Andy Burnham has come to power with an ambition to re-industrialise Britain through a series of domestic initiatives - shifting power away from London, using government contracts to drive local economies and putting technical and academic education on an equal footing. Each is designed to secure growth in every postcode, the undercurrent of his domestic political agenda.

This local-first approach was to be expected, true to his record as Manchester mayor. In contrast, Burnham has said comparatively little so far about his international priorities. Appointing the highly-experienced Ed Miliband suggests he might be happy delegating most of his international diplomacy. Could this be a strategic move designed as a deliberate break from his predecessor, whose frequent overseas travel led critics to dub him ‘Never here Keir’?

Nevertheless, no re-industrialisation plan works without a plan to export, especially to our largest market and the world’s biggest trading bloc. These go hand in hand, and at some point, Burnham will have to make - and explain - some choices about our relationship with the EU.

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Laid out in black and white, the Milburn review was damning: one million young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK are not in education, employment or training (NEETs). A decade ago our NEET rate was closer to the average of EU countries but today, the UK is an outlier that has fallen behind its European counterparts. Finding employment is only one of the many challenges facing today's youngsters, and I should know - it’s my generation.

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If political leadership requires walking a tightrope between the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will, successive UK prime ministers have failed to strike the right balance. Boris Johnson and Liz Tru…

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“I’m not going back to work.” In the past year, while on maternity leave, I’ve heard this - whispered, awkwardly, in sticky soft plays, over spilled coffee - from three friends. Ambitious, capable women leaving before being pushed, flexible working requests denied; childcare places impossible to find; hundreds of pounds wasted on non-refundable nursery registration fees.

Coming back to my desk just last week, I’ve seen that the story is the same across the UK. Flexible working rights have been strengthened thanks to the Employment Rights Act - but many of these changes won’t come into effect until 2027. For my friends, denied the opportunity to work part-time by their employers, it comes too late.

Paying to work

For those that do return, many are paying to work - with nursery fees outstripping their monthly take-home pay. It costs an average of £148.82 per week to send a child under two to nursery full-time in the UK - and that’s if you qualify for both the Tax-Free Childcare and Free Childcare for Working Parents government schemes. But if, like me, you live in the South-East of England and have two children in a nursery, your monthly bill will easily exceed £2,000. Add that to the nearly-doubled mortgage bill gifted to us by Liz Truss (and my wine bill, just to do this maths each month).

Admittedly, the funded hours have helped. When my daughter first started at nursery in 2024, her bill alone was almost £2,000 a month for four days’ care per week. Coram’s 2026 childcare survey showed that working parents of children under three in England now pay less than half of last year’s cost for a part-time nursery place.

But here’s the catch: the government systems designed to support you can punish you for getting the calculation wrong. Take Tax-Free Childcare and Universal Credit’s childcare element. You can’t have both, and just opening a Tax-Free Childcare account stops your entire Universal Credit claim. Get it wrong and you haven’t just lost a top-up, you’ve lost your entire benefit. Good luck trying to operate the government’s childcare calculator after another broken night’s sleep.

Not just babysitting

Almost a million parents don’t have the chance to do this calculation - because they’re not entitled to help in the first place. Government-funded childcare mostly relies on being in work. If you’re not, you’re not eligible, regardless of your circumstances.

That may be about to change. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has joined calls for a “universal early years“ offer, arguing that childcare isn’t simply babysitting so parents can go to work, it’s the first rung of a child’s education. Last September, 37% of children starting Reception weren’t judged school-ready. A quarter weren’t yet toilet-trained, and a third were unable to eat and drink independently.

Children who haven’t reached a good level of development by age five are almost three times more likely to be not in education, employment or training 12 years later. Financial support should not be predicated on whether a parent can find enough paid work to qualify - it’s an investment in the next generation.

19 more years

For parents like me who do meet the work requirement, the cost doesn’t end at childcare fees. The ‘motherhood penalty’ continues long after the kids are out of nappies. Last October, the Office for National Statistics released new analysis, showing:

• An average 42% fall in mothers’ earnings five years after the birth of their first child;

• Amounting to a total loss of £65,618 for the first child, and losses of £26,000-£32,000 for subsequent children;

• Women are twice as likely as men to reduce hours for childcare.

