A briefing to the Times confirms that Healey will use Wednesday’s budget to raise the minimum wage by about 3.9%. But he is slowing the catch-up for young workers…
The National Living Wage for those aged 21 and over is £12.71, which Healey will hike to about £13.20. The Youth rate is £10.85, which will go to about £11.27, the same 3.9% rise as the adult one. This breaks the pattern of large youth rises in the last two budgets…
The youth minimum wage rose 26% between 2025 and 2026. This both ends Labour’s promise to bring the youth rate up to the adult rate in this parliament and worsens the wage gap situation in the UK. The gap between Britain’s highest and lowest paid workers is smaller than in the Soviet Union…
The minimum wage is already two-thirds of the median wage in the UK. Madness….
The prison and probation service spent £3.29 million on interpreters and translators last year, up from £1.99 million in 2022. Write your own translation jokes…
New figures dug out by Tory MP John Hayes show the bill for spoken interpreters in His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service climbed every year, from £903,265 in 2022 to £1.33 million in 2025. Translation and transcription costs rose even faster, from £1.08 million to £1.96 million – an 81% jump. Over four years the total comes to £11.1 million of taxpayer cash…
For comparison, Hayes also asked the Disclosure and Barring Service the same question. It spent £89,916 on interpreters across all four years combined. HMPPS gets through that in about ten days…
Ex-Conservative Justice Secretary Alex Chalk is leading the review, with an initial report expected within five months.
Nationalisation fans have been repeating that public ownership would turn off the dividend taps for good for quite some time now, punishing shareholders. But who is actually paying dividends in the water sector…
At last week’s Northern Ireland EFRA Select Committee, Water UK boss David Henderson said that Thames Water’s shareholders have not taken a dividend for quite some time. Six privately-owned UK water companies paid no dividends last year, and five the year before…
The Northern Ireland Government on the other hand, owner of publicly-run Northern Ireland Water, has happily pocketed a dividend running at around 2%. As Henderson put it: ‘It’s quite a bit higher than for the six companies that are not paying any dividend at all’…
NI Water is hardly performing well. MPs on Westminster’s Northern Ireland Affairs Committee have highlighted its chronic underfunding of struggling wastewater infrastructure, with a think tank telling them 19,000 homes can’t be built because of wastewater capacity constraints. Yet the dividend still flows back to the Government. Nationalisation pays its only shareholder well…
The government has admitted that its online age checks apply to blunt butter knives. Farcical…
Home Office minister Sarah Jones told LibDem MP Charlie Maynard in a parliamentary answer:
“The Government is committed to legislation around knife sales which helps ensure that knives do not fall into the hands of those aged under 18. The measures in the Crime and Policing Act 2026 in respect of the reporting of online bulk sales of knives and the strengthening of age verification requirements for online sales of knives will ensure we have robust controls on knives. The measures in the Crime and Policing Act 2026 are likely to be commenced next Spring.
Non-pointed cutlery knives have been specifically excluded from the new reporting requirements for online bulk sales of knives in section 42 of the Crime and Policing Act 2026. No similar provision was made in section 32 of the 2026 Act for the new age verification checks for online sale and delivery of knives.
However, we are aware of the argument that non-pointed cutlery knives, designed for eating food, present a lower risk to the public and the law should be amended. Such a change could be made via secondary legislation, and we are carefully considering representations made by retailers about whether there could be changes to legislation.”
U-turn…
Robert Jenrick told a rally on Monday:
“They say Chancellors are either undertakers or bookies. This one is an ostrich – and when the Chancellor buries his head in the sand, the rest of us, we’re left staring at his you know what.”