immigration is not going to make people’s problems go away magically.”

While Claire and others are considering independent local candidates, a decent chunk of the anti-Farage vote has coalesced around the wildest, most famous fringe candidate: Count Binface. He’s gained significant support outside the constituency, with a recent Ipsos poll finding that 33 per cent of British adults prefer him to the Reform leader.

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Of course, what matters is what people in Clacton think. Some are so desperate to boot out Farage that they’ve embraced Binface. Others see Jon Harvey (the comedian and TV writer behind the mask) as a more serious candidate than he’s letting on, and are excited about the symbolic power of a joke figure challenging Farage.

“My gut feeling is politics is a serious business, and we shouldn’t be having characters like Count Binface. But comedians speak truth to power, and the country needs someone to speak truth to power,” says Walton resident Lesley Corina.

She adds: “Farage has got no policies, so he keeps poking people with a stick, saying, ‘oh, look, the migrants, the small boats. It is thoroughly unpleasant.” In reference to the Reform leader’s response to the investigation into his £5m donation, she says: “When Angela Rayner did something wrong, she said sorry and went to the appropriate authorities. Farage has thrown his toys out the pram.”

While people like Lesley support Binface, other residents express frustration at the lack of credible options on the table; with Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens (and even Restore) all refusing to field candidates, the field has been left open for a record 34 individuals to stand.

“Clacton deserves better. If you want someone who will take Clacton seriously, I am here,” says independent candidate Adham Alkhatip, who we repeatedly bump into in town, and who joins 13 others at a local hustings one evening (Binface and Farage are unsurprisingly absent). Here, we meet ex-Tory candidate Attieh Fard, who says her priorities are “safety, security, infrastructure like bus services, and potholes” and others with more extreme messages, including racist far-right activist Kai Stephens of the British Democrats.

Many of the candidates standing are either eccentric or downright odd. Most don’t have a convincing, well-communicated offer for Clacton. Crucially, almost all of them live elsewhere (some as far away as Australia), and have limited local knowledge.

Against this landscape, and with such a strong anti-Farage sentiment amongst sections of the constituency, Count Binface could have emerged with a credible offer to local people, and gained a sizeable vote share. Unfortunately, he seemingly has little interest in properly engaging with the community.

Over three days in the Clacton area, we were in constant contact with Binface’s team, attempting to get interview time. He refused. Harvey has been active on the national media circuit, appearing on BBC Breakfast, ITV’s Good Morning Britain, The Rest Is Politics, and various other broadcasts. But he hasn’t attended local hustings, and we didn’t encounter one local resident who had actually met him.

In recent videos posted on social media, he highlights spots of interest in the constituency, and has done a good job of educating people about Clacton outside the town. But these on-camera theatrics – where Harvey films campaign messages from remote beaches and empty car parks far away from onlookers – conceal an unfortunate truth: on the ground, he is not making an effort to engage with local people. While some residents frustrated with the status quo have put their faith in him, this ultimately remains a social media campaign, and the question of how much Harvey actually wants to be Clacton’s MP remains unanswered.

Nigel Farage will win this by-election comfortably, and the parliamentary investigation will resume. If wrongdoing is found, he’ll be forced to fight again, this time against real candidates. Crucially, any such battle will be fought with the reputational damage inflicted by this farcical run against a man dressed as a bin. His approval rating amongst the general public recently hit an all-time-low of -32, and Labour have overtaken his party in most polls, fuelled by the so-called “Burnham bounce”.

You could argue – that simply by claiming victory against this cast of joke candidates and no-hopers – Farage has already lost. But this is more of a consolation for hopeful progressives and the press than it is for Clacton residents. This entire ordeal feels little more than an awfully expensive waste of time. Let’s just hope that the next time residents go to the polls, they will have a better choice of candidates. ■

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About the author: Fred Garratt-Stanley is a freelance journalist who writes about culture, politics, football, and pubs. He’s based in London and has written for a wide range of publications including The Lead, The Guardian, NME, Huck, and Pellicle.

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. You can also watch the video on YouTube and share there to help more people see our special report from Clacton and if you enjoyed reading today’s edition you may also like Fred’s report from Dover as part of our series digging deep into the impact of the EU Referendum a decade or our Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald look at what the future of a fracturing Reform party is now.

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The climate crisis means that UK summers have been becoming hotter and drier for some time now. But little has been done to mitigate the impact of higher temperatures on hospitals and clinics.

In today’s The Lead Untangles, we take a look at the human cost of heatwaves and how they are impacting our National Health Service.

Context

The UK Health Security Agency issued a red ‘heat health alert’ in the June heatwave for temperatures that pose ‘significant risk to life’ even to those not considered to be at risk in hot weather.

A couple of weeks ago, the UKHSA estimated there were 2,877 excess deaths associated with the heatwaves 24-27 May and 21-28 June. Last year the sum total for the summer was just 1,504. The record for the UK was for 2022, when 2,985 heat-associated deaths were observed across 5 heat episodes. Given both May and June have nearly reached that figure, 2026 is on track to make a new record.

Whose health is at risk in hot weather?

People under 5 and over 65 struggle to cope with heat compared with adults, as do pregnant people.

Some medications make it harder to regulate things like hydration, sweating and body temperature: for example SSRI antidepressants, antihistamines, blood pressure medicine, insulin and antipsychotics (for use in schizophrenia and dementia).

