
Broadway House flats in Bradford approved despite 'flood risk'
The agency told the Local Democracy Reporting Service the building's location meant there was a "high risk of flooding". "We recommend that planning permission is refused on this basis."We continue to urge planning authorities to follow national guidance to reduce flood risk and protect communities."When asked why the flats were approved despite the objection, a Bradford Council spokesperson said a flood risk assessment (FRA) had found the proposal "does not introduce unacceptable flood risks".They added: "The upper-floor location of the residential units significantly reduces vulnerability, and the development does not increase flood risk to the site or wider area."The FRA also sets out a number of flood risk mitigation measures that are to be implemented in order to ensure the impacts of any potential flooding are minimised. "Given these considerations, the proposal can be deemed acceptable in terms of flood risk."
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The Sun
31 minutes ago
- The Sun
Aldi's selling handy Specialbuy DIY tool that's £15 cheaper than Black & Decker version
BARGAIN hunters can bag a must-have DIY tool at Aldi this week for nearly half the price of a leading brand. The Aldi gadget promises to make fiddly home improvement jobs a breeze. 2 The discounter has launched a pivot handle screwdriver as part of this week's Specialbuys, priced at just £12.99, while a similar Black & Decker version costs £24.99 on Amazon. It's powered by a 4V rechargeable lithium-ion battery and has a soft-grip handle that twists 180 degrees, making it easier to get into awkward corners that standard screwdrivers can't reach. It also comes with a forward and reverse function, six torque settings, LED working light, USB-C charging, and a built-in safety cut-off to stop overheating. With a three-hour charge time and automatic spindle lock, it's designed to be both practical and durable. The Black & Decker cordless rapid screwdriver, while boasting a slightly higher torque, comes with a smaller 3.6V battery and retails for almost double the price. Both models offer similar speeds and features, meaning Aldi's cut-price tool is a clear winner for shoppers wanting value without compromising too much on performance. This isn't the first time Aldi has gone head-to-head with big-name brands in its Specialbuys range. garden furniture to hot tubs and branded tool dupes. But there's a catch. Once Specialbuys sell out, they're rarely restocked and with prices undercutting rivals by as much as 50%, popular items can disappear fast. Shoppers have even discovered 'secret codes' on Aldi's digital price labels to tell when items are about to vanish for good. Have you seen this secret code in Aldi? Savvy bargain hunter Jordon Cox, known as the Coupon Kid, recently revealed that a capital 'D' in the corner of a price tag means a product is being discontinued. Once gone, it won't return, so fans need to grab it while they can. Upcoming Specialbuys are advertised in Aldi's in-store booklets and on its website, with Thursdays and Sundays being the key days for new stock. The supermarket says mornings between 8am and 10am are the quietest time to shop, while late afternoons and evenings are also good for dodging queues. Arriving early on those days gives bargain hunters the best chance of nabbing the most sought-after deals. Aldi opening stores Unlike many retailers, Aldi is planning to open more sites. The brand has earmarked 11 areas for new stores. Jonathan Neale, managing director of national real estate at Aldi, said: "We're now opening an average of one new store a week for the rest of 2025, showing just how ambitious our plans are to build a store network that will help us reach millions of new customers." This is the full list of 11 new stores confirmed as opening: Airfields, Welsh Road, Deeside Rockingham Road, Market Harborough, Leicestershire Fulham Broadway, London Pacific Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex Mafon Road, Nelson, Treharris Ashford, Waterbrook, Kent Commercial Street, Shoreditch, London Philadelphia Lane, Houghton le Spring, Tyne and Wear Mill Road, Meadowfield, Durham Pendle Drive, Litherland, Liverpool Ringwood Road, Brimington, Chesterfield


Telegraph
31 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Castore kit blunder leaves England short of replicas for Women's Rugby World Cup
England's switch to kits made by Castore was announced in April, ending a previous agreement with Umbro three years early. The first shirt was unveiled in May. The long-term deal is thought to be worth in excess of £5m a season and represents a healthy increase on the rate paid by Umbro. The World Cup, for which England are hosts and hot favourites, is the first significant showcase for the new shirt. John Mitchell's side kick off the tournament against the United States at Sunderland's Stadium of Light on Friday. As well as the online store, many sports and leisure shops up and down the country are unable to sell the official tournament shirt. 'We can confirm that official England Rugby World Cup shirts are now in short supply, as fans continue to show their amazing support for the Red Roses. Online stores are now sold out, but stock will be available at England game match venues,' Castore said in a statement. 'There is a wide range of other Red Roses products available for fans to buy, including official Rugby World Cup branded merchandise, with additional products to be launched in the coming weeks. This is all available on the England Rugby store online. We're confident that Red Roses fans will have plenty of product to purchase and we thank supporters for their amazing support.' The Daily Mail reports a small number of official shirts will be on sale at the Stadium of Light and other England tournament match venues. But they are expected to sell out quickly. This Women's World Cup is set to be the biggest yet, with nearly 500,000 tickets sold. World Cup rules state teams are not allowed to showcase brand deals on their kits. However, the Castore shortfall of World Cup shirts means organiser World Rugby has allowed the RFU to sell its regular women's jerseys, with O2 on the front, at match venues.


