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It’s hard to keep up with the scale of the challenge that lies ahead for Andy Burnham and John Healey because, put simply, it keeps getting bigger.
But what if there was one simple policy tweak to our fiscal rules that our Chancellor and Prime Minister could make to get Britain building the new housing, towns and infrastructure we need to drive growth and improve everyone’s lives?
This week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) are warning that Healey needs to find £35bn to plug a hole in his autumn Budget caused by an inflation shock from Trump’s war with Iran and his pledge to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030.
What we know about Christa Pike’s botched execution
Recordings of the calls made to emergency services after the failed execution of Christa Pike reveal confusion and delays to her care, as her lawyers fight to get her off death row.
Who is Christa Pike?
- The 50-year-old was given the death penalty for killing her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer in 1995.
- She was set to be the first woman executed in Tennesee for more than 200 years before the botched injection.
Pike’s lawyers are now arguing for her sentenced to be commuted to life without parole, arguing she cannot be subjected to the death penalty twice.
Help was delayed by half an hour
Ambulance workers were not cleared to enter Riverbend Prison in Tennessee until half an hour after the first call was made, recordings obtained by the reveal.
The initial call came at 8.40pm on 30 September, an hour after the two attempted lethal injections, and crews were let into the prison at 9.11pm.
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What did prison officials say?
The recording of the first call has not been released, but at 9.03pm, a dispatcher said it was a “false call” and there was “no medical assistance needed at Riverbend Prison”. At 9.07pm officials from the prison’s central control confirmed they “did not make” the initial call.
At the same time, a first responder said there was someone “outside the gate at the prison telling us that it’s real and demanding us to go in”, and asked for someone from the prison to come out to speak to them.
Pike taken to hospital
- Pike was taken to hospital at 9.34pm.
- She has now been discharged after 10 days.
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Tom Cruise film Digger forecast to lose $245m at box office
With ticket sales slumping in the film’s third week in cinemas, is set to lose its studio, Warner Bros, hundreds of millions as it fails to recoup its $280 (£211m) production and marketing costs.
On course to be a historic flop
Tom Cruise’s satirical comedy, in which he stars as oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, has taken just $35m at the box office so far, with ticket sales dropping by 60 per cent this weekend.
It is on track to take $50m according to , which would make it one of only a handful of films to lose a nine-figure sum.
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How bad is it?
- Critics say Cruise gives a poor performance and have labelled the film his “vanity project”.
- The secret twist is said to be too “meta” and the script not funny.
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Women’s autoimmune conditions more likely to be misdiagnosed
Women are up to 75 per cent more likely to have an autoimmune condition misdiagnosed as psychosomatic than men, and face longer waits for treatment, according to new research.
What did the study show?
A study of 6,607 patients found that
43%
of women reported their autoimmune symptoms had been misdiagnosed as psychiatric, compared to 33 per cent of men.
Women were overall 46 per cent more likely to receive a psychiatric misdiagnosis.
34%
of women received a psychosomatic (physical symptoms caused or worsened by psychological factors) misdiagnosis compared to 22 percent of men.
What is an autoimmune condition?
These occur when the body mistakenly attacks its own tissues, and many are more common in women. Diseases include multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, and symptoms range from fatigue and low mood to pain and digestive issues.
Women reported a longer period between onset of these symptoms and diagnosis than men, with more appointments in between.
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Women struggle to be believed, says researcher
Although labels such as hysteria are outdated, and fortunately rarely used nowadays, as women we still often have a harder time having our symptoms believed and therefore addressed accurately
Shaista Tayabali, co-author and patient partner at the University of Cambridge and University of East Anglia
More health from The i Paper
Breaking Bad actor RJ Mitte dies aged 34
Who was RJ Mitte?
The American actor was cast as Bryan Cranston’s on-screen disabled son when he was 14, and drew on his experience of living with cerebral palsy for the role.
