Solar installation in a village near Grimsby, UK (Alamy)

4 min read5 hr

It’s hard to overstate – and I won’t try to – the mess that this government inherited less than two years ago. I’m proud of the work we have done so far on bringing down bills and supporting families, but there’s still so much to do. I also know the immense love that people have for the places they live, and the fear that these towns and neighbourhoods won’t survive another disastrous mini-budget or energy crisis.

The resilience of our communities is vital to both our economic recovery and our social fabric – and today’s Local Power Plan launch places them at the very heart of our energy system. Communities across the country will be able to produce and own their own energy with our new fund, delivered by Great British Energy. Not only will shifting power into the hands of communities reduce our reliance on energy produced and owned abroad, it will tackle climate change, bring down bills and preserve our community hubs.

It is energy funded by, produced by and owned by my community – and we all share in the wealth it generates

Advertisement

In coastal constituencies like mine, people are worried about the impact of climate change – with many households and businesses at risk of tidal flooding and flooding from the Freshney. My community and others across Lincolnshire are well aware of the dangers of rising sea levels and increased heavy rainfall. Many of my constituents remember the 2007 floods, where pensioners were lifted from their houses by their neighbours and children kayaked down the roads. Some even remember the devastating 1953 flooding, when 307 people lost their lives and 30,000 people had to be evacuated.

These floods were once reckoned to be once-in-a-century events, but they are increasingly frequent. Impacts on insurance costs, housebuilding and selling mean that climate change doesn’t just mean uncomfortably hot summers for my community: it’s an impact on personal financial security; on the savings and assets we thought would be safe for our retirement and our children.

Yet climate change can still feel like a distant issue for many of my constituents when they are confronted every day by the high cost of living. It is hard to worry about every choice you make being ‘green’ when your main aim is to get through the month and hope you have a little left over. Rising energy bills also affect the viability of our beloved institutions to stay open – threatening our pubs, our leisure centres, our social clubs, and making life feel that little bit worse. These spaces aren’t just places to have a pint or play snooker – they’re places where people come together to have a chat and a laugh, where neighbours and colleagues become a community.

In Grimsby and across the country, communities are already taking action to bring down bills and help their communities thrive. Energy co-operatives raise money from their members to install, produce and own their own clean energy projects in their communities. Members not only get money back from their investment, either by cheaper bills or a stable interest return, they also decide how to reinvest the rest of the profits back into their community.

For example, Grimsby Community Energy was set up in 2016, and has installed solar panels across 10 buildings for different community assets, including our food bank, an apprentice centre, and our local YMCA. These organisations now pay less for their bills, investors get a stable rate of return, and it has established a community fund where the co-operative gives out grants for local community improvements. It is energy funded by, produced by and owned by my community – and we all share in the wealth it generates.

I am so pleased about the opportunities that today’s Local Power Plan offers my community and others like it across the country. The support and funding that the Local Power Plan offers is the biggest public investment in community energy in this country’s history. It gives people a stake in their community, and makes it easier for them to both invest and reap the benefits. Communities can take back control of their own energy, support and invest in beloved local institutions, bring down bills and tackle climate change all at once.

There are so many people in politics who want us to believe that things can only get worse, that seek to divide and discredit our communities. It’s policies like the Local Power Plan – learned from and delivered by grassroots groups up and down the country – that proves them to be deeply wrong.

Melanie Onn is Labour MP for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes

In the lead-up to the 2026 Super Bowl, it was announced that the far-right political group Turning Point USA was putting together its own halftime show as an alternative to Bad Bunny’s.

On Sunday, the US leader attended a Super Bowl watch party in Palm Beach, Florida, with footage from the event appearing to show that the screens were still airing the regular Super Bowl broadcast at the time of Bad Bunny’s set.

Following Sunday’s Super Bowl, Trump was widely panned for his response to Bad Bunny’s halftime performance, which he described as “one of the worst EVER!” on his own social media platform, Truth Social.

Despite this, the performance – which served as a colourful and vibrant celebration of Puerto Rican culture – has been well-received, with Bad Bunny subsequently occupying the top seven spots on Spotify’s global chart at the time of writing.

Megan Khoo is Policy Director of Hong Kong Watch

This week British citizen Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison in Hong Kong. At 78 years old, held in prolonged solitary confinement and with deteriorating health, Lai will most likely die in prison.

