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Support trulyindependent journalismFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorThe new Labour government confirmed its commitment to uphold plans for a UK smoking ban in the King’s Speech on Wednesday.The measure, which will raise the legal smoking age by one year, every year, means anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 will never be able to purchase tobacco legally.It will also impose limits on the sale and marketing of vapes.While the policy was first introduced by former Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to see it through to legislation.The bill gained cross-party support when it was first introduced by Sunak and has been dubbed the “greatest piece of public health legislation in a generation”.MPs voted in favour of the bill by 383 votes to 67 in April. However, the bill was dropped as the general election was called before it could make its way through the legislature.Following the King’s Speech, here we take a look at the current British smoking laws and how they could change:People currently under the age of 14 will never be able to smoke legally under new proposals More

Support trulyindependent journalismFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorThe largest food bank in Westminster, home of the Houses of Parliament, has called for an end to subsidised “fine dining” for MPs, suggesting funds be redirected to combating poverty. The North Paddington food bank (NPFB) has launched the campaign “No Food in The House” urging Parliament to use the millions spent on subsidised catering for MPs to tackle food insecurity across the country. Politicians could enjoy a full three-course meal for as little as £10.41 last year, according to the charity, costing the taxpayer a reported £7million a year. Catering services in the Houses of Parliament run at a loss, so public money is effectively spent bankrolling politicians’ lunches.As well as MPs, there are around there are 14,000 parliamentary pass-holding staff who can eat and drink in parliament’s bars and restaurants. The North Paddington food bank (NPFB) has launched the campaign ‘No Food in The House’ More

Support trulyindependent journalismFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorUkrainian refugee parents barred from bringing their two-year-old daughter to Britain after the UK’s sponsorship rules were suddenly tightened will now be reunited with their child after a government U-turn.Oleksandra and Yaroslav, both aged 31, decided to leave their daughter Anna with her grandparents in Kyiv while getting set up with their own accommodation and establishing a new business after arriving in Britain under the Homes for Ukraine scheme in April 2022.But after they overcame these hurdles, their application in April this year for Anna to join them was refused by the Home Office on the grounds that – as per rule changes brought in without warning in February – they were no longer eligible sponsors, being neither UK or Irish citizens nor having indefinite leave to remain.However, after Anna’s case was highlighted by The Independent and raised by the charity Settled with senior Home Office figures, her parents were given sponsor checks and the toddler’s visa was finally approved on 18 June.“I’m feeling relieved it’s finally sorted and we can live a normal life – I’m very happy about it,” Anna’s mother Oleksandra told The Independent, after months of worry. But despite the U-turn in Anna’s case, the rules preventing other Ukrainians from sponsoring close family members still remain in place – prompting Oleksandra, Labour peer Lord Dubs and multiple frontline charities to urge Sir Keir Starmer’s new government to urgently reinstate their right to do so.Kate Smart, chief executive at Settled, said: “We are so pleased that Anna has now been granted a visa and that this family can now be reunited in safety. This follows Settled’s intervention with a senior Home Office contact, and our sharing this story in national media. “However, the unfortunate changes to Homes For Ukraine rules made in February still stand – so it’s likely that other families will still be prevented from sponsoring their children. Prior to February’s changes, Ukrainians with more than six months left on their visa could act as sponsors More

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the worldSign up to our free Morning Headlines emailLabour has promised to investigate the exploitation of migrant workers in the UK social care sector if elected to government. Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has said she would back calls by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) for a full investigation into the treatment of migrant workers who have been left trapped in the UK with tens of thousands of pounds of debt. Her comments come after a Guardian investigation found that Indian nationals were paying thousands of pounds to immigration agents to secure health care worker visas to the UK. On arrival in the UK almost all were told that they could not be provided with full-time employment, and many are now stuck in the country, unable to earn enough to pay off their debts. Some paid up to £20,000 to come to the UK to work in the social care sector, the investigation found. Some Indian care workers paid thousands of pounds to middlemen for jobs that did not materialise More

