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Southport killer Axel Rudakubana’s 52-year jail term is set to be reviewed after concerns were raised it was unduly lenient.

The 18-year-old was jailed for life after murdering three young girls and stabbing several others in an act of “extreme violence” at a Taylor Swift themed dance class.

He was sentenced in his absence after failing to return to the dock, and will now spend decades behind bars for what the judge termed “the most extreme, shocking and exceptionally serious crime”.

Rudakubana avoided a whole-life tariff – which would have ensured he could never leave prison – because he was nine days shy of being 18 when he committed the atrocity. The 52-year sentence is a record length for a person of his age.

Southport’s Labour MP Patrick Hurley has now asked the Attorney General to review the sentence as “unduly lenient”.

Attorney General Lord Hermer and Solicitor General Lucy Rigby now have 28 days to decide whether to refer the sentence to the Court of Appeal.

The families of Rudakubana’s victims shared their pain and anger inside Liverpool Crown Court. Mother of murdered seven-year-old Elsie Dot Stancombe, Jenny, described the attack as “the act of a coward” and said Rudakubana was “cruel and pure evil”.

Australia beat England by six runs via the DLS method as rain stops play with just five balls remaining and Heather Knight’s team agonisingly short of their target in the second T20 in Canberra.

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The UK has left open the possibility of following EU rules for food and farm products in order to return to frictionless access to European markets, the trade secretary has said.

Jonathan Reynolds told the BBC such an agreement – which lowers all trade barriers in return for mirroring EU rules and standards – would not cross the government’s red lines.

His comments come after EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic told the BBC a new agreement, including so-called dynamic alignment on standards, is possible alongside other areas of pan-European co-operation on customs.

Reynolds met Sefcovic at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

He said he thanked his EU counterpart for his “incredibly positive” and “helpful” comments. Reynolds add that Sefcovic’s tone was in keeping with what the government had already said about a “twin- track strategy” on trade.

“We can improve the terms of trade with the EU in a way which doesn’t revisit customs unions or single markets or the arguments of Brexit, and we can do that whilst pursuing closer trade links around the world,” Reynolds said.

Labour fought last year’s UK general election with a manifesto pledge to lower Brexit-related barriers and red tape for the export of food and farm products to the European Union.

The question has always been how deep such an agreement might be. It could be settled in the coming weeks, though firm decisions have not yet been made.

on Thursday the EU suggested to the BBC that complete eradication of barriers in the sector would be possible if the UK followed relevant EU rules and standards as they change, a process known as “dynamic alignment”.

Speaking to the BBC in Davos, Reynolds said that both ideas floated by Sefcovic – a fully fledged veterinary agreement with dynamic alignment – and a pan-European customs plan did not break the government’s red lines.

On the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention he said it did not cross red lines because “it is not a customs union”.

Asked if a “full-fat veterinary agreement with dynamic alignment” crossed red lines he said: “No, that’s part of our manifesto, an SPS agreement, a veterinary agreement.”

The Conservatives have voiced anger at reports of a potential new deal on UK-EU trade, with shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel telling MPs that the government was “bending the knee to the EU”.

“These latest reports that the government might shackle us to the European Union are deeply concerning, and once again make clear that Keir Starmer and his chums are all too happy to put their ideology ahead of our national interest, no matter the cost,” she said.

But the Liberal Democrats have said the government is not doing enough to smooth trade with the EU.

Party leader Sir Ed Davey told the Commons: “It is time for a proper UK-EU customs arrangement so we can strengthen our negotiations with Donald Trump, cut the red tape on our businesses and grow the economy.”

Reynolds told the BBC he was preparing the UK’s case to avoid potential US tariffs on exports, after President Donald Trump suggested the world could have to pay trillions of dollars to access markets in America.

After being delayed twice because of the recent devastating wildfires around Los Angeles, this week saw the nominations announced for the film industry’s biggest awards, and Donald Trump move into the White House for a second time.