His disability is rarely mentioned in the show, which ran from 2008 to 2013, with Walter ‘Flynn’ White Junior defying his father and cracking jokes at his expense. He won a Screen Actor’s Guild award for his performance in the role in 2014.
What did he do after ?
Mitte continued acting with roles in Talking to Strangers and Switched at Birth. He also created The Mitte Foundation, a charity to support community initiatives, and was an ambassador for United Cerebral Palsy.
He died on Monday at what is believed to be his home in Brownsville, Texas, aged 34. No cause of death has been determined.
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I’m in deep despair as I write this tonight…That kid was still pretty raw when we started shooting the pilot in February 2007, but little by little we watched him grow into a real fine actor…All that promise and potential is now such a loss.
bryan cranston, Actor for Walter white in , on instagram
Watch more from The i Paper
Midwives win £750,000 over nitrous oxide exposure
More than 120 maternity staff at Basildon University Hospital have been awarded almost £750,000 after they were exposed to high levels of nitrous oxide, which is given to women during childbirth, at work.
How did midwives get exposed to the gas?
- Leaky pipes and poor ventilation caused exposure to the gas.
- Midwives reported fatigue, headaches, brain fog and anxiety.
6 min read
Who got the payout?
The payout was awarded to staff who worked at the hospital between 2021 and 2023, after the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) took legal action against the hospital.
Roughly 80 members of the RCM received compensation along with around 60 others.
The union said the hospital knew about the leaks in 2021 but staff were not warned about the risks until October 2022.
Watch more from The i Paper
The UK towns at risk of running out of water this winter
Five successive heatwaves and the warmest summer on record have left millions of Britons living in drought conditions, which experts believe could remain in place for the foreseeable future unless there is a “significant amount of rainfall” this winter.
Which regions are in drought?
- Yorkshire became the latest area to fall into drought last Friday.
- All of central, southern and eastern England are already in drought.
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Eight reservoirs ‘exceptionally low’
The i Paper understands the Environment Agency is concerned about the low levels at Wimbleball, Ardingly, Clatworthy, Colliford, Hanningfield and Abberton.
These are variously operated by South West Water, South East Water, Wessex Water and Essex and Suffolk Water.
England would need 120 per cent of typical rainfall over the next seven months just to be considered out of the drought status.
3 min read
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When will hosepipe bans be lifted?
No bans have ended in the past month, with restrictions on water usage still in place in most of southern and eastern England, affecting almost 30 million people.
- Professor Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, said the bans would stay in place for the forseeable future unless there is a “significant amount of rainfall” soon.
A debate will rage between now and said Budget about what, if anything, Healey might conspire with Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden to cut from welfare in order to find the money Britain currently lacks.
What will get less attention, however, is the fact that the financial pressures caused by wars in the Middle East jeopardise two of Labour’s landmark programmes and promises which Housing Secretary Angela Rayner will currently be trying to secure cash for.
The first is the next tranche of funding for Labour’s £39bn social and affordable homes programme (SAHP). Just under £10bn was announced at the start of September, but Burnham’s council housebuilding push cannot happen unless more money is brought forward.
The second is Labour’s “next generation” of new towns which, we were promised, would see seven new settlements with a minimum of 10,000 homes each built across England.
Behind the scenes, there has been a fair amount of wrangling over the funding of new towns. Much of it happened when Sir Keir Starmer was still prime minister, and Rachel Reeves was still chancellor. Towards the end of their tenure, it was suggested that private finance would be needed to see the plans through because there was so little scope for capital investment from the state.
Long term, building new towns and social housing would not only increase growth but also generate new jobs and lower the cost of housing for people who have become homeless.
If public investment were used to build homes that would pay for themselves via social rent, or new towns which would see the taxpayer gain a very healthy return on their investment via land value increases and rents, both of these endeavours would create new income streams for the state and be an example of the “spend to save” economics that Burnham has repeatedly said he favours (including in an interview with me in 2024).
And yet, over halfway through this parliamentary term, progress on each of these projects is sluggish at best.
