Rachel Reeves to announce £500m for investment in youth services projects

Rachel Reeves will announce £500m for charities and civil society organisations to invest in youth services on Monday as the government seeks to combat accusations it is not doing enough to tackle child poverty.The chancellor will launch a new “better futures fund”, which will give money to schemes helping children struggling with mental health difficulties, school exclusion or crime, with the hope of attracting an additional £500m from local government and other organisations.The move comes amid tensions between ministers and Labour backbenchers over whether the government should remove the two-child benefit cap, at an estimated cost of more than £3.5bn a year.Reeves said: “I got into politics to help children facing the toughest challenges

Parents urged to get children vaccinated after measles death in Liverpool

Health officials have urged people to come forward for the measles vaccine if they are not up to date with their shots after a child at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool died from the disease.The city has experienced a surge in cases among young people, with the hospital warning parents last week that the spike in infections was due to falling rates of uptake of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.The child was ill with measles and other health problems and was receiving treatment at the Alder Hey, according to the Sunday Times.A statement from the Alder Hey Children’s NHS trust said: “To respect patient confidentiality, we can’t comment on individual cases.”Uptake of the vaccine has fallen across the country in the past decade with rates across England now at 84%

Tom Dolphin: BMA’s new chair who’s taking on government despite bid to be Labour MP

If things had turned out differently, Tom Dolphin would now be a Labour MP, sitting on the government’s backbenches and supporting Wes Streeting, the health secretary.Instead he is the newly elected chair of the British Medical Association, the UK’s main doctors union. Its almost 55,000 resident doctor members in England, gave the government a huge headache this week by voting to strike for up to six months in pursuit of a 29% pay rise, starting with a five-day walkout from 25-30 July.In his first interview this week, Dolphin staunchly defended that 29% figure and said that strikes may go on for a very long time. Despite his Labour background he does not look set to be a pushover for a government desperate to avoid more hospital picket lines

Why is the number of first-time US homebuyers at a generational low?

A cornerstone of the American dream is drifting out of reach.The estimated number of first-time homebuyers in the US dropped to a little more than 1.1 million in 2024, according to data from the National Association of Realtors shared with the Guardian: the lowest level since the NAR started tracking new buyers, in 1989.Economic instability is keeping the housing market at a standstill, with the number of new home owners at its lowest point in three decades. How did we get here?Home prices and mortgage rates remain high years after the peak pandemic housing boom

Crunching the data: are resident doctors in England badly paid?

Resident doctors in England have voted to strike for five days from 25 July, reigniting one of the NHS’s most bitter industrial disputes.At the heart of the row is pay: the British Medical Association (BMA) says resident (formerly known as junior) doctors have seen their real earnings fall by more than a fifth since 2008. The government says the union’s demands are unaffordable, and they’ve already received generous rises in recent years.So are strikes an “unnecessary and unreasonable” move, in the words of the health secretary, Wes Streeting? Or a necessary step on the path to restore doctor’s pay?After the global financial crisis of 2007-08, pay stagnated across the board in Britain. But resident doctors have had it worse than most

Fundamental flaws in the NHS psychiatric system | Letters

I am disappointed to read such a scathing review of Bella Jackson’s book Fragile Minds (A furious assault on NHS psychiatry, 30 June). It is a difficult read, and yet I thought that Jackson wrote about her experiences with compassion for both patients and staff unwittingly caught up in erratic and overstretched services.I am a doctor, with experience as a psychiatric patient and as a senior “staff grade” doctor on an acute psychiatric ward. My memoir, Unshackled Mind: A Doctor’s Story of Trauma, Liberation and Healing, confirms Jackson’s claims that abuses do happen in these places. More subtly, there is a continued reliance on the disease-centred model of biomedical psychiatry without sufficient attention paid to the circumstances and adversities suffered by patients before they ever came in contact with psychiatry