But how much attention did you pay to what else had been going on in the world over the past seven days?

Quiz compiled by Ben Fell.

Warning: This article contains graphic references to violence

When yoga instructor Leanne Lucas posted an advert for a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport, the two-hour dance class sold out within 11 days.

It was a beautiful summer’s morning on 29 July when 26 children, all girls aged between six and 13, were dropped off by their parents to dance, play and make friendship bracelets.

Meanwhile, at his family home in the nearby village of Banks, Lancashire, Axel Rudakubana, then 17, armed himself with a 20cm kitchen knife he had earlier bought on Amazon.

This is a timeline of what happened next:

Follow latest: Dance class killer Axel Rudakubana sentenced

10am: The workshop led by Leanne and her colleague Heidi Liddle gets under way.

11.04am: Rudakubana searches online for “Mar Mari Emmanuel stabbing” – the knife attack on a bishop in Sydney, Australia, earlier that year.

11.10am: Despite the sunshine, he is wearing a green hoodie with the hood up and a surgical face mask covering his face when he leaves his home in the village of Banks in Lancashire.

11.11am: One minute later, he is captured on CCTV at a bus stop making a call to book a taxi.

11.16am: Around five minutes later he heads back towards home.

11.30am: Rudakubana is picked up and travels in silence for the 4.5-mile journey to Hart Street in Southport.

On the first map start with the marker at the bottom and then click next.

11.43am: When he arrives, he asks the driver to direct him to 34a. But he refuses to pay the driver, who then follows him down a driveway towards Masters Vehicle Body Repairs at number 36a.

Read more:
What are the UK’s knife crime laws?
Southport attacker had ‘kill list’

11.44am: Rudakubana retreats after the owner of the car repair workshop, Colin Parry, and his colleague confront him, telling him to pay the fare but Rudakubana replies: “What are you going to do about it?”

Inside the dance studio, on the first floor of an industrial unit down a path off the main road, children are gathered around tables making bracelets, while a life-size model of Taylor Swift stands nearby for the youngsters to pose for photos with.

As Ms Lucas opens a window because of the hot weather she sees the teenager outside but thinks nothing of it.

11.45am: Rudakubana walks into the 34a Hart Street building, climbs up the stairs to the first floor and opens the door armed with the black-handled kitchen knife.

Without saying a word, he grabs the girl nearest to him and begins stabbing her, before moving through the room, stabbing as many children as he can.

11.46am: CCTV shows one child as she tries to escape the building but is dragged back in by Rudakubana, before she staggers out and collapses.

11.47am: Merseyside Police receive their first emergency call.

11.48-11.56am: North West Ambulance Service respond after a call reporting the stabbings.

On the below map start with the marker at the bottom and then click next.

Window cleaner, Joel Verite, then 25, is driving past with his work partner. They stop to help Leanne Lucas who has been stabbed in the back before fleeing the building with several children. She tells them children are being attacked.

Mr Verite runs down the driveway to the dance studio where a mother waiting to collect her daughter has parked. She has her daughter in the car and three other girls who have managed to escape.

She asks him to help a child who has been stabbed several times. He later described opening the door behind the driver’s seat to find the girl “had many holes in her body”.

Mr Verite carries the child back to the street, where other members of the public are gathering to help. Then he runs to the building’s entrance, where he is told by two men the attacker is in the dance studio.

Mr Verite sees a man at the top of the stairs with his hood up, holding a knife. The attacker moves away when seen, while Mr Verite calls “for everyone to come over and block him in”.

On the below map start with the marker on the left and then click next.

Jonathan Hayes is at work in an office located across the landing from the dance studio when he hears screaming and looks out of the window to see some children running across the car park.

He leaves his desk intending to go outside to help but, as he walks on to the landing, he sees a child on the floor, motionless and bleeding. The attacker is crouching over her but starts to follow Mr Hayes as he retreats. Mr Hayes tries to grab the knife and the defendant swipes at him and stabs him in the leg. His colleague chases Rudakubana out of the office and shuts the door.