My three friends pushed out of work while on maternity leave are not anomalies. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, in research with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, found significant numbers of mothers experienced dismissal, redundancy, pressure to leave or loss of opportunity after having children. A lack of progression in the early years of motherhood compounds across a career - separate research by the IFS found that by the time a first child turns 20, mothers earn about 30% less per hour than similarly educated fathers. This isn’t just driven by discrimination, but by the years of wage progression that part-time work stymies.

Lower earnings and reduced pension contributions from part-time work can spell disaster in the long run. It’s no coincidence that the UK has the second largest gender pension gap in the OECD. To reach the same pension savings as men, women would need to work 19 more years, unless they buy an annuity. Another 19 years of work - by which time I’ll be writing something like this while dodging globs of Weetabix thrown by grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, rather than my one-year-old.

A historic low

No, this bit isn’t about how I’m writing this in between clearing up puddles of vomit after my son caught a sickness bug during my first week back at work.

Birth rates have fallen to an average of 1.4 children per woman in England and Wales: the lowest level since 1977. (The irony of researching fertility rates in the five minutes’ peace afforded by a nap is not lost on me.) This is a global phenomenon. Fixing our childcare systems and supporting parents who want to work to do so won’t be a magic bullet. But the complexity and cost associated with the early years clearly does not encourage families to have more children.

My three friends haven’t left work by choice - they’ve been priced and pushed out of it. And for every sick-stained shirt I’m hurriedly wiping clean before a Zoom call, there’s another hanging in a wardrobe somewhere, unworn - because the woman who owned it wasn’t given the choice to put it back on.

Julia Meadon is Director of Digital at Best for Britain.

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It has been ten years this week since the Brexit referendum, and it’s become a truism to state that everything has changed. Russia is waging war on the European continent, China is more assertive than ever, and with his tariffs and undermin…

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This week, the government announced plans to ban social media for under-16s. Predictably, the response was immediate. Supporters argued it was a long-overdue attempt to protect children from companies increasingly associated with poor mental health, addiction and abuse. Others warn it would risk driving young people elsewhere online and distract from addressing underlying drivers of harm.

Both sides make valid points, and so did the Prime Minister, when he was challenged on these issues. ‘We don’t give up on banning cigarettes for under 18s, just because some teenagers end up smoking,’ was the gist of his response. And he is quite right, a compliance rate of even 50% if or when this ban is introduced, would represent a profound shift in norms about the role social media should play in children’s lives.

5Rights has been clear that any ban must be a circuit breaker, not the end of the conversation, because behind this announcement lies a more fundamental question: how did we arrive at a point where such a dramatic intervention seemed necessary in the first place? That question sits at the heart of Baroness Beeban Kidron’s new book, Users. Central to Kidron’s argument is its rejection of the idea that the digital world we inhabit today was somehow inevitable. Every major feature of today’s online world, from the business models that reward engagement to the algorithms that decide what we see, exists because somebody decided it should. They are the result of choices and if today’s digital environment was a choice, then tomorrow’s can be too.

That might sound obvious. Yet for years, tech policy has been dominated by a sense of fatalism. Platforms grew at extraordinary speed, new products transformed the way we communicate and policymakers often found themselves scrambling to keep up. The result was a widespread assumption that technological change simply happens to us and that society’s role is merely to adapt. Users challenges that assumption. It asks us to look beyond the rhetoric of innovation and examine the incentives shaping the digital world around us.

For children and young people, those questions have become impossible to ignore. The debate about social media restrictions reflects a growing public concern that digital products are shaping childhood in ways that were neither anticipated nor intended. Yet discussion often gets bogged down in two unsatisfactory positions: either technology is inherently harmful and should be restricted, or responsibility rests entirely with children and parents to navigate it safely.

