u/coffeewalnut08

Shortened summary:

What is the new Conservative policy on social housing?

Under the plans, single social housing tenants who are not UK, Irish or EU citizens with settled status would lose their right to remain in their homes. The same would apply to couples where neither partner qualifies. For future tenancies, foreign nationals would be barred from becoming social housing tenants, with eligibility limited to UK and Irish citizens and EU citizens with settled status.

The Conservatives claim the policy would free up around 230,000 homes for “British families”. Evicted tenants would be given six months to find private accommodation. The “divisive plans” could mean evicting “thousands of families and pensioners who have lived in them for decades,” said Sarah Elliott, the chief executive of housing charity Shelter.

“It is completely senseless to ruin people’s lives, drive up homelessness and put extreme pressure on councils. This policy does nothing to deliver new social homes, which is what we desperately need.”

Is it a new policy?

No. The Conservative proposal is remarkably similar to one announced by Rishi Sunak in 2024, and echoes a policy announced by Reform UK earlier this year.

Reform’s policy did go further. It would give foreign nationals already living in social housing just three months to find private accommodation. They would also not exempt EU nationals with settled status.

Who qualifies for social housing?

Most new migrants cannot access social housing. People who come to the UK on work or study visas generally have “no recourse to public funds”, meaning they cannot claim most benefits or get help with housing. Asylum seekers cannot apply for council housing either while their claim is being processed. There are limited exceptions.

Foreign nationals can qualify for social housing if they have settled status, refugee status or certain forms of humanitarian protection.

How many ‘foreign nationals’ currently live in social housing?

British people already make up the vast majority of social housing tenants.

In 2024-25, 88.5% of main householders – the person in whose name the social home is rented – were UK or Irish nationals, according to the English Housing Survey. Just 11.5% were non-UK or non-Irish nationals. That amounts to an estimated 470,000 non-UK and non-Irish citizens living in social housing.

Is the Conservatives’ plan workable?

There would be serious difficulties involved, said Williamson. “Proposals to ban foreign nationals from social housing raise significant practical, legal and operational questions.”

Firstly, the policy would likely face a legal challenge.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has previously warned that social housing providers discriminating against applicants on the basis of nationality may be breaking the law.

But even if the policy survived a court challenge, there is another obvious question: where would the people being evicted go?

“It just creates more people who are going to be in crisis,” said Mort. “A policy that creates more homelessness and doesn’t create any more homes doesn’t feel like a very good housing policy.”

Is there an alternative solution?

The Tories are right about one thing, said Mort: Britain is desperately short of social homes. Around 1.3 million households are currently on social housing waiting lists in England. The number of households in temporary accommodation reached a record high of 135,580 at the end of March 2026.

But that shortage “is not caused by migrants in social housing,” she said.

“We know what the problems are. The fundamental problem is we don’t have enough social homes. Policies like Right to Buy have completely depleted the stock that we do have, and therefore we’ve got people just languishing in temporary accommodation.”

The alternative, she argued, is to build more homes.

Andy Burnham has said he wants his Labour government to “oversee the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”.

It would be a big task. His predecessor Keir Starmer promised to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of a parliament – a target Labour is already struggling to meet.

Andy Burnham has pledged to give every person sleeping rough a route off the streets by Christmas as he unveiled the first steps in his drive to end rough sleeping in England.

The prime minister announced that new accommodation and support will be rolled out across England this winter based on the A Bed Every Night model he pioneered as Greater Manchester mayor.

Emergency accommodation will be made available alongside help with housing, health and other needs to help people out of homelessness, backed with increased funding of £442 million.

The move comes a month after Burnham revealed that his first instruction as prime minister would be to put the country on a path to ending rough sleeping as he was unveiled at 10 Downing Street.

“No one should have to bed down in a doorway or outside a station. But we’ve seen it for so long that it feels like Westminster has started to accept it,” said Burnham.

“I won’t accept it. That’s why my first instruction as prime minister was to end rough sleeping. And it’s why today we’re getting started with a national drive to get everyone in for Christmas.

