Markus Andrews

Rachel Reeves is looking at imposing a fresh tax raid on savers by giving HMRC new powers to dock workers’ pay and acquire data about customers from banks. It comes as part of a wider drive to ensure people pay the tax they owe amid concern that savers are failing to pay the correct tax on interest earned, as the Treasury seeks extra income without directly hiking taxes. At the Spring Statement, the chancellor vowed to increase the number of tax fraudsters charged every year by 20 per cent, promising to invest in HMRC’s “capacity to crack down on tax avoidance”. Consultation documents published in the wake of the Spring Statement indicated that proposals being considered by the government include plans to allow banks to hand over more personal information about their savers, including National Insurance numbers, that would make it easier for HMRC to match taxpayers with the money in their savings accounts.Rachel Reeves imposed cuts to welfare but did not raise taxes in her spring statement More

Rachel Reeves is fast becoming as hated as Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor who delivered Liz Truss’s disastrous so-called mini-budget.Just 24 hours after delivering her spring statement, a damning Ipsos poll showed just one in five people believe Ms Reeves is doing a good job, with half saying she is performing badly.In a devastating blow for the chancellor, it means she is plunging toward the approval rating of Mr Kwarteng in the wake of the September 2022 financial statement.The chancellor Rachel Reeves has confirmed that universal credit health benefits for new claimants will be halved in 2026 and then frozen until 2030 (Ben Stansall/PA) More

Banning smartphone and social media access alone fails to equip children for the healthy use of technology in the future, a group of international experts has argued.Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the collection of academics argued there is a lack of evidence that blanket bans helped children and such approaches were “stop-gap solutions” that “do little to support children’s longer-term healthy engagement with digital spaces across school, home, and other contexts, and their successful transition into adolescence and adulthood in a technology-filled world”.Instead, the experts call for a rights-based approach to technology use, where children are better protected from harm by age-appropriate design and education while using technology to develop skills to help them participate in the modern, digital world.Victoria Goodyear, from the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Birmingham, and colleagues from Harvard, the University of Cambridge, the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences, and the University of Sao Paulo said governments and regulators should instead focus on improving legislation designed to ensure children can use phones and social media safely.The intervention comes as debate continues over whether mobile phones should be banned in schools in England.On Wednesday, the chief inspector of Ofsted said smartphones should be banned in schools in England, which followed an exchange between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch on the issue during Prime Minister’s Questions.Mrs Badenoch questioned why the Government opposed a Tory amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to require schools to ban the use of phones.In response, the Prime Minister described the proposal as “completely unnecessary” as he claimed “almost every school” already bans phones, and instead said the focus should be on the content children were consuming.Schools in England were given non-statutory guidance under the former Conservative government in February last year intended to stop the use of mobile phones during the school day.In their article, the experts said a recent evaluation of school smartphone policies in England reported that restricted access to phones in school “was not associated with benefits to adolescent mental health and wellbeing, physical activity and sleep, educational attainment or classroom behaviour”.They added: “In addition, this study found no evidence of school restrictions being associated with lower levels of overall phone or media use or problematic social media use.“Technology-free moments and spaces are nevertheless important for children because increased time spent on phones and social media is generally linked with worse physical, mental, and educational outcomes.“However, approaches that focus on simply restricting access to devices can undermine children’s rights to technology design and education that will help them thrive as adults in today’s world.”Rather than approaching the issue in the same way as banning people from smoking, the experts said a more “constructive” approach would be to look at how society has responded to safety concerns around cars.“In response to increasing injuries and deaths from car crashes, rather than banning cars, society built an ecosystem of product safety regulations for companies (seatbelts, airbags) and consumers (vehicle safety tests, penalties), public infrastructure (traffic lights), and education (licences) to support safer use,” they said. More

Britain and France are preparing to send a joint military delegation to Ukraine in an effort to determine how any future ceasefire deal can be supported on the ground, Sir Keir Starmer said after a summit in Paris on Thursday.The prime minister also called for a deadline for Russia to come to the negotiating table, adding: “We need to see this developing in days and weeks, not months and months”. Sir Keir said: “We will be ready to operationalise a peace deal whenever its precise shape turns out to be, and we will work together to ensure Ukraine’s security so it can defend and deter against the future.”It came as French president Emmanuel Macron said it is “not up to Russia what happens on Ukrainian soil” after the Russian leader ruled out allowing the so-called coalition of the willing to deploy a peacekeeping force in the country. Volodymyr Zelensky, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Thursday More

It looked like the moment Sir Keir Starmer had reached a turning point after spending his first six months as prime minister tumbling in the polls.He hugged Volodymyr Zelensky close and offered the heroic Ukrainian president support after Donald Trump and JD Vance’s White House ambush.With work underway to establish and lead – alongside Emmanuel Macron – a ‘coalition of the willing’, it looked like European and other Ukrainian allies were preparing to step up where the US was walking away.Prime minister Keir Starmer holds a press conference at the British Residence in Paris on Thursday More