Kidron offers a more useful starting point. Rather than asking how children can better adapt to digital systems, she asks whether digital systems are being designed in ways that support children’s wellbeing, rights and development in the first place. The answer matters because design is never neutral. Recommendation systems, engagement metrics and advertising models all influence behaviour. They determine what is rewarded, what is amplified and, ultimately, what kind of online environment people experience. Behind every platform sits a set of commercial incentives. Behind every product sits a series of decisions.

What makes Users particularly valuable is its refusal to accept the increasingly tired argument that protecting people online must come at the expense of technological progress. Growth, technological advancement and commercial success are not inherently bad things. Nor are technology companies uniquely villainous. The question is whether the incentives driving innovation are aligned with the interests of users, families and society as a whole.

The question is no longer whether technology should be regulated. We regulate medicines without being anti-healthcare. We regulate cars without being anti-transport. We regulate food without being anti-agriculture. The idea that technology alone should sit beyond democratic accountability has always been a strange proposition.

The UK has often led this debate, from the Age Appropriate Design Code to the Online Safety Act. As Head of UK Affairs at 5Rights Foundation, the organisation founded by Beeban Kidron to champion children’s rights in the digital world, I have seen how far the conversation has moved. Ideas once dismissed as unrealistic and impossible by tech companies and policymakers are now shaping policy discussions in Westminster and around the world.

Yet many of the underlying questions remain unresolved. Progress has come from refusing to accept that harmful outcomes are simply the inevitable price of technological change. The most effective regulation has not sought to prevent innovation, but to ensure it develops in ways that reflect democratic values and human needs.

Whether the government’s proposed restrictions prove successful remains to be seen. What matters is that they challenge the notion that the digital world is a force of nature beyond our control, and recognise that we have agency should we wish to use it. That, ultimately, is the significance of Users. It is not really a book about screens, apps or even technology. It is a book about power. Who has it. Who exercises it. And who gets to challenge it.

For too long, the public has been encouraged to see the digital world as something that simply happens to us: a tide to be ridden rather than a current we can channel. Kidron rejects that fatalism. Our digital world was built by people, and it can be changed by people. The sooner we remember that the better.

Colette Collins-Walsh is the Head of UK Affairs at 5Rights Foundation.

Users by Baroness Beeban Kidron will be released on 25th June 2026. Register here for the live launch event.

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World Environment Day arrives every year with a familiar mix of messaging, good-intentioned ideas and carefully curated imagery. At worst, we scroll past. At bes…

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Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, lager and footie, they make us all Britons. Or do they?

It’s not a bad place t…

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The UK’s vote to leave the EU in 2016 has made our country poorer, more isolated, and less safe. But that doesn’t mean voters were wrong about the economic consensus of the preceding years failing them, and their communities. We think it’s important that these two points aren’t conflated or confused: so we’ve made this post free to read, for everyone. - Best for Britain

Lisa Nandy deserves credit for acknowledging that something went badly wrong for millions of British people in the decades before Brexit. The towns hollowed out by deindustrialisation, the communities that felt invisible to Westminster, the sense that the economy worked for some but not for others are all real, all legitimate, and all demanding of a serious political response.

But before a doctor can prescribe, she must diagnose correctly. And on this, Nandy has got it wrong. The cause of that failure was not European Union membership. A cabinet minister who misidentifies the disease cannot prescribe the cure, and worse, risks making the patient sicker.

Over successive decades governments of all shades failed to build enough new homes, to invest in skills or transport infrastructure outside the southeast of England. As was the devastating austerity agenda of the 2010s. The decision to pursue a decade of cuts to local government was made by a Conservative-led coalition and enthusiastically backed by the Liberal Democrats who spent much of the following decade refusing to challenge it. The EU did not force George Osborne’s hand. The EU did not close the Sure Start centres or gut the further education colleges in Wigan and Wakefield and Wolverhampton. Those were the sovereign choices of the British government.

Forty years of macroeconomic consensus have failed ordinary people. Trickle-down economics did not trickle down. The homes were not built. The new industries did not arrive in the towns where the old ones had gone. That is a serious charge, but it is a charge against the political class of this country, not against our former membership of the European single market.

