Labour launches child poverty strategy but hints costly welfare system has to change
The UK welfare system is not helping enough people into work and has significantly rising costs, and no one should think the government is backing away from reforming it, the work and pensions secretary has said.Pat McFadden made the comments as the government published its new child poverty strategy on Friday.He said the aim of the strategy was to improve young lives for the long term and that those lifted out of hardship are likely to have improved prospects for employment in the future.“This is about more than the distribution of money.It’s an investment in the future of the children who are affected by poverty,” he said.
McFadden added that further changes to the welfare system to encourage work were important for improving children’s lives, arguing that getting people into jobs will make families better off and save money on the benefits bill,The flagship policy in the strategy is the government’s pledge to end the two-child limit on universal credit, at a cost of £3bn to the Treasury,The move is expected to lift 450,000 children out of poverty by 2031,Other measures in the package include helping parents choose cheaper baby formula, getting families out of temporary accommodation faster, establishing breakfast clubs and extending free school lunches,Labour MPs are delighted with the move to scrap the two-child limit, and won a victory in July when they forced ministers to abandon plans to cut disability benefits.
However, McFadden said it would be a “mistake” for anyone to think the government was not aiming for further changes to the welfare system.“I think because of what happened in July, there’s been a conclusion that no reform is happening.That’s a mistake.Reform is happening.But I think we will need more in the future, too,” he told the Guardian as he toured a Little Village baby bank in north London that has supported more than 11,000 families with the cost of living.
In a sign he will pursue further significant changes, McFadden said: “I don’t think the right thing to do with the welfare system is just to circle the wagons around a system that is not delivering as well as it should and has such significantly rising costs.“We should see this system as not just about the distribution of benefits but ask ourselves: does it do everything it can to help people into work? I don’t think it does right now, and so there is a case for further reform to the system and there’s also reform happening [now].”Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotionThe chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has also said the benefits bill cannot “remain untouched”.Two reviews are under way: the Timms review looking at the disability benefits system, and another headed by Alan Milburn, examining youth inactivity.Asked whether he was planning to cut people’s payments or reduce eligibility for benefits, McFadden said: “I can’t say yet and I don’t want to start ruling things in or ruling things out.
“What it will involve is us asking the question: how do we deal with rising inactivity among the young and what can we offer to enhance people’s opportunity and the chance to get into work right across different government departments?”He said it was wrong to look at taking out costs from the welfare system without considering how changes would help people back into work – improving their finances and prospects as well as generating tax revenue for the Treasury.“If a young person gets on to benefits and stays on them, they will lose out about a million pounds in earnings over the course of their life and it will cost the state about a million pounds too,” he said.“Rather than approaching this the way that it has [been] done in the past, where people say: ‘I’m going to take a figure of X billion, and then retrofit a policy on to that,’ think about that million pounds.“Every person we can get into work and not have them on benefits for years is earning and paying tax.That does save money on the benefits bill and I think that’s a good thing if that’s the way that we save money on the benefits.
”McFadden also firmly rejected the Conservative’s claim that last month’s budget would help those on benefits more than those in work.He said the two-child limit brought in by the Conservative government in 2017 was “never really about saving money on the benefits bill”.“It has always been seen in part as a political dividing line with children used as the weapon of choice,” he added.“I think setting this up as some sort of division between the working and the non-working is just factually wrong.”
Ministers urged to close £2bn tax loophole in car finance scandal
Ministers are being urged to close a loophole that will allow UK banks and specialist lenders to avoid paying £2bn in tax on their payouts to motor finance scandal victims.Under the current law, any operation that is not a bank can deduct compensation payments from their profits before calculating their corporation tax, reducing their bill.UK banks have been blocked from claiming this relief since 2015, but it has now emerged that those due to pay redress as part of the pending £11bn car loan compensation scheme can exploit it because their motor finance arms are considered “non-bank entities”.The Guardian has learned this includes the operations of big high street names including Barclays and Santander UK, and Lloyds Banking Group, which is the UK’s biggest provider of car loans through its Black Horse division.Specialist lenders in the scandal, which include the lending arms of car manufacturers such as Honda and Ford, also fall outside this taxation rule
Cloudflare admits ‘we have let the Internet down again’ after outage hits major web services – as it happened
Technical problems at internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare today have taken a host of websites offline this morning.Cloudflare said shortly after 9am UK time that it “is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs [application programming interfaces – used when apps exchange data with each other].Cloudflare has also reported it has implemented a potential fix to the issue and is monitoring the results.But the outage has affected a number of websites and platforms, with reports of problems accessing LinkedIn, X, Canva – and even the DownDetector site used to monitor online service issues.Last month, an outage at Cloudflare made many websites inaccessible for about three hours
Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning, which has raised questions among computer scientists about the state of AI research.The author, Kevin Zhu, recently finished a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now runs Algoverse, an AI research and mentoring company for high schoolers – many of whom are his co-authors on the papers. Zhu himself graduated from high school in 2018.Papers he has put out in the past two years cover subjects like using AI to locate nomadic pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, to evaluate skin lesions, and to translate Indonesian dialects. On his LinkedIn, he touts publishing “100+ top conference papers in the past year”, which have been “cited by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and more”
Cloudflare apologises after latest outage takes down LinkedIn and Zoom
Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month.“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” it said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures.The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack, it said. Earlier, it said a separate issue had been reported with its application programming interfaces.The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, lasted for half an hour and was resolved shortly after 9am GMT, it said
Il Etait Temps shows his time is now with stunning display in Tingle Creek
A group of racegoers in high pre-Christmas spirits were singing: “We love you, Jonbon, we do,” on the path across the track, but the punters had not one, but two new favourites to celebrate by the end of Saturday afternoon as the odds-on shots Il Etait Temps and Lulamba delivered impressive victories in the card’s two Grade One events.Both horses are now close to the top of the betting for their respective targets at next year’s Cheltenham festival, and Jonbon’s supporters can at least reflect that his bid to become only the second three-time winner of the Tingle Creek in its 56-year history was derailed by an exceptional rival.A posse of top-class two-milers attacking the long line of fences on Sandown’s back straight is one of the great spectacles in jumping, and the three market leaders in Saturday’s race – Jonbon, Il Etait Temps and Dan Skelton’s L’Eau Du Sud, who had beaten Jonbon by 18 lengths at Cheltenham last time – were foot-perfect throughout.As Jonbon led them out of the back and towards the Pond fence, however, Il Etait Temps was clearly travelling best and when Paul Townend sent him to the front after jumping the second-last, the race was in effect over.Willie Mullins, Il Etait Temps’ trainer, had started the day without a single winner to his name in Britain this season, but the £100,000 first prize here was a reminder that Dan Skelton’s big lead in the title race could yet come under threat when Mullins’s huge team arrives for the spring festivals at Cheltenham and Aintree
F1 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix: Verstappen takes pole in qualifying for the season finale – as it happened
Max Verstappen claimed pole position for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, a vital first step in attempting to clinch the world championship in the decisive season-finale at Yas Marina.His title rivals – McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri – took second and third in a competitive and tense qualifying session, with the protagonists in three-way title fight duking it out for the top spots on the grid.Norris still holds the advantage as they enter the final rubber. Leading the championship, he is 12 points in front of Verstappen and 16 clear of Piastri. Norris will claim his debut F1 title and become the 11th British driver to do so if he finishes in front of both his rivals or claims third place or better
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