Watch live: Rachel Reeves delivers spending review as chancellor pledges to make working people ‘better off'
Watch live: Rachel Reeves delivers her much-anticipated spending review on Wednesday (11 June) as the chancellor pledges to make working people 'better off'.
The spending review comes after the government announced a massive expansion of who will receive winter fuel payments in a major U-turn following months of backlash.
After weeks of speculation over what the changes would look like, it has now been confirmed that 9 million pensions will be eligible for the payment - a huge uplift from the 1.5 million pensioners who received the payment in winter 2024-25.
The chancellor will stand in the Commons to deliver the government's spending review.
Some of the announcements have already been made over the last few weeks, but they will now be formally presented to parliament.
Reeves is expected to announce:
A £30 billion increase in NHS funding, a rise of around 2.8 per cent in real terms.
An extra £4.5 billion for schools.
A rise in defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP.
£39 billion for social and affordable housing over the next decade as the Government aims to meet its target of building 1.5 million new homes by the next election.
£15.6 billion of spending on public transport in England's city regions
£16.7 billion for nuclear power projects, the bulk of which will fund the new Sizewell C plant in Suffolk.
An extension of the £3 bus fare cap until March 2027.
An extra £445 million for upgrading Welsh railways.
The Government has also promised £750 million for a new supercomputer – the UK's most powerful – in Edinburgh.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News
an hour ago
- Sky News
PR-savvy and now finally a knight - Beckham always knew how to turn on the charm
A sporting icon courted by prime ministers past and present, newly knighted Sir David Beckham is renowned for being extremely media savvy. Never more so than when I interviewed him for Sky News at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, after he took part in the closing ceremony having played a key role in London's winning bid to host the 2012 Games. Speaking about Sir Alex Ferguson in the interview, canny Sir Becks heaped praise on his old boss in our interview. But he'd been less complimentary about his old boss in a conversation with prime minister Gordon Brown, I later learned. I'd travelled to Beijing with Mr Brown, via Afghanistan, and we spent the final evening of the Games at the handover party, when Boris Johnson - then London mayor - famously spoke in his speech about "wiff waff" (table tennis) coming home. During his Beijing visit, Mr Brown had been promoting the idea of a Great Britain football team competing at the 2012 Games and there was speculation about Sir Alex being the team's coach. "Aah, Sir Alex," Becks said wistfully and apparently affectionately when I asked him about being re-united with his former Manchester United manager during the interview. "Like a father to me." Later, on the flight home to the UK, when I told Gordon Brown about the interview, the prime minister laughed. "That's funny," he said. "Why?" I asked him. Beckham played for Fergie at Manchester United from 1995 until 2003, when he joined Real Madrid amid claims that Ferguson disapproved of the player's showbiz lifestyle. By 2008 he was playing for LA Galaxy in the US. But despite his canny, PR-savvy answers in my interview, I saw him work the room that night in Beijing and glad-hand relentlessly. He gave every interview asked of him and turned on the charm on behalf of UK PLC to everyone present. For politicians and prime ministers, sportsmen and women like Beckham are pure gold. David Cameron was also a fan and was photographed sitting alongside Becks at the London Games. When "Goldenballs", as wife Victoria called him, retired from football a year later, a No 10 spokesman gushed: "The prime minister's view is that David Beckham has been an outstanding footballer throughout his career. "But not only that, he has been a brilliant ambassador for this country, not least if we remember all the work he did on helping us win London 2012." There was indeed a Great Britain men's football team at the Olympics, but it was coached by former England legend Stuart Pearce, not Sir Alex. And Pearce, nicknamed "psycho" for his aggressive style on the pitch, didn't pick Becks either, though he claimed he'd faced pressure from Downing Street to include him. Then in 2017, David Cameron's former spin doctor Craig Oliver claimed a senior Tory cabinet minister - thought to have been George Osborne - suggested giving Becks a peerage and appointing him sports minister in a 2013 cabinet reshuffle. That never happened either, obviously, though at least now David Beckham is also a knight - just like his "father figure" Sir Alex.