Britain would build more if it learned from these European countries
Part of the problem Healey and Burnham face here is that they are bound by the same fiscal rules that Starmer and Reeves committed to. The current fiscal framework mandates that public sector net financial liabilities must fall as a share of GDP by 2029-30, sharply restricting the amount the Government can borrow.
As a result, Britain’s Government finds itself in something of a financial straitjacket which prohibits it from borrowing money to invest in housing and infrastructure.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Britain could get on with building if we took a lesson from the European countries that do it best. A simple lesson, at that.
In Europe, debt held by public non-financial corporations – like the development corporations that housing minister Matthew Pennycook says should oversee new towns or council-owned housing companies – is not subject to the fiscal rules in the same way as central government debt.
So, as various British think-tanks have pointed out, if Britain’s Government changed the fiscal rules so that such bodies were excluded from the fiscal rules on debt, then a whole new generation of public organisations could deliver new housing and infrastructure.
Broadly speaking, Britain is much worse at building new homes than our European neighbours.
As the Centre for Cities has noted, because of the way our planning system has restricted the availability of land, the restriction of funding for new social and council homes and the lack of public capital investment in housing and new towns overall since the 80s, Britain has lagged behind Europe, building fewer new homes than France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland in particular.
This research suggests that failing to build social housing is a key reason why Britain’s housing stock has not increased at the same pace as other European nations.
Consider France.
In Paris, Paris Habitat – the country’s largest public housing developer – manages more than 120,000 homes.
In 2020, Paris Habitat transformed a 17th-century military barracks into a new eco-neighbourhood called Caserne de Reuilly, which includes 582 social and affordable homes with public gardens, a nursery and a student residence.
And Finland, where rough sleeping has almost entirely been eradicated because municipal housing companies continue to deliver social and affordable homes, which are financed through interest subsidy loans granted by a commercial bank or other financial institution like MuniFin.
Having recently visited France and the Netherlands, I won’t pretend that they don’t have their own housing crises. However, it is striking how much more municipally minded they are when it comes to building. Paris, for instance, has a mandate that at least 25 per cent of housing in the city must be social.
The reasons why Starmer and Reeves committed to their fiscal rules are important. Britain is carrying too much debt and, as a result, we are too often a hostage to fortune in global markets at a painfully volatile moment in modern history.
Somewhere, Reeves is smiling. Despite the difficulties Britain’s economy faces, it has proved tougher than many experts expected, especially amid headwinds from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
Just a few days after the IFS’s warning, the International Monetary Fund published new projections at its annual meeting in Bangkok, forecasting that Britain’s economic growth would be 0.3 percentage points higher than it had previously thought at 1.3 per cent.
Now, this is not high enough. It’s not a figure that is cause for celebration. But it does vindicate Reeves and offer some room for manoeuvre to Healey.
A simple tweak to the way debt incurred to invest in housing and infrastucture is classed and carried could change Britain’s fortunes even more.
By setting up the development corporations Labour promised, and exempting them from the fiscal debt rule, Burnham and Healey could deliver everything Labour has promised, make sure Britain remains financially responsible and achieve that elusive growth that we so urgently need.
Housing crisis watch
It is rumoured that the Government might axe funding for heat pump grants in a bid to cut hundreds of millions of pounds from the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), a flagship element of the Warm Homes Plan. My colleague Alannah Francis has written about the potential fallout of this here.
Next up, on the subject of new towns, later this week, the House of Lords Built Environment Committee will publish its findings after months of grilling experts in a bid to find out what is needed to get new towns up and running.
And, finally, it’s worth paying attention to the fact that Professor Peter Fonagy cited unaffordable housing as a factor in the growing mental health crisis faced by younger people. You can read my column about it here.
Over the weekend, I went to see , which is Aaron Sorkin’s new film about Facebook. It centres around a major investigation which was carried out by former reporter Jeff Horwitz. Worth a watch.