In the lead-up to his conviction and sentencing, time was of the essence. Yet Prime Minister Keir Starmer paid little more than lip service to the fate of Jimmy Lai during his visit to China this month. Sebastien Lai, Jimmy Lai’s son, criticised the Prime Minister for failing to place conditions on his father’s release in negotiations with Xi Jinping. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch likewise described the trip as a failure, given that the Prime Minister was unable to secure the release of one of his own citizens.

The visit to China also immediately followed the UK government’s approval of plans for a Chinese mega embassy in the heart of London. Despite mass protests and seven years of objections over security risks and concerns about espionage, the Labour government approved the development. This decision was widely seen as paving the path for Keir Starmer’s trip to Beijing.

Local residents near the proposed site have since launched a judicial challenge that could ultimately reach the Supreme Court and delay construction for up to five years. The government should take this challenge seriously and reconsider a decision that risks enabling transnational repression and endangering Hong Kongers and other dissidents living in Britain.

On X, Keir Starmer showcased his China visit and claimed to have secured billions of pounds in investment deals to support the British economy, yet made no mention of Jimmy Lai. Following Lai’s sentencing, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper released a statement expressing concern for his health and called on the Hong Kong government “to end [Lai’s] appalling ordeal and release him on humanitarian grounds, so that he may be reunited with his family”. The Foreign Secretary also reiterated that the Prime Minister raised Lai’s case with Xi Jinping and promised to “rapidly engage further” on the matter. That engagement must be more than rhetorical. It should involve concrete conditions and sustained pressure, led directly by the Prime Minister, to secure Lai’s release.

In response to Lai’s sentencing, the Home Office also announced an expansion of the British National (Overseas) (BNO) visa scheme to include Hong Kongers who were under 18 at the time of the 1997 handover. The government estimates that up to 26,000 people may relocate to the UK through this route over the next five years, helping to uphold Britain’s commitments to Hong Kongers. This long-awaited change, championed by Hong Kong Watch and others, is most welcome. It closes a significant gap that left tens of thousands of young Hong Kongers stranded and unable to flee repression.

Still, the policy announcement comes at a bitter moment. While it will assist those escaping a rapidly deteriorating Hong Kong, a British citizen has just been condemned to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Hong Kong is no longer the open, international city it once was. Independent media owners are imprisoned, overseas activists face bounties for speaking out, and any form of dissent, even online, can result in lifelong persecution.

For these reasons, the UK government must approach its dealings with China and Hong Kong with far greater vigilance. Keir Starmer should personally and urgently lead efforts to secure Jimmy Lai’s release by any viable means. He should also withdraw his approval for the Chinese mega embassy in London to protect Chinese and Hong Kong dissidents living in Britain, some of whom are, or will become, British citizens. Above all, the Labour government must stop compromising the UK’s core values of freedom, democracy, and human rights in pursuit of economic agreements that come at the expense of its own people.

4 min read1 hr

The government’s announcement on Monday that it will look at improving lobbying rules and transparency disclosures is welcome, while a proper mechanism to remove disgraced peers is long overdue. But voters need to see us delivering root and branch reform, and they need to see us delivering it at speed.

As a backbench Labour MP with a background in anti-corruption, I’m shocked at what we’ve seen this past week or so. But in some ways, I’m not surprised.  

The Epstein affair is particularly egregious, and my heart goes out to all the victims and their families beyond the Westminster bubble. But the anatomy of a political scandal in this country tends to be the same.

A scandal breaks. Westminster gasps. Our constituents are left thinking that politicians are in it for themselves and we’re all the same. Then nothing changes, and the next scandal comes along. 

The row surrounding Peter Mandelson is only the latest reminder that our ethics regime is still far too soft, far too porous, and far too reliant on politicians being ‘good chaps’.  

People are angry. In fact, many are losing faith entirely. 

It hardly matters, at this stage, what the eventual legal findings are. The damage is already done. And every time a scandal erupts, it reinforces the same toxic suspicion: that influence is for sale, that the powerful play by different rules, and that accountability is something reserved for everyone else. 

This is why ethics reform is not some fringe issue to be kicked into the long grass. It is central to restoring trust in government, and to defending the country against growing threats from foreign influence and dirty money, as underscored by the Reform UK politician Nathan Gill’s recent conviction for accepting bribes to make pro-Kremlin statements.  

The government deserves some credit for recognising this. The work already underway on the Hillsborough Law is a serious attempt to rebalance power between the state and the citizen. The decision to establish an Ethics and Integrity Commission is also the right direction of travel. These are not cosmetic changes. They are the beginnings of a much-needed clean-up. 