The NHS warned that people with heart, respiratory, kidney and mobility problems should all consider themselves at higher risk in heatwaves. People with diabetes, Parkinson’s and substance use problems may also struggle.

Homeless people are at higher risk because of a lack of access to water and cool spaces.

People without pre-existing conditions are at higher risk if they work outside, or spend time outside exercising.

The NHS also warns that people living alone are at higher risk in a heatwave if they are unable to care for themselves – for instance due to mobility or cognitive problems.

How are doctors coping?

A survey of more than 1,100 doctors and healthcare workers by Doctors’ Association UK found that 83 per cent of respondents described their workplace as ‘very hot’ or ‘dangerously hot’. Some 94 per cent worked without air conditioning and 68 per cent of respondents said the heat had affected patient safety.

The same survey asked doctors and nurses to record the temperature at work and one participant reported 45C.

The UK’s independent adviser on climate change published a report in May saying air conditioning should be installed in all care homes and hospitals within the next ten years, but the majority of NHS workers need these adaptations now.

In the June heatwave, vulnerable patients were encouraged to stay home for their own safety, resulting in cancelled appointments and creating a backlog for clinicians. Some hospitals declared critical incidents as cooling units and equipment such as scanners stopped working, again creating a backlog for services.

Yesterday a UN ambassador used an article in the Health Service Journal to call for the government to create a summer version of the winter pressures strategy, first introduced in 2013/14. Importantly, extra funding was attached to help services cope.

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How are other countries coping?

The UK is not alone in this. Europe has already recorded over 10,000 excess deaths this summer, of which over 5,700 in France, 5,000 in Germany and 1,222 in Belgium.

The death toll shows the urgent need for adaptations to homes and infrastructure across the continent. For example, researchers estimated that Australia recorded around 1,000 deaths over four years in a population of around 28 million. By contrast the UK has nearly tripled that number in a single year for a population of around 70 million.

What have doctors and nurses said about the heatwave?

Dr Alice Clack, consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist and member of Health for XR, said: “Experiencing this year’s heatwave has been deeply distressing.”

Dr Naomi Adelson, a GP in London who’s also a member of Health for XR, said many patients’ homes are not designed to cope with extreme heat: “The heatwaves just seem never-ending this summer and they hit the most vulnerable hardest. We urgently need adaptation of homes and public buildings to protect our population and reduce the strain on the NHS.”

Two weeks ago the Royal College of Nursing said that employers must commit to basics like providing access to drinking water and allowing them breaks during heatwaves.

RCN Head of Health, Safety and Wellbeing, Kim Sunley, said: “The heatwave shows little sign of slowing down in parts of the UK.

“This summer, we told our members the key actions employers should be taking to keep them safe. With temperatures still regularly topping 30 degrees, the need for this is greater than ever. Health and care employers have a legal duty to protect staff and must get the basics right.”

Are doctors and nurses allowed to campaign for climate solutions?

Yes and no. Technically, nothing stops clinicians protesting in a personal capacity.

But since 2022, registered doctors have been suspended and even imprisoned for climate protests that hit the news.

Dr Patrick Hart, a GP from Bristol, was imprisoned for a year. He became the first doctor to face a medical tribunal and have his licence to practice suspended as a consequence.

Dr Sarah Benn, also a GP, went to prison for 32 days for taking part in Just Stop Oil protests in 2022. She is still suspended from practicing.

A third GP, Dr Diana Warner, also had her licence suspended.

There is a fast-increasing awareness of the urgency of the situation amongst healthcare workers in the UK, particularly as individuals are directly affected by global heating.

Dr Matt Lee is the sustainability lead for Doctors’ Association UK and a hospital doctor in Wales.

He’s volunteered and worked in the area of climate change and human health for a number of years. Nevertheless he has been alarmed by the temperatures this summer: “It still came as a shock having to prepare a ‘just-in-case’ evacuation bag whilst watching wildfire smoke from my house.

“The realities of climate change and what it means for our friends and family are feeling closer than ever. While it motivates me to keep advocating for climate action, I worry about what the future holds for my loved ones and those who I care for in hospital.”

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What next?

Doctors may have been disappointed by health secretary Yvette Cooper’s response. Earlier today she told LBC that the NHS must ‘prepare’ for heatwaves, but made no reference to new strategy or funding to prevent heatwave deaths. Another heatwave has been forecast for mid-August and time is running out for the government to announce emergency support to prevent further deaths. Last year the heat episode with highest mortality occurred in August, with those aged 75 and over at greatest risk. Hospitals registered significant deaths in this period.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski has called for higher taxes on oil and gas profits to fund wildfire prevention. In his speech he specifically highlighted the risk posed to older people and those with pre-existing conditions. He framed the speech as a ‘reality check’ for the new Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister has made no notable announcements on the UK heatwave since he came into his new role on 20 July. Fears emerged that he would revoke the ban on North Sea exploration licences for oil companies but he has maintained the ban to date, despite showing some support for UK oil and gas.

A coalition of MPs and public figures has also called for a ‘National Emergency Briefing’ to address the impact of the heatwaves, but its petition has not yet reached the threshold for a parliamentary debate.

Without firm funding commitments to adapting houses and hospitals, the NHS is unlikely to be able to affect the number of excess deaths next summer. ■

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

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

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