Brighton and Hove City Council to raise council tax by 4.99%
Brighton & Hove City Council has voted to increase council tax by 4.99%, as members backed a budget totalling about £1.1bn for the 2025/26 financial year.The increase includes 2% ring-fenced for adult social care, the biggest single area of council spending.Precepts from the Sussex police and crime commissioner and East Sussex Fire Authority take the average band D council tax bill to £2,455, more than £200 a month up from the previous year.The Labour-run authority said it had managed to reduce its predicted budget deficit by £20m, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
Deputy leader Jacob Taylor said the council had forecast a £36m budget gap – the difference between how much it expected to spend and its revenues.But the government's autumn statement had reduced the hole in the budget to £16m.
The Green leader of the opposition, Steve Davis, described the budget as having "more cuts – but with a different coloured axe".Meanwhile, Conservative leader Alistair McNair criticised the national government for slowing economic growth and criticised the effects of increased national insurance contributions for hurting businesses, charities and schools.He also argued that money spent on equality, diversity and inclusion could be used to fund libraries threatened with closure or cuts to their opening hours.The Greens and Conservatives put forward a series of amendments to the budget, but they were voted down.
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Without a Badenoch/Farage pact, the Left will rule Scotland for decades to come
Did Zia Yusuf's dramatic (and as it turns out, temporary) resignation on the day of the Hamilton by-election cost Reform the seat? Of course not. The idea that chaos in Reform puts off its voters is based on a misunderstanding of what motivates those voters. Reform exists because the older parties failed. You might argue that not all of that failure was their fault. Some of the issues that enrage the electorate – poor public services, high taxes, rising prices, dwindling social capital – are the products of a lockdown that 93 per cent of the country demanded. Others are products of our demographic decline: nations with elderly populations are bound to be less dynamic. Equally, though, there have been unforced errors and broken promises, above all on immigration. Reform is a howl of protest against those betrayals. It is an essentially negative vote, and I say that in no slighting spirit. Every party attracts negative votes. I used to get lots of them as a Conservative MEP when people wanted to punish Labour governments. Negative votes can take you, Trump-like, to the very top. I simply make the point that Reform's supporters show scant interest in their party's policies, let alone its personnel. Reform came from nowhere in the Hamilton by-election despite not having a leader in Scotland. It is hard to imagine the famously resilient electors of Lanarkshire determining their vote on the basis of an unelected party official resigning in London. If we want to play 'what if', the thing that might have given Reform the extra 1,471 votes it needed was the backing of the local Conservatives. Not every Tory would vote for Reform in the absence of a Conservative candidate, of course. Still, the electoral system used for Holyrood argues strongly for a deal at next year's Scottish Parliament election. Just as the SNP and the Scottish Greens used to maximise their representation by focusing respectively on the constituencies and the top-up list, so Reform and the Tories should do the same in 11 months' time. In Scotland, as in England and Wales, the parties have similar policies but different electorates. The Scottish Conservatives are strong in the Borders and the north-east, Reform in the more populous Central Belt. An understanding between them would leave both with more MSPs next May. Such a deal in Wales might have put Reform into office had the principality not just ditched that voting system and adopted EU-style proportional representation, but that's another story. How many Tory and Reform voters would co-operate? Although the two manifestos are compatible – lower taxes, strong defence, less wokery, secure borders, growth over greenery – tonal and aesthetic differences remain. Some Reform supporters will never vote Conservative, either because they can't forgive the tax rises and immigration failures of the last administration or, conversely, because they are former Labour voters who would never back the party of Margaret Thatcher. Some Conservatives – a smaller number – recoil from a party they see as a Trumpian personality cult. One way to express the difference is this. The Tories, after three and a half centuries, have a sense of the trade-offs and complexities involved in holding office. Reform is in the happy position of being able to claim that it is simply a question of willpower. Consider the issue of immigration. On Friday, Kemi Badenoch embarked on a major overhaul of the Blairite juridical state. She asked her shadow law officers to look at all treaties and domestic laws that hinder elected ministers from fulfilling their promises, and set five tests by which to measure success. Will we be able to deport people who should not be here, protect our veterans from 'lawfare', prioritise British citizens in housing and welfare, keep malefactors in prison, and get things built? Meeting all five tests is hard, but not impossible. Badenoch wants to take her time and get it right. But, to some, it will come across as equivocation. 'Why can't you just say now that you would leave the European Convention on Human Rights?', they ask. I have no doubt that that is where she will end up. But we need policies, not slogans. Leaving the ECHR is not a skeleton key that unlocks every door. Our problems go far deeper. Outside the ECHR, we would be constrained by numerous other international accords: the UN Refugee Convention; the Paris Agreement on climate change (under which our Australia Free Trade Agreement is being challenged in court); the Aarhus Convention, which caps costs for activist groups bringing eco-challenges. Even the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has been used both to challenge deportation orders and to block welfare reforms. All these things need to be looked at, calmly and thoroughly. Nor is it just foreign treaties. The last Labour government passed a series of domestic statutes that constrained its successors: the Human Rights Act, the Climate Change Act, the Equality Act and a dozen more. We need to tackle these, too. What, if anything, should replace the ECHR? Do we update our own 1689 Bill of Rights? Do we offer a CANZUK version? Do we rely on pure majoritarianism? Even if all the