But now is the time to really grasp the nettle and show the country that this Labour government really is different from the venal Tory administrations which came before it.  

The danger is that ethics reform gets crowded out by all the other things we need to fix. But I’d argue it’s existential for us.  

The Mandelson affair has exposed gaps so wide you could drive an ornamental duck house through them. The House of Lords is a prime example. Ending hereditary peers and introducing a retirement age is welcome, but it does not fix the most glaring weakness: when a peer disgraces themselves, the system struggles to remove them. Too often, Parliament is left relying on voluntary resignation, as though public office were a private club. And let’s not forget that Mandelson can still go around calling himself a Lord, with all the social and potentially commercial advantages that come with it. 

That is not accountability. 

The same principle applies to appointments in the first place. The House of Lords Appointments Commission should be put on a statutory footing and given real power to block unsuitable nominations. A watchdog that can only bark is not protecting anyone. 

Then there is lobbying: the quiet engine room of political cynicism. Britain’s lobbying rules are so narrow they verge on parody. They cover consultant lobbyists but ignore the army of in-house operators, think tanks, corporate representatives, and front groups who shape policy behind closed doors. The result is predictable: scandal after scandal, each one feeding the sense that politics is stitched up. 

The answer is pretty simple. A full statutory register of all lobbyists. Monthly publication of departmental meetings, including what was discussed. And transparency rules that reflect reality, covering WhatsApp, emails, phone calls, and informal contact, not just tidy diary entries. 

And this is where the political dividing line must be drawn more sharply. 

There is a catalogue of Tory ethics scandals, peaking under Boris Johnson. Farage and his colleagues have been consistently disdainful of any sort of ethics regulation, and clearly have a Russia-shaped problem. My own party, as we’ve seen from the Mandelson affair, is not immune to this sickness infecting our politics.  

The government can’t afford another era where standards are optional, and scrutiny is dismissed as an inconvenience. Trust in politics is already hanging by a thread. 

The government has made a start. Now it must finish the job. 

Phil Brickell is Labour MP for Bolton West

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in March 2024 (PA Images / Alamy Live News)

2 min read18 min

This is a critical time for all of us focused on getting better results for citizens from the available public resources – and government must get the basics of good financial management right.

At the National Audit Office (NAO), we’ve seen countless examples in the past year of opportunities to get better value for taxpayers.

Across the 17 major departments and 400 other organisations, from The College of Policing to National Savings and Investments, that we provide an audit opinion for, common themes have emerged, as highlighted in our recent report Audit Insights.

The difficulty of grappling with legacy IT systems, poor asset management and the rising cost of compensation schemes are just three – and they show up in our value for money investigations too.

Our work tells us that we won’t see the public service improvements that taxpayers deserve without concerted attention on four fundamentals of good financial management in government, namely: timely and accurate financial reporting; fit for purpose financial management information; the skills and capability to inform decision-making; and the leadership and culture that supports innovation and continuous improvement.

Most departments and public bodies complete timely and high-quality accounts. But a significant number don’t yet achieve that, and we’re working with them to accelerate timetables and improve the quality of reporting.

If you are in any doubt that timely and robust accounting matters in the public sector, the situation in English local government remains a cautionary tale. Backlogs of unaudited accounts going back several years are only being cleared by means of disclaimed audit opinions, meaning that in many cases we have no independent assurance about how local authorities spent billions of pounds of public money.

To drive the efficiency and productivity improvements set out in the Spending Review, finance leaders should be strategic partners with a seat at the top table. The right people, skills and leadership culture are essential. Government is rightly focusing on increasing digital skills in the civil service and should ensure that finance skills keep pace with changing business models.

The right information matters too. Our recent report on improving productivity through better cost information showed that too many managers in the civil service lack the financial information to drive improvements in value for money. 

In other areas there are important steps forward. I welcome particularly the 10-year infrastructure strategy, addressing the failures of asset management shown by our previous work on schools, hospitals and roads.

On so-called ‘mega-projects’, I welcome the new governance arrangements being implemented by Treasury and the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, based on recommendations from us as well as the Office for Value for Money.

The NAO’s new five-year strategy sets a new level of ambition for our work to help improve the productivity and resilience of public services and support better financial management and reporting in government.

In short, we want to make a difference.

And I would argue that the need for independent, evidence-based auditing to support accountability and public trust has never been greater.

Gareth Davies is head of the National Audit Office