Female colleague says she was forced out shortly after incident with Luke Campbell, Hull and East Yorkshire mayor
A Reform UK mayor is under police investigation for allegedly showing “naked and sexualised” images of himself to a female member of staff.
Luke Campbell, a former Olympic boxing champion and the mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire, is understood to have been questioned under caution by Humberside police earlier this month.
Scrutiny committee looks into financing of Manchester Life project as PM promises ‘full transparency’
A £55m loan to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owner will be investigated as part of a review into a fund for housing projects while Andy Burnham was mayor.
The prime minister has faced weeks of scrutiny over his links to Manchester City’s super-rich owners after the club was found guilty of boosting its income by £900m in a nine-year breach of financial rules.
Alan Feeney, who sat on Solihull and Birmingham councils, said there was ‘no excuse’ for his comments
Alan Feeney has resigned as a Reform councillor for Solihull and Birmingham after backlash over racist comments that were captured in an undercover investigation.
In a Facebook post on Friday, Feeney wrote: “There is no excuse for my comments. With responsibility comes accountability, and it is for that reason that I have resigned every post I hold on both Solihull borough council and Birmingham city council.”
Party faces fresh crisis as three councillors quit after ITV undercover filming exposed violence, misogyny and racist views
Reform UK has been rocked by a fresh crisis after councillors and election candidates for the party were caught on film making graphic threats of extreme violence and expressing racist and misogynistic views.
Three councillors have already stood down from the party, which said it was conducting an investigation over the first revelations from an ITV undercover investigation that aired on Wednesday.
Environmentalists of all political hues must find the language and ideas that turn passion for climate action into impetus
The future of Green politics is under constant discussion after the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, but a much heavier clash – in meaning, symbolism and portent – happened earlier this summer, in King’s Lynn and West Norfolk. The council declared a climate emergency in 2021, along with hundreds of others, and while it was under Conservative control. It is now controlled by independents, and a Reform UK councillor, Austen Moore, moved to scrap the declaration.
It was the end of June, and the meeting had to be called off, because of the extreme heat in the King’s Lynn council chamber. A lot of people paused to grimly remark on that irony, but not Moore, who simply rescheduled the motion for the following week, where it was voted down (by 33 to seven). A local scientist and member of Extinction Rebellion liveblogged that debate, adding helpful maps, such as how much of the county was already below the annual flood level – most of it, including King’s Lynn itself. If this all sounds like a cheerful take home, numerous other Reform-led councils have had the same debate and Reform has prevailed. Their arguments can be terrifyingly illiterate. In Kent, councillor Linden Kemkaran asserted that climate change is fine because the world was warmer in Roman times, and as “carbon dioxide … is a trace gas essential for life on Earth”, to try to cut carbon emissions would itself be dangerous.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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Exclusive: Greater Manchester mayor Bev Craig invited City representative on trade trip organised by business secretary
A club representative from Manchester City was invited on a government-backed trade delegation to India this week, despite the club being found guilty of 114 breaches of Premier League rules.
Andy Burnham’s successor as Manchester mayor Bev Craig took a representative from the club to Delhi and Mumbai on a trip organised by business secretary Jonathan Reynolds,where she and other northern mayors have been promoting British trade and tourism.
The original 1970s Lewisham self-build scheme that he mentions, using methods developed by the German architect Walter Segal, was proposed by a friend of mine, Brian Richardson, who was a Lewisham council architect at the time.
More than 50 families call for investigation into how Vincent Chan was allowed to return to job after inquiry by nursery
The parents of the victims of paedophile nursery worker Vincent Chan have reacted with fury to the news that he was cleared to return to work after “significant concerns” wereraised by the parent of a young girl.
As first revealed in the Guardian, Chan was reported to his employer, the nursery chain Bright Horizons, by a concerned parent in 2021.
Exclusive: Homes demolished along east coast after being deemed too vulnerable to live in, figures reveal
Seaside communities along the east coast of England have lost at least183 homes to coastalerosion and landslides over the past 16 years, figures obtained by the Guardian reveal.
After councils judged properties across the Yorkshire and East Anglian coasts too vulnerable to remain safely occupied, the homes were proactively demolished.