“We did it in the pandemic. We can do it again. But it needs all of us. Government will put the money in. But I’m asking leaders in communities and sectors across society to play their part locally too.

“Let’s get people out of the cold. And let’s bring back hope.”

The government claimed the new policy will “not only change lives but have huge benefits for the whole country” citing research from Crisis that suggests preventing 40,000 people from becoming homeless for a year could save taxpayers around £370 million.

Sarah Elliott, chief executive of Shelter, described the pledge to get everyone sleeping rough off the streets by Christmas as “a game-changing move”. 

Big Issue founder John Bird compared Burnham’s actions to the Everyone In scheme, which saw government act quickly to bring rough sleepers indoors during the pandemic.

The scheme saw 37,000 people housed in hotels and prevented an estimated 266 deaths in the first lockdown alone, according to a University College London study.

But progress was undone following the pandemic: the most recent official government rough sleeping snapshot counted a record-high number of people on the streets last autumn. 

“Covid proved that when we decide rough sleeping is unacceptable, we can act and get people in off the streets. This Christmas commitment is a welcome return to that spirit,” said Lord Bird.

“But it’s important that people are not just brought in from the cold for a few weeks, only to be sent back out again. To that end, I’m encouraged to see the prime minister is allocating millions in tried-and-tested local solutions that offer wraparound support for long-term rough sleepers.

“Countless projects and pilots demonstrated this approach works, only to be suffocated by the underinvestment and short-termist mindset of the previous government.”

Areas with the greatest need will receive the largest share of the £442m funding to get people out of the cold this winter and give long-term rough sleepers a settled home and the support to keep it.

The funding will help local areas deliver more than 1,000 settled homes over the next three years, alongside intensive wraparound support to help people rebuild their lives.

Mayors will work with councils to drive action to end rough sleeping, the government said, with local areas making decisions on how to deliver help where it is needed most. 

"I’ve always thought you can tell something about a country by what it learns to walk past. And, somewhere along the way, we’ve got used to seeing people sleeping rough on our streets.

We see people bedded down in doorways and sat outside stations, carrying their lives in rucksacks and with sleeping bags on their backs. And I think most people have the same reaction: this isn’t right; it shouldn’t be happening here. But we’ve lived with it for so long that something that used to shock us now feels like part of the scenery.

That’s not on the public. It’s on us as politicians. For decades, Westminster has treated rough sleeping like a problem to step around rather than solve. It’s a philosophy that took hold in the 1980s and came back full force in the era of austerity: this idea that rough sleeping is just a fact of life rather than something government has a responsibility to end.

I’ve never accepted that. Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world. We’ve built the NHS, developed life-saving vaccines and invented the world wide web. But it’s somehow beyond us to get our own people off the streets? I don’t believe it for a minute. We did it during the pandemic. We got people out of the cold because, as a country, we decided it had to be done. We can do it again.

That’s why the first thing I announced when I became prime minister was a commitment to end rough sleeping. Not to manage it, not to reduce it – but to end it. And today, we’re taking the first step in getting it done.

We’re putting £442m behind a national drive in England to get everyone in for Christmas. I don’t want Whitehall trying to dictate how every penny of that is spent. The people who know what will work in Newcastle, Liverpool or Plymouth are the people who live there and see the problem first-hand every day. I’ll expect every person to be offered a route off the streets, but beyond that it will be up to local leaders to decide what type of support their community needs most.

But I also know from my time in Manchester that public money alone won’t solve this. Ending rough sleeping has to be something we all take responsibility for. That means councils, charities, businesses, faith groups and local communities all pulling together. And, even more importantly, it means all of us asking what we can do to help.

So alongside the money we’re putting in, I’m asking leaders across society to get behind this national drive. Because if we all play our part – if we all put care of people at the heart of what we do – we can bring some of that hope back to our communities. No matter who they are or what they’ve been through, every person sleeping rough deserves a chance to get back on their feet – and, together, that’s exactly what we’ll give them.