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the worldSign up to our free Morning Headlines emailLabour is pledging it will get working within months of election victory to build clean power that will “turn the page” on the cost-of-living crisis.Sir Keir Starmer will warn that “family financial security depends on energy security”, accusing the Tories of failing to make Britain resilient, as he launches the logo and website for Great British Energy at an event in Scotland with Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar.Labour’s pledge to set up a publicly owned company to invest in domestic power sources – part of the party’s six-point “first steps” policy – aims to tackle the cost-of-living crisis by cutting energy bills.Early investments by Great British Energy will include wind and solar projects across the UK, as well as making Scotland a world leader in new technologies such as floating offshore wind, hydrogen and CCS, Sir Keir is pledging.Labour plans to fund the company, which will be headquartered in Scotland, through a windfall tax on big oil and gas firms, with an initial £8.3 billion capitalisation over a parliament.The plan has been endorsed by former chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, who wrote in The Times: “The prize is huge, lower energy bills, good jobs, more innovative businesses, energy security and climate leadership.”“If we choose to go slowly, others will provide the answers and we will ultimately end up buying the solutions rather than selling them. Getting to a clean power system fast and with appropriate technologies is an investment, not simply a cost.“And being self-sufficient in energy will mean that our country is never again left so exposed by our dependency on an unstable international fossil fuel market.“This is a challenge that we should not shrink from and say it is too hard, but roll up our sleeves and give it everything we have got.”It comes in the wake of the energy price shock which saw costs soar in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Labour says that in the last two years a typical family paid £1,880 more on energy bills than they would have done if prices had stayed the same, while the government spent £94 billion of taxpayers’ money on capping energy costs.The party says the Office of Budget Responsibility has warned that if the UK remains dependent on gas, families and taxpayers could see a repeat of the recent crisis, and accused the Tories of leaving households at risk of a £900 annual energy price spike.Great British Energy will kickstart our mission for clean power to lower bills and boost our energy independence. Ed MilibandSir Keir said: ”Family financial security depends on energy security.“The pain and misery of the cost-of-living crisis was directly caused by the Tories’ failure to make Britain resilient, leaving us at the mercy of fossil fuel markets controlled by dictators like Putin.“It doesn’t have to be this way. Our clean power mission with Great British Energy will take back control of our destiny and invest in cheap, clean homegrown energy that we control.“We will turn the page on the cost-of-living crisis. The choice at this election is clear: higher bills and energy insecurity with the Conservatives, or lower bills and energy security with Labour.”Ed Miliband, shadow energy security and net zero secretary, said: “Great British Energy will kick-start our mission for clean power to lower bills and boost our energy independence.“It’s time to move on from the Tories’ bone-headed opposition to clean energy, for which British families are paying the price.“The choice at this General Election is clear: higher bills and energy insecurity with the Conservatives, or lower bills and energy independence with Labour.”Claire Coutinho, energy security and net zero secretary, accused Labour of an unfunded promise with its plans for Great British Energy, that would cost taxpayers, and attacked the party’s moves to stop new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, claiming it would hit jobs.“By sticking to the Conservatives’ clear plan, energy bills are at the lowest point since 2022, but we must go further.“That’s why we are taking bold action to guarantee the future of the energy price cap, as we back new nuclear power and offshore wind, keeping bills low and ensuring families are not lumbered with the cost of reaching net zero,” she said.The Green Party said Labour’s plans do not go far enough, and fail to address energy efficiency through home insulation and the electrification of home heating.Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said: “We need real change if we are to meet the demands of the climate crisis. These Labour plans do not deliver it.“Compared to Labour’s original commitment to spend £28 billion a year on green investment, this announcement of just £8.3 billion over the course of the parliament looks tiny and is nowhere near enough to deliver Labour’s promise of ‘clean electricity’.”Friends of the Earth’s head of policy, Mike Childs, said: “Labour’s pledge to develop the UK’s enormous homegrown renewable energy potential is great news that will help to power the transition to a green economy that we so urgently need.“But the party mustn’t rest on its laurels just because it has one strong green policy. We’re yet to hear how it intends to tackle the enormous carbon pollution created by transport and heating our homes, for example, which can be addressed by rolling out a nationwide programme of insulation, funding the switch to heat pumps, and delivering a true public transport renaissance.”He called on all parties to strengthen their green commitments.Alasdair Johnstone from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit said: “The UK has spent £100 billion on gas during the energy crisis of the last couple of years, placing a burden not only on bill payers but also tax payers as bills were subsidised.“With prices set to go up again in October, there will be a need to insulate from more gas price volatility. This means using less gas and more British renewables along with insulating homes so they leak less heat.“Recent polling showed that the public think that the best long-term solution to the energy crisis is to decrease dependence on gas and transition to renewable energy.”Max Wakefield, co-director of climate charity Possible, said: “Lifting the ban on onshore wind is one the quickest and best things an incoming government can do for the climate and our country.“It’s clean, it’s cheap, it’s popular and it will bring down bills as a homegrown renewable energy source.” More