After announcing the largest package of government cuts since 2015 on Tuesday, Rachel Reeves was likely prepared to rebut accusations that Labour is returning Britain to a programme of austerity.Around £4.8 billion is set to be slashed from welfare spending over the next five years, the chancellor confirmed in her spring statement, with the changes set to plunge at least 250,000 into poverty. At least 50,000 of these will be children, figures from the government’s own analysis finds.Her announcement has led several economists to draw a comparison to the austerity measures pursued by Conservative governments in the 2010s, which saw a series of swingeing cuts to public services made to balance Treasury books.But “this is a far cry from what we saw in the Conservative years,” the chancellor said in an interview with ITV News.”The austerity period, particularly 2010 to 2015, when Cameron and Osborne were prime minister and chancellor, there were cuts every year in spending, and there were cuts to capital spending as well. So we’re increasing spending in every year now,” she added.But the exact definition of the term is a bit of a grey area, and not everyone seems as convinced as the chancellor that UK has seen the back of austerity. Least of all the British public, recent polling would suggest. According to a new poll from think tank More in Common, just over half of Britons say they think the country is either returning to austerity or never left it.Here, we look at the numbers behind the claims, and assess whether the UK is really seeing a ‘new austerity’:What is austerity?Austerity is a fiscal policy approach used to reduce government debts, through a combination of reducing government spending and increasing tax revenues. In the fallout from Covid and the energy crisis, the UK’s national debt reached its highest levels since the 1960s.Since the beginning of this century, government debt has increased from 33 per cent of GDP to nearly 100 per cent of GDP, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). As a result, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is making cutting government debt a key focus, saying in one of her first addresses to Parliament in July: “If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it”. The new set of cuts and changes to Britain’s welfare will be seen as a form of austerity to some – albeit more staggered and smaller than those under the coalition government. But despite the cuts, the welfare budget overall is still forecasted to increase in cash-terms until 2029/30, so in net terms, the sector will not see losses.What cuts has the Labour government made? The Chancellor said yesterday that welfare spending will go down as a proportion of GDP over the forecast period. The OBR has estimated that changes to incapacity and disability benefits will reduce spending by £6.4 billion by 2029/30, while the overall changes to the welfare package will cut £4.8 billion.Meanwhile, the IFS projects that the cuts to working-age benefits specifically will save £4.2 billion by the end of this Parliament, in today’s prices.It will become harder to be eligible for Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which will impact around 800,000 people, according to the government’s own assessment of the new benefits cuts.Some 370,000 of these people affected are already receiving PIP, and could lose an average of £4,500 a year.The Universal Credit health rate is also set to be slashed by 50 per cent, while the basic UC rate will increase by more than expected, to £106 a week by 2029. The government has also floated an age restriction to the UC health benefit, which would make under-22s ineligible to claim.How does this stack up against Tory cuts?The cuts to welfare announced in yesterday’s Spring Statement are the fifth largest since 2010, according to research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).The first two budgets introduced by David Cameron’s coalition government in June and November of 2010, amounted to a combined £17 billion in welfare savings (in 2025/6 prices) from cutting working-age benefits.Meanwhile in 2015, then-chancellor George Osborne announced a second Budget after Conservatives won the summer election, which contained the single highest cuts to welfare in this century (£15.9 billion).By comparison, the current government’s cuts, at £4.2 billion in net savings by 2029/30 from working age benefits, are just a small fraction (less than a third) of the 2015 cuts, and a quarter of those in the coalition’s first year.Over the whole decade of Tory leadership before Covid, 2010-19, these savings from cutting working-age welfare added up to £44.6 billion, according to the IFS.So far, the government has not announced cuts to day-to-day spending in other departments. But this spending is set to increase by an average of just 1.3 per cent above inflation overall.With higher spending boosts needed in defence and the NHS, other unprotected areas like schools and prisons are likely to feel the squeeze come June’s spending review. It is unclear how these inevitable cuts to public services, which have not yet been announced, will map up against the previous government.Over the coalition and Conservative governments, day-to-day spending on public services decreased until 2018-19, according to the IFS. ( More

Reform UK is unlikely to receive a record-breaking multimillion-pound donation from Elon Musk, Nigel Farage appears to have conceded. The former Ukip leader said the idea of a mega-donation from the X boss and ‘first buddy’ of Donald Trump had been “massively over-exaggerated”. The two men fell out spectacularly earlier this year, with Mr Musk even calling for a new leader for Reform, but now talk and text each other. Asked about the mega-donation, he called Mr Musk a “hero” for buying the social media platform but admitted they took a “different view” in their row over jailed far-right political activist Tommy Robinson.Reform UK leader Nigel Farage (PA) More