I don’t pretend this is a permanent fix – far from it. It’s not enough just to help people when they fall on hard times. It’s our job to catch people long before they hit the pavement, and that means dealing with the multitude of reasons why someone might be sleeping rough in the first place.

That’s why we’re reforming education so every young person, whatever their talents, has a route to a good job. It’s why we’re reindustrialising our towns and cities to make sure we get good growth in every postcode. It’s why we’ve committed to the biggest housebuilding programme since the second world war. And it’s why we’ll keep transferring power back to the local people who are closest to the problems they face and are best placed to solve them.

But today is about making that crucial first step. It’s about giving people a safe place to sleep tonight, and hope that tomorrow might be different. And, fundamentally, it’s about answering that defining question: what kind of country do we want Britain to be?"

Study involving 100 sitting MPs reveals gulf between perceptions of the political class and realities of public attitudes on environmental issues such as insulation and green taxes.

Our study found a systematic pessimism about the public appetite for climate action among the UK’s most influential decision-makers

Lisa-Maria Tanase

Members of Parliament from the UK’s three biggest political parties in the House of Commons significantly overestimate levels of public resistance to major policy proposals for tackling climate change, a University of Cambridge study suggests. 

Researchers say it may be the first data-led evidence for a “spiral of silence” in Westminster, where skewed perceptions of public sentiment among politicians can reduce political support for a policy.  

The study’s authors, from the University’s El-Erian Institute of Behavioural Economics and Policy and the Cambridge Political Psychology Lab, surveyed one hundred sitting MPs in early 2025 on how they think voters and other parliamentarians feel about carbon reduction policies, and compared their estimates with public polling from earlier that year.

On making grants or loans for improved insulation available to all households with an energy efficiency rating of C or below, MPs collectively estimated public opposition to the policy at around 18%, more than three times the actual level of just 6%. 

When asked about rejigging tax on products so that it varies according to environmental damage, MPs believed public opposition to be around 38%, almost double the 20% shown by polling the British people.  

“MPs across parties who both support and oppose climate policies consistently overestimate public opposition,” said study lead author Dr Lisa-Maria Tanase, who conducted the work for her PhD at Cambridge. “This is likely to limit the range of what they consider to be politically feasible options for taking action on climate change.”   

“Our findings cannot be explained away by wishful thinking of politicians or the projecting of their own worldview. On average, even MPs who support a climate policy think the public is more opposed to it than it really is,” said Tanase. 
“Politicians, like all of us, are often exposed to information environments that distort perceptions of public opinion. Social and traditional media can disproportionately reflect particularly vocal segments of society rather than the full distribution of opinion.” 

“We find a ‘funhouse mirror’ effect through which politicians see a distorted version of the public position on carbon reduction policies, associated with a lower willingness to promote these ideas,” said Tanase, now a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Cambridge’s El-Erian Institute of Behavioural Economics and Policy. 

The deportation and removal of British citizens from Sweden over Brexit residency rights is damaging relations with the UK amid efforts to improve links with London, a Swedish MP has said.

Häkan Svenneling, representative for Vârmland, where a 78-year-old British widow, Joyce Thomas, has been given four weeks to leave Sweden after 21 years of residency, has written to the migration minister, Johan Forssell, asking what he “intends to do to stop the deportations”.

Sevenneling, who is an opposition MP for the left, is to meet Thomas on Wednesday, exactly a week after she was told her appeal had failed over the removal order.

Thomas told the Guardian: “I am in shock. I feel sick. An individual’s life is at stake at my age. It is hell. I have done nothing wrong.”

The retired nurse moved to Sweden with her financier husband, to be closer to one of their sons and their grandchildren, when she was 57.

Her husband, who died of cancer in 2023, did all the administrative work in the household, but both Thomas and her friends have said repeatedly they checked if they had to complete any forms to remain in the country after Brexit, and were told they did not.

This has been a tough pill to swallow for me, but has become increasingly apparent as I see how different online communities are moderated.

See Elon Musk when he took over X, for example. Directly led to an explosion of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism etc. of the absolute worst kind. Stuff you'd expect of 1930 Germany.