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the worldSign up to our free Morning Headlines emailRishi Sunak has been dealt a huge blow after parliament’s most influential committee concluded that the Home Office “does not have a credible plan” for sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. The unanimous report by the Public Accounts Committee from a cross-party group of MPs with a Tory majority said it had “little confidence” in the Home Office’s ability to implement the Rwanda plan. The Rwanda deportation flights have long been Mr Sunak’s solution to “stopping the small boats” and ending the flow of asylum seekers to British shores. His early attempts to get flights off the ground to the East African nation had been thwarted by a Supreme Court ruling and he was forced to fight for months against a right-wing Tory rebellion and resistance in the Lords to get emergency legislation through to allow them to go ahead.The plan is a key plank in his attempt to see off the threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform Party of splitting the vote on the right in the general election. But Mr Sunak had already been damaged by having to admit that it would not be possible to send any flights before the election on 4 July.Rishi Sunak has made stopping the boats a key pledge More

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the worldSign up to our free Morning Headlines emailThe UK’s population grew by 685,000 people in 2023, a drop from record high net migration in 2022, official estimates show. The latest figures, published a day after Rishi Sunak called a surprise general election on July 4th, will feed the debate about immigration – a key campaign battleground. The Office for National Statistics said that it was too early to tell if the 10 per cent drop in net migration year-on-year was the start of a permanent trend, but pointed to signs that fewer people are applying to come to the UK on health care worker and student visas. Net migration to the UK hit a record 764,000 in 2022. Despite the provisional 2023 figures representing a 10 per cent drop year-on-year, they are still historically high.The 2023 figures mark the third year running that overall net migration has exceeded the pre-Brexit, pre-Covid levels of roughly 200,000 to 300,000. Migration experts at the University of Oxford said that the small drop from 2022 was fuelled by lower immigration on humanitarian visas, such as Ukrainians and Hong Kongers, and fewer non-EU students. Rishi Sunak has pledged to bring down net migration to the UK More

Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the worldSign up to our free Morning Headlines emailA Ukrainian refugee couple who fled to the UK have been refused permission for their two-year-old daughter to join them after the government suddenly changed its sponsorship rules, The Independent can reveal.Oleksandra and Yaroslav were offered shelter from Russia’s war under the Homes for Ukraine scheme in April 2022, leaving newborn Anna with her grandparents in Kyiv until they were settled in the UK with work and their own home.But after finally overcoming the hurdles of finding accommodation and setting up their own marketing business in the UK, the couple’s submission in April for the toddler to join them was refused by the Home Office, after rules for the schemes allowing Ukrainians to do so were tightened overnight in February.“Now it seems like it’s impossible to bring Anna,” Oleksandra told The Independent. “I was almost there – and I wasn’t expecting [the legislation] to change. I’m very sad and frustrated, I don’t know what to do and how to react. If I am not able to bring Anna, we will be forced to leave everything and go somewhere else. “I spent a lot of time building up the business, finding proper accommodation, and when we came here we didn’t have anything – our business in Ukraine was closed and we didn’t have any money. So it’s not a good situation.”Despite the Home Office insisting that the new rules do not prevent children joining their parents, charities warn the changes have created “unintended consequences” which could leave hundreds – if not thousands – of Ukrainians separated from their loved ones.The “deeply shocking” failure “betrays our commitment to Ukrainians”, warned Labour peer Lord Dubs, who himself arrived in the UK as a six-year-old fleeing the Nazis.“We pay lip service to how much we want to help Ukraine and the Ukrainians, then in practice we don’t do it,” he told The Independent. “The most fundamental thing is parents should be allowed to have their children with them – absolutely fundamental – and I think the government should be ashamed of itself.”The Refugee Council has also urged the government to amend its new policy More