Car repair shop owner Colin Parry is also now on the scene, after being phoned by a colleague who’d heard the screaming next door. He sees children running past, some lying on the floor injured.

11.57am: The first police officer, Sergeant Gillespie, arrives at the scene to find Rudakubana holding the knife, which he drops when ordered to do so by the officer.

Mr Verite, a former rugby league player for Wigan and Salford, follows officers inside and sees blood everywhere as two officers tackle the attacker to the floor. He carries an injured child out to an ambulance and stays with her.

Police find Heidi Liddle and a little girl she protected hiding in a toilet. They are escorted from the building crying.

11.59am: Rudakubana is arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, then further arrested on suspicion of murder three minutes later.

Rudakubana stabbed 11 children and two adults (Leanne Lucas and John Hayes) – causing the deaths of Alice da Silva Aguiar (nine), Bebe King (six) and Elsie Dot Stancombe (seven).

He was taken to Copy Lane police station where he remained silent throughout his interviews with officers.

Despite later discovering he had a wide interest in violence, genocide and terrorism from an analysis of his digital devices, police say they still don’t know why he carried out the attack.

In the hours after the stabbings, false rumours spread online claiming the suspect was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK on a small boat, sparking a wave of rioting and unrest across the country.

Read more:
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On Monday, as his trial was about to start, Rudakubana pleaded guilty to the three murders and 10 other charges of attempted murder.

He also pleaded guilty to production of a biological toxin, ricin, found in a container under his bed the day after the attack, and possession of an academic analysis of an al Qaeda training manual under the Terrorism Act.

When he was charged with the offences in October, police maintained the attack was not being treated as a terrorist incident.

During the sentencing hearing, Rudakubana repeatedly called for proceedings to be stopped, shouting: “I need to see a paramedic because I feel ill.” He was removed twice from court and wasn’t present to hear his sentence.

In his absence, Mr Justice Goose sentenced the 18-year-old to a life sentence with a minimum term of 52 years. The judge said “it is likely he will never be released and will be in custody for all his life”.

Explaining his decision, the judge added: “The prosecution have made it clear this does not meet the definition of an act of terrorism within the meaning of the legislation as there is no evidence the purpose was to advance a particular political or ideological cause. I must accept that conclusion.

“However, his culpability is equivalent in its seriousness to terrorist murders, whatever his purpose.

“What he did on July 29 caused such shock and revulsion that it must be seen as the most extreme level of crime.”

Additional reporting by Adam Parker, OSINT editor, and Freya Gibson, junior OSINT producer. Maps credit: Google Earth

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open-source information. Through multimedia storytelling, we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK

The cost of replacing more than 2,000 MPs and political staff after the election reached £52.8m, the body managing MPs’ pay has revealed.

Nearly all of that was spent on closing down former MPs’ offices and helping new MPs set theirs up, with around a third of the total spent on redundancy payments for staff.

The Independent Parliament Standards Authority (Ipsa) report said Labour’s landslide election had been a “once in a generation event” which saw 350 MPs leave office – more than at any general election in the last fifty years.

According to its report, 2,373 people lost their job as a result – including 2,023 staff who worked for MPs who either lost their seat or stood down.

At the 2019 election only 460 members of staff were effectively made redundant.

Ipsa, which is funded by public money through a grant from the Treasury, said the “almost-unprecedented” turnover had helped push up the cost of supporting those who lost their jobs by 286%.

Costs included ending rental agreements, settling outstanding payments and making staff redundant.

MPs themselves were entitled to a loss of office payment, set at twice the legal minimum, if they lost their seat and had been an MP for at least two years.

All MPs who either lost or stood down were also eligible for so-called “winding up” payments worth four month’s salary. Since April 2024, the basic annual salary of a MP is £91,346, plus expenses.