This content is being permitted on X under the guise of "free speech".

But guess what? Free speech doesn't have to extend to allowing soul-destroyingly bigoted commentary, memes, propaganda and harassment. This is a leadership choice. And we all pay the price when the Epstein class oligarchs refuse to lead properly.

Or worse yet, when the Epstein class oligarchs actually decide that inciting riots/tensions between diverse communities benefits them, so they encourage it.

It's the same across Reddit. Find a bigoted racist sub? Chances are the mods just don't have a grip on the problem - or, in some cases, the mods agree with it.

The Epstein class now declares that caring about your neighbours, irrespective of race, nationality, sexuality or religion - is some sort of "suicidal empathy".

Nonsense. It's just called having basic human decency. It's not that hard to enforce, or set a good behavioural example of it.

Also, empathy is a basic human quality that has ensured our survival through history. It's not a bad word. The last time "let's end suicidal empathy" types rose to power, they were actually the ones that nearly ended the human race - e.g.: World War 1, World War 2.

While Keir Starmer’s premiership has officially come to an end, one of his most significant policies is about to come into force: the expansion of Free School Meals in England to more than 500,000 children from September.

Announced in June 2025 as a precursor to the 2025 Child Poverty Strategy, the government has estimated that these additional meals will lift over 100,000 children out of poverty.

More recently, following their victory in the 2026 Senedd election, Plaid Cymru have announced a similar expansion in Wales. From September, eligibility will be extended to students in Years 7 and 8, with plans to roll it out to all secondary school students in households receiving Universal Credit over the coming years.

But how will it all work? And how will it affect school funding?

(More details in article)

Families who claim free school meals receive support equivalent to around £500 per year in school meals. This support can go beyond school meals by making families eligible for holiday free meals.

Reform UK has pledged to bar foreign nationals from claiming almost all forms of welfare in a move condemned as "senseless and cruel".

Nigel Farage's party said it would remove entitlements to Universal Credit, Housing Benefit, Pension Credit, Jobseeker's Allowance, Child Benefit, free childcare and disability benefits if it wins the next general election.

Reform claims the move, which will include those from the EU given 'settled status' in the UK after Brexit, would save taxpayers £21 billion a year within five years.

Other parties attacked the plan, warning it would plunge the UK back into years of Brexit negotiations and "strip" support from millions who have worked and paid taxes in the UK for years or even decades.

A Labour spokesperson hit out at the plans, which he said would "mean ripping up the UK's Withdrawal Agreement with the EU, plunging the UK back into years of Brexit renegotiations, and stripping support from potentially millions of people who have lawfully lived, worked, and paid taxes in Britain for years, and in many cases decades. That includes people with settled status who are part of our communities, raising families, working, and contributing to our economy."

THOUSANDS of Britons could lose access to benefits in Spain if Reform UK pushes ahead with plans to strip EU nationals of welfare in Britain, one of the party’s own MPs has admitted.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Monday, Danny Kruger said he would ‘understand it’ if European countries decided to ‘deny our nationals access to their welfare system’ in response to the plan.
It came as Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s economy spokesman, unveiled a proposal on Monday to ban foreign nationals – including EU citizens – from accessing most benefits in Britain if the party is elected to government.

The plan would require a renegotiation of the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU, with experts warning Brussels could respond with a tit-for-tat ban on Britons living across Europe.

The party’s own policy documents say foreign nationals would no longer be eligible for welfare payments under a Reform government, while EU nationals with settled status would retain their residency rights but lose their current entitlement to benefits.

The plan would, however, run into the existing Brexit settlement.

EU citizens in Britain who are protected by the Withdrawal Agreement have rights that include equal treatment in areas such as social security, meaning Reform would need to renegotiate the UK’s arrangements with the EU before introducing the proposed ban.

Spain was home to 266,462 British nationals as of January 1, 2025, according to the latest figures from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE).

Amnesty International has warned that Reform’s plan to cut benefits for disabled people and ban foreign nationals, including EU citizens with settled status, from accessing most benefits would breach the UK’s human rights commitments.

