Starmer has no coherent social mobility plan, says top government adviser

Keir Starmer has no coherent strategy to tackle entrenched inequalities harming the life chances of millions of people, the government’s social mobility commissioner has said.A report warned last week that young adults in Britain’s former industrial heartlands were being left behind as a result of failed or abandoned promises by successive governments.The Social Mobility Commission (SMC), a government advisory body, said big cities such as Manchester, Edinburgh and Bristol were starting to thrive but that opportunities were “overconcentrated”.In a Guardian interview, the commission’s chair, Alun Francis, urged Starmer to outline a bold vision to tackle “the defining social mobility challenge of our generation”.He said: “We have a government that talks quite a lot about social mobility, but mainly about individuals – often about [the] social mobility of themselves or their colleagues … But what we don’t have is a coherent approach to social mobility as a useful concept that you can build a strategy around

Christmas burnout: why stressed parents find it ‘harder to be emotionally honest with children’

Advent calendars, check. Tree and decorations, check. Teachers’ presents, nativity costumes and a whole new ticketing system for the PTA’s Santa’s grotto, check. But the Christmas cards remain unwritten, the to-do list keeps growing, and that Labubu doll your child desperately wants appears to have vanished from the face of the earth.If you’re feeling frayed in the final days before Christmas, you’re not alone

Labour admits 60% of parents wrongly targeted in HMRC child benefit fraud crackdown

More than 60% of parents who had their child benefit stopped by HMRC using incorrect Home Office travel data were not fraudulently claiming the support from abroad, it has emerged.The scale of the government’s anti-fraud fiasco is four times higher than previously admitted, with 15,000 of the 23,500 parents targeted by HMRC now identified as legitimate beneficiaries living in the UK.It means 63% of parents targeted in the anti-fraud debacle first reported by the Detail and the Guardian were legitimate claimants.The government’s admission was revealed in a written answer to a parliamentary question tabled by the Conservative MP for Fylde, Andrew Snowden.Dan Tomlinson, the exchequer secretary to the Treasury, told Snowden in his written answer that figures revealed that, as of 30 November, 14,994 of the 23,794 cases where benefit had been suspended had since “been confirmed to be eligible to child benefit”

‘We’ve got more in common than what divides us’: a Muslim-Jewish kitchen in Nottingham counters hate and hunger

As antisemitism and Islamophobia rise, a community centre brings people together over shared meals, offering an antidote to food poverty, social isolation and divisionDonate to the Guardian Charity Appeal 2025 hereCommunities are our defence against hatred. Now, more than ever, we must invest in hopeIt’s 2.30pm on a Wednesday afternoon and the Himmah Hub, a community centre in Nottingham, is abuzz with activity. Crates of leftover supermarket food are being carried inside, trestle tables assembled, and volunteers are arriving to prepare meals that will be served in a few hours’ time to anyone who needs one – a queue has already begun to form outside.This is the Salaam Shalom kitchen, known as SaSh, a joint Muslim-Jewish project set up in 2015, and based on one of the core tenets of both faith groups: bringing people together through food

NHS to trial potentially life-saving treatment for deadly liver disease

The NHS is to trial a potentially life-saving new treatment for a deadly liver disease that causes the body’s vital organs to fail.Thirteen major hospitals will use a device that cleans patients’ blood that has become corrupted by toxins as a result of them developing acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF).ACLF is a severe and hard-to-treat form of liver disease linked to obesity, alcohol and hepatitis, in which patients suddenly deteriorate and have to be admitted to intensive care. Three out of four people affected are only diagnosed when it has already become life-threatening.Seven out of 10 people with the disease die within 28 days and only a handful of those affected are eligible for a liver transplant, which is the only existing way to reverse ACLF

Pressure grows on DWP over ‘misleading’ response to carer’s allowance scandal

Senior officials who oversaw a flawed benefits system that plunged hundreds of thousands of carers into debt are under mounting pressure over their “misleading” response to the scandal.Prof Liz Sayce, the chair of a scathing review into the government’s treatment of unpaid carers, last week called for an overhaul of management and culture at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).Days after the publication of the review, the DWP’s top civil servant in charge of carers’ allowance, Neil Couling, said carers themselves were at fault for the decade-long failures.His comments, revealed by the Guardian, have prompted a key adviser to the Sayce review and a leading carer’s charity to declare a lack of confidence in the department’s pledge to fix the issues.Prof Sue Yeandle, the UK’s leading expert on unpaid carers, said ministers and senior officials had issued “really misleading” claims that the failures affected only a small number of people