Times
31 minutes ago
- Times
Rising food prices mean hefty obesity costs
Stung by the price of olive oil? Burnt by the cost of your coffee? You are not alone. The cost of food and drink is increasing fast, faster than prices in general. This is a bigger problem, politically, socially and economically, than any politician has yet noticed. The government in particular should be paying attention to food bills, and taking action. The Office for National Statistics this week put the annual inflation rate at 3.8 per cent, but also showed that food and drink prices are rising at 4.9 per cent. The average household spends a bit more than £5,000 annually on food, so those numbers add up to about £250 a year. ONS tracking of public opinion shows that the cost of living remains the number one concern for the public, with more than 90 per cent of people citing rising food bills as a reason — well above the share who cite energy bills as an inflationary worry. Being reminded that things are getting more expensive — meaning that you feel poorer — every time you fill your shopping basket is not a happy experience. Food prices rising faster than the cost of other purchases has been a dismally common feature of the UK economy since 2022, for several reasons: war in Ukraine; too much rain; not enough rain; higher energy costs; not enough migrant workers to pick fruit and veg; higher taxes. The public's daily dismay at food prices, I'd bet, is a bigger reason for Britain feeling generally dissatisfied than noisier issues like immigration or crime. Yet it gets curiously little political attention, given how much it matters to voters' lives and outlook. Labour's spin team should give more thought to finding someone else to blame for rising food bills, not least because the problem is going to get worse. The Bank of England reckons food inflation will hit 5.5 per cent by the end of the year, while the British Retail Consortium says 6 per cent. Get ready for a winter of headlines about the painful cost of your Christmas lunch. Looking further ahead, the problem is even worse, reaching beyond simple political unease into questions of fairness, public health and economic performance. Rising food prices affect some groups more than others, with the poorest facing both the greatest financial pain but also the worst long-term consequences. The worst of these is rising obesity levels. Perhaps that will surprise some readers. How do rising food prices make poor people fat? Surely if it's getting harder to buy food, people will eat less of it and get thinner? In fact, a wealth of evidence shows that when low-income households face rising food prices, they trade quality for quantity, buying more cheap foods that are high in calories but low in nutrients. Social scientists grandly call this the 'food insecurity obesity paradox' but it's arguably just the human version of a common animal instinct to put on fat when times are tough and a hard winter is coming. • From peanuts to pomegranates — the 19 foods that will keep you young Almost a third of UK adults are obese, with rates highest among the poorest. There are many links between obesity and poverty but raw economics is a significant factor. According to the Food Foundation, a campaigning charity founded by former Tory MP Laura Sandys, recent years of inflation have made it almost impossible for poorer people to eat healthily. The foundation reckons that the poorest households would need to spend almost half of their disposable income on food to afford a healthy diet high in fruit and veg with limited sugars and fats. For poor parents, a healthy grocery shop could cost 70 per cent of disposable income. Healthier foods are just more expensive per calorie than stuff that's full of sugar and fat. Government calculations show that cauliflower and broccoli might cost almost 2p per calorie; for cheap biscuits it's less than half as much. Obesity means more sickness — diabetes and heart disease, in particular — and shorter lives. It means misery for individuals and mounting costs to taxpayers. My back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that just a one percentage point increase in the obesity rate (roughly 550,000 more people getting too fat) costs the state more than £3 billion over ten years in higher NHS and care costs. We must make good food cheaper for poorer people, but that's far easier said than done. Continuing education to overcome ignorance about nutrition helps but new ideas are needed. What about Nutrition Impact Bonds? Building on NHS 'social prescribing' models, public and private investors could pay upfront for subsidised or even free healthy food for poorer households, then be paid back from the savings the state makes from lower obesity spending. The causes of higher food prices are big, complicated and long-term. Likewise the public health challenge of obesity and poor diets. It follows that fixing them will be a long-term project, the sort of job that no government, especially an unpopular one worrying about its next election, rushes to tackle. • Eating home-cooked food 'helps you lose twice as much weight' But Labour should lift food prices and obesity up its agenda, because they interact with the government's emerging economic focus. Ministers are planning an autumn drive on productivity, correctly identifying Britain's basic economic effectiveness — how much stuff do we generate from each hour of work we do? — as a national priority. Helping business to finance and deploy technology and training to make workers more effective is a key part of productivity, but so too is ensuring the availability of a healthy workforce. And our fatter, sicker population is emerging as a drag on productivity, as more and more people go off sick or leave work outright. Last month a paper by Nesta, a think tank, and Frontier Economics put the cost of productivity lost to obesity at £31 billion a year. The study shows that obesity doesn't just drag on the economy by taking people out of the workforce through sickness. Boldly, it says that obese people just aren't as effective at work as healthy colleagues and cost the economy almost £10 billion a year, it estimates. The government rightly wants to increase productivity but the fact is that Britain is simply too fat and ill to be fully productive. And in large part that's because of bad and increasingly expensive diets. Sadly, the cost of food is even higher than you think. James Kirkup is a senior fellow of the Social Market Foundation