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
How Trump's Africa strategy may become a double-edged sword
With US President Donald Trump on a cost-cutting warpath since starting his second term, aid to Africa has been slashed and now defence spending is in his sights - but could these approaches cost more in the long run?The phrase his administration presses on Europe to assume more of the costs of its own defence is "burden sharing". This is the challenge that Washington is now throwing down to African armies too - and they are far less comfortably resourced to take it having paid dearly in lives and money, in the struggle to hold back the spreading reach of jihadist armed groups across the Sahel, the Lake Chad basin and Somalia over recent years, they could be forgiven for feeling that they already carry much of the burden - and for the sake not just of their own continent but the wider international community which has lost more than 80 soldiers in jihadist attacks since the start of the year, is just one example. "The epicentre of terrorism on the globe" is how the Sahel was described a few days ago by Gen Michael Langley, who as head of US Africa Command (Africom) oversees the American military presence south of the briefings and interviews over the past few weeks, he has graphically outlined the threat that jihadist groups will present if their push southward towards the Gulf of Guinea succeeds."One of the terrorists' new objectives is gaining access to West African coasts. If they secure access to the coastline, they can finance their operations through smuggling, human trafficking and arms trading. This not only puts African nations at risk but also raises the chance of threats reaching US shores."Gen Langley has admitted that the current upsurge in militant attacks is "deeply concerning".Yet he has also repeatedly hammered home a core message: the US is minded to rein back its own sub-Saharan military operations, leaving local armies to take on more of the defence 6,500 personnel are currently deployed in Africa by the US military and a 2019 list published by Africom mentioned 13 "enduring" American bases across the continent and a further 17 more temporary some of these installations, including the purpose-built drone base at Agadez in Niger, have already been shut down, in particular after military juntas seized power in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso since it now looks as if the once-ambitious American operational footprint will be pruned back quite a lot we will see more air power deployed from offshore to hit militant targets - Gen Langley says there have been 25 strikes in Somalia this year, double the 2024 total - but a much thinner permanent on-the-ground military presence."Some things that we used to do, we may not do anymore," he recently told a conference in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, that brought together chiefs of defence staff and other senior officers from 37 countries."Our aim is not to serve as a permanent crutch, but to achieve US security objectives that overlap with our partners. We should be able to help African nations build the self-reliance they need to independently confront terrorism and insurgencies."In the bluntness of his language Gen Langley reflects the stark change of outlook and policy that has come from January's change of power at the White House."We have set our priorities now - protecting the homeland."What matters to the no-longer-so-new Trump II administration, the general made clear in a Pentagon publication last week, is fighting terrorists - particularly those who might attack the priorities are countering the spread of Chinese military influence across Africa and protecting freedom of maritime navigation through key trade choke points such as the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and the Bab el-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea. In some respects, the focus on training and capacity building that Gen Langley now expounds is not so very different from the approach of previous American administrations, Republican as well as lauds the National Guard State Partnership Program, through which individual US states have been helping to build the capacity of government security forces across Africa and other parts of the world - for the past three too is pursuing this approach, with the closure of bases in Chad and Senegal, while those in Ivory Coast and Gabon have been handed over to their governments, with only small French training teams left behind to work alongside African in other respects, the Trump administration's Africa strategy represents a drastic shrinkage in outlook and - critics might argue - a conscious retreat from addressing the factors that drive instability, conflict and terrorism, particularly in the Sahel, which is among the poorest regions on the under President Joe Biden the US looked far beyond the military realm alone in its efforts to counter the both the growing reach of jihadist groups and other sources of violence. And Gen Langley, as Africom chief, was an articulate exponent of this much broader last year, in an interview with the Associated Press news agency, he outlined what he described as a "whole of government" response to the proliferation of conflict, stressing the importance of