How Labour ended up taking on the Boriswave
Sir Keir Starmer, remarkably, has launched an immigration crackdown. Britain risks becoming an 'island of strangers' after the Tory 'one-nation experiment in open borders', he said on Monday. A Home Office white paper has introduced several measures which will supposedly bring the sky-high numbers down.
Most interestingly, the government will extend the required qualification period for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) – which grants migrants access to the welfare state and the ability to bring dependents – from five years residency in the UK to ten. On Wednesday it confirmed that this would apply retroactively. Which means that should this go through – there will be a public consultation – it can be expected to prevent the post-2021 migration surge known as the 'Boriswave' from automatically being granted permanent settlement in the next few years.
This is a hugely welcome and sensible move: if the Boriswave was a mistake, as it is widely agreed to be, there is no reason we should let it become permanent.
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Western Telegraph
21 minutes ago
- Western Telegraph
Winter Fuel Payments details of who is eligible confirmed
The payment, worth up to £300, will return for millions this winter, the Chancellor has announced. To be eligible for the winter fuel allowance, a person will need to have reached state pension age by the week starting September 15 this year. Devolved authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland will each receive a funding uplift so they too can meet the new threshold. Payments will be restored to the vast majority of pensioners who previously received it because anyone with an income of under £35,000 a year will now get the payment automatically Those with an income above this threshold will also receive the payment, but it will then be reclaimed from them in tax. Pensioners who do not want to receive the payment will be able to opt out, according to the Treasury. The decision to limit the winter fuel payment to only those who claimed pension credit was one of Labour's first acts in Government, aimed at balancing what was described as a £22 billion 'black hole' in the public finances. This meant the number of pensioners receiving the payment was reduced by around 10 million, from 11.4 million to 1.5 million. But Sir Keir Starmer announced there would be a partial U-turn on the policy in May, after it was thought to have contributed to Labour's drubbing in the local elections. The Treasury claims the new arrangement will cost £1.25 billion in England and Wales, while means-testing winter fuel will save the taxpayer £450 million. Chancellor Rachel Reeves said: 'Targeting winter fuel payments was a tough decision but the right decision because of the inheritance we had been left by the previous government. 'It is also right that we continue to means test this payment so that it is targeted and fair, rather than restoring eligibility to everyone including the wealthiest. 'But we have now acted to expand the eligibility of the winter fuel payment so no pensioner on a lower income will miss out. NEWS. Winter Fuel Payment to be reinstated for all State Pensioners this winter, but then clawed back via tax system for all who earn over £35,000 (roughly average earnings). This is a big improvement. Full instant analysis video coming with all the details in a minute.… — Martin Lewis (@MartinSLewis) June 9, 2025 'This will mean over three-quarters of pensioners receiving the payment in England and Wales later this winter.' Some two million pensioners who earn more than £35,000 will see their winter fuel payments clawed back via the taxman, the Treasury estimates. Kemi Badenoch, Leader of the Opposition, claimed the Prime Minister had 'scrambled to clear up a mess of his own making'. The Conservative leader added: 'I repeatedly challenged him to reverse his callous decision to withdraw winter fuel payments, and every time Starmer arrogantly dismissed my criticisms. hr /> Recommended reading: What is the energy price cap and does it need a smart meter? 'This humiliating U-turn will come as scant comfort to the pensioners forced to choose between heating and eating last winter. The Prime Minister should now apologise for his terrible judgment.' Liberal Democrat Leader Sir Ed Davey said: 'Finally the Chancellor has listened to the Liberal Democrats and the tireless campaigners in realising how disastrous this policy was, but the misery it has caused cannot be overstated. 'Countless pensioners were forced to choose between heating and eating all whilst the Government buried its head in the sand for months on end, ignoring those who were really suffering. 'We will now study the detail of this proposal closely to make sure those who need support actually get that support. The pain they went through this winter cannot be for nothing.'