Lisa Nandy is also wrong about where public opinion now sits. The polling is consistent and increasingly clear: there is a large and growing gap between those who want to rejoin the EU and those who prefer to remain outside. Voters were lied to about the benefits of Brexit by Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and others, and they know it. The promised bonuses have not materialised. The NHS has not received its £350 million a week. The trade deals have not compensated for what was lost. But knowing you were deceived is not the same as wanting to reverse course immediately, and conflating the two does not help anyone.

There is something particularly striking about hearing these arguments from the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. Because no one in cabinet has a clearer view of the concrete, daily damage Brexit has inflicted on the creative industries than she does. Musicians cannot tour Europe without navigating a labyrinth of work permits. Orchestras cancel international residencies because the costs and paperwork have become prohibitive. Schools lost access to Erasmus exchanges that opened doors for young people who could not afford to travel independently. Lower-league football clubs find recruitment from European talent pools immeasurably harder. That is the lived reality of the sector she is paid to champion.

Her job is to stand up for those musicians, those touring artists, those students. Not to suggest they are out of step with what voters want.

The status quo before Brexit failed people. That diagnosis is correct. But the prescription matters as much as the diagnosis. No other policy option on the table unlocks the kind of growth that EU membership does. It offers a government with genuine political will the chance to deploy that growth to deliver the transformative economic change needed to improve the lives of people in Makerfield and beyond. Misidentify the illness and you prescribe the wrong treatment. Britain has been misdiagnosed for long enough.

Naomi Smith is CEO of Best for Britain.

I was in Glasgow and Cardiff recently, filming people for Best for Britain’s social media, and what struck me was the number of people, young and old, who brought up the Erasmus+ scheme in our conversations. From those who had the opportunity …

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We all know how a hangover works.

You do something you know will hurt you, but that’s a problem for tomorrow. And tomorrow can deal with itself. But then morning arrives, the headache kicks in - and you’re left with the crumpled receipts and an overwhelming sense of regret.

Britain is living through a particularly painful version of that experience - and one a glass of water and two paracetamol or even a full English can’t cure. A decade after the Brexit vote, the sense that something hasn’t quite worked as intended is no longer confined to one side of the argument. And that is becoming measurable.

Best for Britain has just published new analysis suggesting that not only is public opinion shifting, but that politicians are underestimating the opportunity that comes with it. A pro-membership position is no longer politically unthinkable. In fact, it’s politically advantageous - and underpriced. Our report finds that a push for UK membership of the European Union (EU) would galvanise progressive voters. It also shows that such a position is associated with stronger economic growth than the current trajectory, which continues to constrain efforts to reduce the soaring weekly shop, energy bills and the costs hammering British businesses.

At the same time, more than half of Brits now support rejoining the EU, while the number who believe Brexit has been a success continues to decline. This is not a sudden reversal. It is a steady shift, driven less by theories and ideology and more by the solid evidence of lived experience.

Immediately after the referendum, attitudes to Brexit were highly polarised and strongly held. Voters interpreted new information through an existing identity: Leave or Remain. Now, though? That has changed. Views on Brexit are now more closely tied to perceptions of economic performance, trade friction and pressure on public services. The issue is shifting from identity to outcomes, which matters a lot, because identity-based views tend to be stable and resistant to change. Outcome-based views are not: as the evidence accumulates, opinion moves with it. And the evidence stares us straight in the face.

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From friction at the border, to pressure in the labour market, or weaker economic performance - including estimates that UK GDP is up to 8% lower than it would otherwise have been - the practical consequences of Brexit are plain to see. As those consequences bite, the impact on voters really starts to show; right across the political spectrum.

Our report reveals support for rejoining the EU is highest among Liberal Democrat (84%), Labour (83%), and Green Party (82%) supporters, with about two-thirds (63-69%) of each strongly supporting this. Tellingly, almost two-fifths (39%) of Conservative supporters and a fifth (18%) of Reform UK supporters also back this policy position.

Politics, however, has been slower to respond than voters. There has been a shift in tone from the Prime Minister but both major parties remain committed to variations of the status quo. Labour has ruled out rejoining the EU, the single market or the customs union: its manifesto red lines. While the Conservatives insist on continuing to defend Brexit as a strategic success, and Reform UK push once more for a ‘no deal Brexit’. And so the gap between what voters want and what politicians are prepared to offer grows, with the median voter position evolving far more quickly than the median political position.