Reform’s finance spokesperson, Robert Jenrick, set out the proposals in an article for the Telegraph yesterday.

Reform has said that if it won power it would scrap Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and the health element of Universal Credit, and replace it with a “health security allowance”, a single, regularly reviewed payment.

Jenrick also said that Reform will ban foreign-born households from claiming universal credit, housing benefit, pension credit, jobseeker’s allowance, child benefit, free childcare, free school meals or disability benefits.

Jenrick claimed paying benefits to non-British people was “plain immoral”, even though many would have paid into the tax system through working.

He also wrote in the Telegraph over the weekend that the amount spent on disability benefits was “not generosity … it is suicidal empathy”.

Amnesty said that it was “grotesque” to call providing disabled people with benefits “suicidal empathy”.

“Calling that ‘suicidal empathy’ is grotesque. Pip isn’t generosity, it’s what lets people eat, pay for the equipment they need to stay alive, live with dignity and take part in society – and taking it away doesn’t save money, it shifts the cost onto people’s health, sometimes their lives.

“The same goes for people permitted to make this country their home. The minority who claim social security do so on the same basis as other taxpayers. Stripping their benefits isn’t fairness, it’s scapegoating – and it’s built on the same premise: that some people’s rights matter less than others.“

Brexit didn’t create all the problems young people now face, but renewing close ties with Europe will give us so many opportunities

"I was 14 when the UK voted to leave the EU. Too young to vote, but not too young to understand that a decision was being made that would affect the rest of my life.

In many ways, Brexit was my political awakening. It taught me that politics matters, because decisions made by people in power can change your future before you’ve even been given a say.

Ten years later, my generation is living with that decision. We lost the automatic right to live, work and study freely across 27 other countries. Opportunities previous generations took for granted are now more complicated, more expensive or completely out of reach. But with a new prime minister who has a recorded history of stating that we should rejoin the EU, perhaps we can start to hope.

If you have money, many of these barriers can be overcome. You are better able to cope with the extra costs, paperwork and bureaucracy involved in moving abroad. Someone from a wealthy family can afford more expensive routes to studying or living overseas. But what about everyone else?

Freedom of movement wasn’t just a nice perk for people who could already afford to travel. For working-class young people like me, it meant opportunity. It was the possibility of studying in Paris, working in Berlin, or falling in love in Barcelona and building a life there. It was about experiencing different cultures, learning languages and feeling part of something bigger.

Young people are already facing a difficult economic future. Housing is increasingly unaffordable, wages haven’t kept pace with costs and many of us wonder whether we’ll ever have the security our parents got to enjoy. The median income for those aged 25 and under has not increased for two decades. We are becoming the first generation in modern times to seriously contemplate having less than our parents.

Brexit didn’t create all of these problems. But putting up economic barriers against our largest neighbouring market certainly hasn’t helped. We were told Brexit would create opportunities. For many working-class young people, it did the opposite. I think often of my friend: a British citizen who married a German, only to face endless challenges just so they could live together. And countless young people in creative industries have had their careers stifled through lack of access to the continent.

This is why Andy Burnham’s approach to Europe is so important.

The prime minister must start removing some of the walls Brexit put up. Make it easier for young people to study and work in Europe, restore opportunities for musicians, artists and young creatives, and make sure those opportunities aren’t reserved for people wealthy enough to pay their way around the obstacles.

But closer ties aren’t enough. My generation wants the UK to rejoin the EU. So my message to Burnham is simple: be brave.

Don’t become another prime minister whose time in office is cut short trying to find another way to make Brexit work. My generation didn’t get a vote last time. Give us one now and I believe we’ll vote for our future in Europe. And this time, give 16- and 17-year-olds a vote too. If they’re old enough to live with the consequences of a decision for the rest of their lives, they’re old enough to have a say in it.

We young people have grown up connected to the rest of Europe and the world. We don’t see someone in France, Germany, Poland or Spain as being on the other side of some great divide. They’re our friends, colleagues and partners.

Politicians worry about young people becoming disengaged from politics. Perhaps they should ask why."