obnoxious laws were swept away, what would we do about Left-wing activists who become judges rather than go to the bother of getting themselves elected to anything, and who legislate from the bench? Can we return to the pre-Blair arrangements where the lord chancellor is in charge? My point is that all this requires patience, detail and nuance. But a lot of voters are understandably impatient, and regard nuance as the sign of a havering milksop – a nuancy-boy, so to speak. They see not a Conservative Party determined to repair the broken state machine so that it can deliver on its manifesto, but a bunch of vacillating wets shying away from simple solutions. This worries me. Suppose that Nigel Farage were to form the next government and leave the ECHR, only to find that illegal immigrants continued to arrive, that judges continued to apply the rules asymmetrically, and that every one of his statutes ended up being snarled up in the courts? What would be the impact on our democracy? I pick the example of immigration because it is the most salient, but much the same applies across government. Reducing spending involves trade-offs, and anyone who pretends that there are huge savings to be made by scrapping DEI programmes or cutting waste has not looked at the figures. The same is true of reducing welfare claims, scrapping quangos, reforming the NHS and raising school standards. The diagnosis may be easy, but the treatment will be long and difficult, and will require more than willpower. In his response to Yusuf's resignation, Farage reminded us why he is a successful politician. He blamed Islamophobic trolls for making his party chairman's life impossible, thereby both anticipating the 'no one can work with Nigel' charge and reinforcing his non-racist credentials. The same calculation led him to condemn Tommy Robinson, and played a part in his falling-out with Rupert Lowe. Farage knows that there are hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised Muslims, many of whom, like his white supporters, are former Labour voters in decaying northern towns. Unnoticed by the national media, Farage has been reaching out to these communities. Imagine Farage's political nous and personal energy allied to the detailed policy work that the Tories are undertaking. Imagine his reach, whether in Hamilton or in some of those Muslim-dominated old industrial towns, complementing the traditional Conservative appeal to property-owners. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. Next year's Scottish elections will be the first test of whether figures on the British Right are prepared to put country before party. A possible by-election in Jacob Rees-Mogg's old seat may be another. But one thing is already clear. If the two parties are taking lumps out of each other all the way to the next general election, they will lose – and they will deserve to.
Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
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MPs could vote to force government to build 150,000 social homes a year
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The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
NHS to get £30bn boost over three years at expense of other services
The NHS is set to receive a £30bn funding boost in the spending review next week, at the expense of other public services. The Department of Health is expected to emerge as the biggest winner on Wednesday with a 2.8% increase to its day-to-day spending budget over a three-year period, amounting to a £30bn rise by 2028. This amounts to a £17bn real-terms increase according to the Times, which first reported the figure. The cash injection will come at the expense of other public services such as policing and local councils, which are facing real-terms cuts in the spending review. Ministers are planning to put the increase in health spending, as well as plans for over £100bn in capital investment, at the centre of their pitch to the public this week. Keir Starmer has pledged that by the next election, 92% of patients in England waiting for planned treatment will be seen within 18 weeks of being referred. NHS data suggests about 60% of people are currently seen within this time. NHS figures released last month showed the overall number of patients on waiting lists had risen slightly from 6.24 million to 6.25 million. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has acknowledged that she had been forced to rebuff requests for funding from some departments because of the tight economic situation. She has insisted the blame lies with Conservatives and has declined to reassess her self-imposed rules on borrowing and spending. Speaking in Manchester this week, the chancellor said despite a £190bn increase in funding over the spending review period 'not every department will get everything that they want next week and I have had to say no to things that I want to do too'. The Foreign Office and Department for Culture, Media and Sport are thought to be facing some of the deepest cuts. Economists have warned that the chancellor faces 'unavoidably' tough choices when she sets out the departmental spending plans. The Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank has said defence and the NHS will dominate on 11 June. The Home Office has been lobbying heavily for more funding, with Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, warning that cuts threaten progress towards two of the prime minister's 'missions' — halving knife crime and halving violence against women and girls. Police chiefs including Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan police service, warned Starmer directly in a letter this week that they would face 'stark choices' about which crimes they investigate if the Treasury pushes ahead with cuts. One of the areas in which the Home Office has sought to cut spending is on hotels to temporarily house asylum seekers in the UK. But according to figures published on Saturday, the department plans to spend about £2.2bn of foreign aid to support asylum seekers this financial year. This is only marginally less than the £2.3bn spent in 2024-2025. Asylum seekers and their families are housed in temporary accommodation if they are waiting for the outcome of a claim or an appeal and have been assessed as not being able to support themselves independently. International rules allow countries to count first-year costs of supporting refugees as overseas development assistance. A total of 32,345 asylum seekers were being housed temporarily in UK hotels at the end of March this year, down 15% from the end of December. The Home Office said it was 'urgently taking action to restore order and reduce costs', which would cut the amount spent to support asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.