This was to compensate them for the time spent closing down their offices, which was extended at this election from two months to four. They could also claim costs during this time.

Ipsa said an average of £35,200 was spent per MP on redundancy payments to both MPs and their staff – up from an average of £19,900 at the 2019 election.

Ipsa’s chair Richard Lloyd said: “An MP’s office is like a small business. They are the employer, and any MP not returned in the 2024 general election had until 4 November to close down their office entirely.”

He added: “Ipsa is proud of its role in supporting a representative Parliament, where people without private finances shouldn’t be prevented from becoming an MP – or working for one.”

Established in the wake of the 2009 expenses scandal, Ipsa oversees both MPs’ pay and expenses, including the salaries of the constituency caseworkers, parliamentary assistants and other staff that work for them.

A record number of children are living in B&Bs beyond the legal limit as England’s homelessness crisis pushes councils to breaking point.

MPs said there is a “dire need” for housing reform, with the lack of affordable homes forcing cash-strapped local authorities to haemorrhage their funds on temporary accommodation.

The “crisis situation” means there is less money in the pot to focus on homelessness prevention, the cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said.

Councils are instead having to prioritise short-term solutions which can include putting families in bed and breakfasts – the fastest rising temporary accommodation type over the past decade, a Sky News analysis of government data found.

Temporary accommodation is meant to be a short-term solution for people who are homeless while they wait for more suitable and long-term housing options.

But the rising number of homeless households in England, driven by a shortage of social or otherwise affordable housing to move on to, means that increasingly this fix is anything but temporary.

A recent Sky News investigation found that children in some parts of England are spending as long as five-and-a-half years on average in temporary accommodation.

Length of stay has increased significantly in many areas since 2021, with particularly long stays in London and the South East.

B&B use was the fastest rising temporary accommodation type over the past decade, rising fourfold from 4,400 households in 2014 to a record high of 18,400 by 2024, according to government figures.

The data shows 6,000 of these households included children, of which two in three had been living there for longer than the 6-week legal limit.

All of this is cripplingly expensive for councils. B&Bs, meant to be reserved for emergencies only, were the largest single spending category in council homelessness budgets in 2024, at £723.9m.

This is more than triple the amount spent in 2014, which was £218m adjusted for inflation.

Overall, temporary accommodation costs to local authorities have risen from more than £1.6bn in 2022-23 to around £2.1bn in 2023-24, the PAC said.

‘Crisis situation’

The PAC is calling for a clear strategy and stronger support for local authorities to address what it called “a crisis situation”.

Despite there being an overarching homelessness strategy for each of the devolved nations, England does not have one.

Committee chairman Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said this had left local authorities “attempting to save a sinking ship with a little more than a leaky bucket”.

Read More:
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National scandal’ as number of children living in temporary accommodation reaches record high

MPs also urged the government to justify its Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates, which calculate housing benefit for tenants renting from private landlords.

The committee said 45% of households in receipt of the benefit face a shortfall between what they receive from the government and what they are being asked to pay in rent, and the issue is “exacerbated by the lack of affordable housing”.

The government has pledged to build 1.5 million homes by the end of this parliament, but it has not set a target of how many of them will be classed as affordable.

Sir Geoffrey said: “My committee is deeply concerned by the number of people currently being housed in sub-standard, overpriced and at times, wholly inappropriate accommodation, sometimes a long way from their previous home.

“A lack of affordable housing, a focus on short-term solutions and no clear strategy to tackle this issue have left us with thousands of families in deeply troubling circumstances.”

He added: “Local authorities find themselves at breaking point as they haemorrhage funds to cover the rising costs of housing families in temporary accommodation.

“We are calling for an overarching strategy that addresses the need for better connectivity across government departments to tackle the root causes of this crisis.

“Without one, we fear this will remain an issue into which money is simply poured, without effectively tackling the blight of homelessness.”