Times
21 minutes ago
- Times
What will be in the spending review? The winners and losers
The spending review is make-or-break time for Rachel Reeves. The chancellor's first year in office has been challenging — imposing unpopular tax rises and cutting winter fuel payments for millions of pensions, which she has subsequently been forced to reverse. Reeves sees the spending review as a chance to stamp her authority and present voters with a clearer narrative about the purpose of this government. She will say that the government will invest to renew Britain, focusing on three central pillars: security, health and the economy. Growth will be the order of the day. There will be clear winners — the NHS and the Ministry of Defence will be at the front of the pack — and Reeves will have £113 billion to invest in infrastructure and other capital projects. But there will also be clear losers. The Home Office was the last to settle and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is unhappy with her settlement. There are also suggestions of significant cuts to Angela Rayner's Ministry of Housing, Community and Local Government. The NHS will be the biggest overall winner in the spending review, receiving a £30 billion rise in its day-to-day spending budget, making up about 60 per cent of the cash increase in the chancellor's overall day-to-day spending envelope, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. But health service managers are still warning it will not be enough to meet the government's ambition for reducing waiting time targets. In fact, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, initially asked for a real-terms 4 per cent rise in his budget but had to settle for a 2.8 per cent rise. There are also concerns in the department that although day-to-day spending will rise, infrastructure budgets will remain flat in real terms. NHS managers have long warned that it is hard to improve productivity in the health service when staff have to work in buildings that are not fit for purpose and with outdated IT infrastructure. Reeves has concluded she wants to target infrastructure spending in other areas, such as transport and net zero, where the government is more likely to get an economic return on its investment. The agreement is also complicated by the need for the NHS to pay more for medicines amid pressure from President Trump and to boost Britain's life sciences industry. The Treasury has refused to allocate extra funds, insisting that the department find the additional cash within existing budgets. The other big winner from Wednesday's announcement will be the armed forces, which will see their budgets increase to hit the government target of spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2027. The increase will be funded by cuts to international aid and will leave defence spending about £6.4 billion higher than if it had remained at the existing level. • Increase defence spending or learn Russian, Nato chief warns UK A key decision Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer will have to make on Wednesday is whether to go beyond this and increase spending still further towards the end of the decade to meet the prime minister's aspiration of hitting 3 per cent of GDP in the next parliament, 'as economic and fiscal conditions allow'. The announcement comes before a meeting of Nato leaders this month, which is expected to agree to Trump's demand of increasing core defence spending to 3.5 per cent, accompanied by a further 1.5 per cent on defence-related infrastructure. No date has yet been set for when Nato members will have to meet this pledge. Ministers have already announced that schools will receive an extra £4.5 billion a year in core funding by 2029, in part to pay for reforms under which more children with special educational needs will be taught in mainstream schools. The rise includes spending pledges that have already been made, including the cost of expanding free school meals for all pupils whose families claim universal credit and the £615 million allocated to schools to fund the new pay settlement for teachers. But while this extra money may sound generous on paper, in practice schools will receive £1.5 billion each year up until 2028-29, when the cumulative increase reaches £4.5 billion compared with this year. Boiled down, this means the spending rise for education in this review totals a real-term lift of 0.4 per cent. Luke Sibieta, a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said it was also unclear if the money included the teacher pay settlement reached last year. If so this would probably mean a real-terms budget freeze — although a shrinking school-age population means this would still result in a 3 per cent rise in spending per pupil by the end of the parliament. Despite being among the last few ministers to agree their spending settlement with the Treasury, Ed Miliband's department is likely to emerge as one of the biggest winners of the spending review as Reeves doubles down on Labour's clean-power pledge. Miliband will get more than £14 billion to fund the new Sizewell C nuclear power station, as well as a further £2.5 billion to develop a new generation of smaller modular reactors, and additional funding for carbon capture and storage. The energy secretary has also won out in a Whitehall row over the future of the government's warm-homes plan. The Treasury had looked to reduce some of the £13.2 billion earmarked for the scheme, which will subsidise households to install energy efficiency measures such as solar panels and insulation. Miliband is expected to get the vast majority of this funding in an effort to meet Labour's pledge to cut household energy bills by 2030. The Home Office was the last government department to settle its spending plan with the Treasury after it was in effect imposed upon Cooper. Reeves has refused to meet her colleague's demands for extra police funding, despite warnings that it means the government could miss its flagship pledges on law and order and a public intervention by police chiefs who said they faced 'stark choices'. It is understood that police spending will increase in real terms each year of this spending review period, which ends in 2028-29. However, it remains unclear whether this boost will match the more than £1 billion that officers say is needed to cover existing gaps. • Early prison releases risk public safety, police warn Cooper is unhappy with the final settlement amid concerns it is not enough to meet the government's pledge to recruit 13,000 neighbourhood officers by 2029. The real-terms rise in police funding will also mean deeper cuts to other areas of her department. The Border Force has warned that any cuts made to its £1.2 billion budget could result in anything from longer queues at airports to threats to 'national security'. Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary, has also clashed repeatedly with Reeves over potential cuts to her budget. Negotiations did not close until Sunday and were dominated by two big rows. First, Rayner was attempting to secure billions of pounds in capital funding to build more social housing, arguing that the government's pledge to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this parliament would be missed otherwise. She has previously said that the government needs to double the rate at which it is building council houses to meet this pledge. The second row was about funding for local authorities, which are facing mounting pressure because of the spiralling costs of providing social care. A number of local authorities have declared themselves in effect bankrupt, but as an unprotected area of spending councils could see their real-terms spending power fall further. There are also likely to be changes to the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, which was established to support the long-term economic development of towns and cities in place of EU funding after Brexit. Reeves will cut future allocations for London to zero — and other English regions could lose out as well. Reeves is once again looking to farmers as she seeks to pare back government spending. This time the debate is over Britain's flagship post-Brexit farming subsidies, which appear likely to be slashed for all but a few small farms. Sources at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, led by Steve Reed, said that the subsidies, which financially reward farmers for sustainable practices, will be severely cut in the spending review. Labour will honour its budget promise of £5 billion in farming funding for 2024-26, so cuts would hit many farms from 2026 onwards. The package of subsidies was introduced to replace the European Union's common agricultural policy after Brexit. It is designed to encourage farmers financially to look after nature and the soil instead of rewarding them for growing crops or tending livestock. In future the scheme will be targeted at small farms, meaning larger, wealthier farms will lose access to funding for nature-friendly practices. Coming off the back of the government's decision to reduce inheritance tax relief for farmers, it is likely to go down badly with rural communities. Reeves announced £15 billion worth of funding for local transport infrastructure, predominantly in the north of England and the Midlands. The transport spending will be focused on seats that Labour needs to hold in the face of a growing challenge from Reform. The focus will be on projects that will bring spades in the ground by the time of the next election. Reeves has told colleagues that she wants people to see and feel the outcome of the investment, which includes trams in Manchester and Birmingham, the Tyne and Wear Metro and a mass-transit system around Bristol. There is not expected to be money for big transport projects in London as ministers look to rebalance spending away from the capital. The government has said it will spend £86 billion on the science and technology sector by the end of this parliament as it looks to support the tech industries to boost economic growth. The package will help fund research into drug treatments and longer-lasting batteries, and include up to £500 million for regions across the UK. Local leaders will have a say on how it is spent. • What should the UK bet on with its industrial strategy? While this may sound like a lot of money, the £86 billion figure is the sum of all government spending on 'research and innovation' over four years and the annual spend will be £22.5 billion by 2029-30. This represents a 3 per cent real-terms rise in budget in 2029-30 compared with the present financial year. Three prisons will be built, starting this year, after a £4.7 billion funding commitment in the spending review in an attempt to grapple with the prisons crisis. The justice secretary Shabana Mahmood's speedy settlement was crucial as she was forced to announce plans to curb prison overcrowding when government projections showed that jails would fill up in November. The plans for 'record expansion' of the prison estate came alongside measures that meant offenders would spend only 28 days on recall to prison if they breached their licence conditions.
The Independent
28 minutes ago
- The Independent
Rachel Reeves slashing spending by £5bn in ‘austerity 2.0'
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is set to announce Labour's spending plans on Wednesday, but analysis suggests she will need to make £5bn in cuts by 2028/29. The cuts are expected across unprotected departments like housing, policing, and local government, excluding NHS England, core schools budget, and defence, with Labour critics dubbing the plans 'austerity 2.0'. The Home Office is expected to bear the brunt of spending cuts, potentially impacting police numbers despite pledges to cut crime. The analysis, commissioned by the Lib Dems, assumes Reeves will not hike taxes and was made before committing £1.25bn to restore winter fuel payments to pensioners. Lib Dems criticised the expected cuts, urging the Labour government to boost growth and avoid spending shortfalls, suggesting a UK- EU Customs Union to boost the economy.
