Key events
Four-day week may be considered a sign of failure, England councils told
Steve Reed, the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, has written to all councils to warn that adopting a four-day week for staff puts them at risk of being declared a failing authority, Jamie Grierson reports.
As Jamie reports, 25 councils have discussed a four-day week policy and one, South Cambridgeshire district council, has already moved to the pattern.
This is quite a shift from Labour. At the time of the 2019 general election, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, Labour was committed to the goal of reducing average working hours over the course of a decade so as to in effect introduce a four-day working week for everyone.
Lib Dems call for creation of fly tipping hotline to improve reporting of ‘mountain of rubbish’ problems
Last month Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, raised an incident of fly tipping in Oxfordshire at PMQs. That is not the sort of topic that normally comes up at PMQs, although anyone who has seen the pictures will know why Davey, and his party, felt this had to be raised at the highest level.
Not letting go, the Lib Dems have today released some polling that suggests this is a widespread problem, and that it is getting worse. According to the poll by Savanta, commissioned by the party and carried out last month, 20% of people say they have seen ‘mountain of rubbish’ fly tipping in their area, on a scale similar to the Kidlington incident raised at PMQs.
Among the 1 in 5 who did say fly tipping was a problem for them locally, 66% of them thought organised criminal gangs were involved, and 64% of them said they thought the problem had got worse in the past 12 months.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem environment spokespeson, said:
These figures show that the scandalous mountain of filth in Oxfordshire is just the tip of the iceberg. From our riversides to our rural lanes, criminal gangs are turning this country into an environmental wild west.
What’s worse – we don’t even know the true scale of the problem. Communities are being left to deal with filthy waste whilst criminal operations run rings around a system that all but looks the other way.
We cannot go on like this. Liberal Democrats are calling on the government to urgently clean up illegal waste sites and set up a new fly-tipping hotline to improve public reporting and detection of large-scale waste sites across the country.
In a thread on social media yesterday, Calum Miller, the Lib Dem MP for Bicester and Woodstock, recalled how he was first alerted to the problem at Kidlington and how he got the Environment Agency to respond.
Non-crime hate incident recording system for police ‘not fit for purpose’ and must be replaced, expert body to tell Home Office
Good morning. With Christmas just two days away, the Westminster tap of news, which normally gushes strongly, is down to a dribble. There is not much on the government’s grid today, apart from an announcement about a plan to ensure young people leaving care in England will receive free prescriptions, and dental and eye services up to their 25th birthday, which we’ve written up here …
… and also confirmation that some former mineworkers are getting a £100-a-week boost to their pensions as a result of a change to the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme announced in the budget.
Josh MacAlister, the children’s minister, has been giving interviews this morning about the care leavers announcement.
We’re in one of those weeks where, even more than usual, news organisations have to find their own stories. In politics we’ve got a report from Peter Walker about Reform UK’s plan to slash aid spending (or, rather, slash it even more than it has been slashed already).
“Plans by Reform UK to slash the aid budget by 90% would not cover existing contributions to global bodies such as the UN and World Bank, shredding Britain’s international influence and risking its standing within those organisations, charities and other parties have warned,” Peter writes.
The Telegraph is splashing on a story by Charles Hymas, its home affairs editor, saying that “non-crime hate incidents [NCHIs] are to be scrapped under plans that police chiefs will present to the home secretary next month”. This sounds like something pencilled in for the 2026 No 10 news grid, but Hymas has spoken to Lord Herbert, the former Tory policing minister who is now chair of the College of Policing, an organisation that works with the Home Office on policing policy, and he has confirmed that NCHIs are for the chop. He told the paper:
NCHIs will go as a concept. That system will be scrapped and replaced with a completely different system.
There will be no recording of anything like it on crime databases. Instead, only the most serious category of what will be treated as anti-social behaviour will be recorded. It’s a sea change.
The police started recording NCHIs following a recommendation in William Macpherson’s 1999 report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Macpherson said the police should create “a comprehensive system of reporting and recording of all racist incidents and crimes”.
Herbert told the Telegraph that the system was no longer “fit for purpose” because of the growth in social media and the advent of smartphones. He said:
It’s drawn police into an area that I don’t believe they wanted to be in. Police have been caricatured that they wanted to be involved in this, but I haven’t met a copper who does.
While some police officers argue that recording NCHIs is a useful way of recording behaviour that will escalate into criminality, the system has also generated countless stories (not least in the Telegraph) about police forces becoming over-preoccupied with offensive tweets.
According to the Telegraph, under the new system officers will not log hate speech incidents on crime databases, and will instead treat them as intelligence reports. They will also be given a “common sense” checklist so that they only intervene in cases of serious anti-social behaviour. Herbert told the paper the police had to be careful “not to throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
Ministers, including Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, have repeatedly said (normally in response to press reports about alleged excessive police responses to NCHIs) that they want the police to focus on what matters to the public and the Telegraph says the College of Policing plans are likely to be accepted by the Home Office. Mahmood is on record as saying that the police should be able to distinguish between “content [on social media] that is offensive, rude, ill-mannered, and incitement to violence, incitement to hatred”.
There is nothing much in the diary for today. But we’ll find some news somewhere.
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