Preparing her first report on England’s social care system, the peer says ‘everything is on the table’. This should include older people’s wealth, rather than taxes on younger workers
Residents with advanced dementia lined the day room, glazed stares or sleeping mouths agape, with that terrible human vacancy everyone most fears for their own end days.
This was Millvina House in Anfield, Liverpool, which I visited withLouise Casey, who is heading the commission on social care in England, last week. Here is a snippet of what she saw: an angry man jolting into life, shooting out his arm at her and bellowing: “Out! Get out! Get out!” A young care assistant went to stroke his back and calm him down. It’s a hard job, and part of it is watching for warning signs of aggression, one of dementia’s dreadful symptoms. “People don’t want to know,” Casey said, “but if you are born, you will die. Chances are you will need care, and dementia is the biggest killer.”
Survivors had criticised ‘outrageous’ appointment of Laura Johnson to £150,000 job with Barnet Group
A housing director who oversaw cost cutting at Grenfell Tower before the fatal fire has left a £150,000-a-year senior council housing role after a backlash from bereaved families and survivors.
Laura Johnson was the director of housing at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) at the time of the 2017 Grenfell fire which killed 72 people, and was criticised in the subsequent inquiry for her role in budget-cutting decisions prior to the blaze.
Council car parks have switched away from ticket machines to cut costs, leading to extra fees for users
Drivers are unwittingly paying up to 40% more to park as more councils switch to app-only payments and force customers to pick up the tab.
Many councils across England have removed pay and display machines and replaced them with app payments, including a number in London. Most local authorities encourage drivers to pay by app to beat queues, while apps are often the only way to pay when ticket machines are out of order. However, many car park signs fail to mention that app payments may incur an additional service fee.
Finance expert launches Small Ideas Initiative to gather ‘practical, low-cost’ ideas to put before cross-party panel
Every day, people run into what the finance expert Martin Lewis calls “the life-potholes of unintended consequences” – clunky systems and poorly conceived rules that make life harder than it should be. His latest project, the Small Ideas Initiative, will attempt to address that, with a cross-party panel of politicians and policymakers crowdsourcing ideas for everyday fixes to take to government.
The ideas could cover anything from health and schools to policing, tech and money. Lewis is encouraging people to submit ideas for “practical, low-cost, non-controversial ways to improve the UK” before 12 November.
A bold south London initiative to give land to community groups rather than private developers could transform the system
Lewisham council, in southeast London, is developing ambitious plans to transfer public land to community groups in an attempt to get new social housing built in the borough. According to papers tabled at Wednesday’s council cabinet meeting, the local authority is devising a new housing strategy, which includes giving packages of public land worth up to £2m each to community-led organisations such as housing co-operatives, on the condition that they build social housing.
The Green-controlled council is further considering placing any land it gives away through the programme into community land trusts, legal instruments that lock in permanent affordability. They may also provide low-interest loans to help developments get started, and pre-approve planning permission to speed up construction. It is hoped that the proposals will take effect within a year.Together, they form the most radical suite of solutions to the housing crisis any local authority is currently putting forward. If adopted elsewhere, the approach could transform the construction of social housing not just in Lewisham, but across the entire country.
Zack Polanski has led energetic campaign for the Greens, while Labour will hope to hold on to Starmer’s old seat
Voting has opened in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, a contest seen as a key gauge of Andy Burnham’s ability to energise voters and whether Zack Polanski’s Greens can still peel off support from Labour’s left.
Polanski, who leads the Greens in England and Wales, is standing for his party in the north London constituency, previously held by Keir Starmer before he stood down as an MP shortly after resigning as prime minister.
Faced with a president who has called global warming a hoax, officials have filed dozens of suits against oil companies to try to cover the costs of extreme weather.
Seldom do local officials consider the cumulative effect that several data-center projects have on a region. Construction of a Texas data center near a residential community recently.
Initial results showed that residents of Independence, Mo., voted overwhelmingly to recall an official who backed billions of dollars in tax breaks for a data center.
Organizers of the recall vote said the councilman, John Perkins, had failed to engage the public while the city negotiated with the developer of a data center project.
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