good governance and action to tackle the fragilities of African states and the impacts of desertification, crop failure and environmental approach openly recognised that recruitment by armed groups and the spread of violence is fuelled not only by jihadist ideology, but also by a host of social and economic factors, including the stresses now afflicting farming and pastoralist Langley himself does not seem to have abandoned this analysis, recently noting how Ivory Coast had countered the jihadist threat to its northern border areas by complementing security force deployments with development could equally have pointed to the success of a similar approach pursued by the president of Niger, Mohamed Bazoum, before he was deposed in the July 2023 coup. But of course, these days Africom must operate within the context of a US foreign policy radically reshaped under are even rumours that it could be downgraded to become a subsidiary of the US command in Europe and Gen Langley suggests African governments should tell Washington what they thought of this the separate Africa unit at the radically slimmed down National Security Council at the White House is reportedly being wound up and integrated into the Middle East-North Africa director, Gen Jami Shawley, an Africa specialist appointed to the role only in March, has now been assigned to more general strategic Congress this week, Gen Langley warned about China's and Russia's African ambitions: Beijing's agility at capitalising on the US's absence and Moscow's ability to seize military opportunities created by chaos and these concerns, some might wonder if the general is discreetly signally his doubts about a slimmed down Africa under the "efficiency drive" led, until recently, by tech billionaire Elon Musk, the American government's main international development agencies, USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, have been effectively shut spine of the new US economic engagement with Africa is now private sector trade and business generally needs to operate in a stable and secure context - which Africa's most fragile and violence-prone regions cannot in winding up the American development agencies, the Trump administration has stepped aside from funding the rural projects and social programmes that sought to address land and water pressures and lack of economic opportunity, the key drivers of conflict - and the jihadist groups' recruitment of frustrated rural young the fragile regions that are the main sources of jihadist violence the US response is reduced to the purely military, and now it is seeking to shift even most of that on to the shoulders of African states that already struggle to respond adequately to a plethora of challenges and Melly is a consulting fellow with the Africa Programme at Chatham House in London. You may also be interested in: The region with more 'terror deaths' than rest of world combinedFreed captive tells BBC of life in West African jihadist baseWhy Trump is on the warpath in Somalia'My wife fears sex, I fear death' - impacts of the USAID freezeTrump's tariffs could be death knell for US-Africa trade pact Go to for more news from the African us on Twitter @BBCAfrica, on Facebook at BBC Africa or on Instagram at bbcafrica
South Wales Argus
an hour ago
- South Wales Argus
Senedd hears incoming NRW chair embroiled in rail funding row
Nilesh Sachdev, the Welsh Government's preferred candidate to take the helm at Natural Resources Wales (NRW), appeared before the Senedd's climate committee on June 11. On his CV, Mr Sachdev boasts of securing £6bn of UK Government investment as chair of East West Rail (ERW) which is leading on a new railway between Oxford and Cambridge. The railway was controversially reclassified as a Wales-and-England project by the UK Treasury, denying Wales any consequential funding through the Barnett formula. Llŷr Gruffydd, who chairs the committee, asked: 'I was just wondering whether you have any qualms about… how does it look that potentially the chair of one of the biggest public bodies in Wales is actually spending Welsh money on England-only projects?' During the pre-appointment hearing, Mr Sachdev replied: 'A very fair and reasonable ask, I guess, I think I'll turn it around the other way: what a great opportunity. 'I managed to persuade, through my board and chief executive, to get the government in England to give all that money to East West Rail, I wonder what we could do here. 'So, I think there's an opportunity of saying: how can we, in Wales, put a case forward that makes sure the money that Welsh taxpayers are paying stays here?' Mr Gruffydd pressed concerns about his involvement with ERW, saying: 'I know you don't decide where the money comes from – but you're the guy signing the cheques.' Asked about his motivation for wanting to be chair of NRW, Mr Sachdev pointed to his passion on climate change and a recent move to Bristol. 'In fact, it's quicker to get here than it would be from Abergavenny in the traffic,' he said. He told the committee: 'I want to play a part in a community I dearly respect and have an affection for in an area I deeply care about.' Pressed about his local links, the father of three confirmed he has never lived in Wales but said his wife's grandparents were born in Gower and his son attended Cardiff University."