Those ‘halfway house’ approaches - customs union, single market alignment, sector-by-sector agreements, are the familiar menu of ‘closer relationships’ that have dominated political discussion for so long. They are often presented as pragmatic compromises, politically cunning ways to capture some of the economic benefits of EU membership while avoiding the political risk.

But at Best for Britain we base our approach on evidence, and the evidence suggests halfway houses are not the answer. As part of our report, we assessed the economic impact and political viability of each of these options. The conclusion is clear: there is limited appetite for half-measure solutions compared with resounding, and deeply-felt, support for full EU membership.

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Economically, partial arrangements deliver partial benefits. They reduce some friction but leave significant barriers in place. What they do not do is restore the conditions required for stronger, sustained growth. Politically, they offer little shelter, particularly when our European neighbours are understandably reluctant to permit us to cherry-pick only the juiciest policies.

Lengthy negotiations would accompany all of these half-options. Trade-offs are unavoidable and they would not resolve the underlying arguments around sovereignty, arguments that would be swiftly exploited by the usual suspects. These halfway houses offer neither the full economic upside nor the political safety net required when balancing on a Westminster high-wire between an increasingly frustrated electorate and those extremely loud voices of the far right.

Full EU membership, however, provides both the economic gains and the political clarity that partial solutions cannot. Unfortunately, too much of Britain’s current political strategy relies heavily on the intermediate options because they appear to be safer, less confrontational and easier to explain. But if they deliver neither the required economic gains nor political durability, their advantage is illusory. In effect, they risk prolonging the uncertainty they are designed to manage. Our analysis confirms it: the political risk of a clear pro-EU position is now much lower than assumed, and the potential rewards far higher.

There’s a growing realisation that the Brexit experiment has failed and Britain left with an almighty migraine. It’s high time our politicians dispensed the cure by applying for UK membership of the European Union.

Naomi Smith is chief executive of Best for Britain.

This week marked World Health Day and this year the World Health Organisation (WHO) is pushing the message ‘stand with science’. While at first glance the slogan sounds broadly positive, it’s an argument that should give us pause.

Once upon a time, people didn’t need to be asked to ‘stand with’ science, experts didn’t plead for trust, and ground-breaking…

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This morning the ONS released the latest GDP figures for the UK. They are not a disaster. They are something in some ways worse than a disaster. They are a flatline.

A disaster at least implies energy, something going wrong at speed. A flatline just sits there on the monitor, barely registering. And when a patient flatlines, medics don’t stand around looking at their shoes. They wheel out the crash cart, reach for the adrenaline. They get the defibrillator charged and on the chest within seconds, because every moment spent deliberating is a moment you don’t get back. This government needs to start acting less like a group of consultants scheduling a follow-up appointment and more like an A&E team that knows exactly what the patient needs and has it ready to go.

Britain’s economy is not collapsing. It is not roaring. It is doing the economic equivalent of lying very still and hoping nobody asks it to do anything difficult. And at a moment when the global trading environment is being torn apart by Donald Trump’s tariff war and Donald Trump’s actual war, when supply chains are being redrawn, when every country in the world is scrambling to find stable partners and reliable markets, flatlining is not a neutral position. Flatlining is falling behind.

So what do we do?

There is, as it happens, a very clear answer to that question. It is not complicated. It is not politically contentious, at least not in the way its opponents like to claim. It is not some pie-in-the-sky prospectus that requires years of negotiation and goodwill from parties who have none. It is a set of commitments that this government has already made, to partners who have already agreed, at a summit that has already happened.

The UK-EU Summit last year produced a set of promises. Real ones, serious ones, with genuine growth attached to them. Independent analysis by Frontier Economics shows there is upwards of 2% additional growth available to the UK economy from delivering on those commitments and then extending alignment across industrial and service sectors. Two percent. At a moment when the economy is growing at something close to nothing, two percent is not a marginal gain. It is transformational. It is the difference between an economy with a beating heart and one that’s on life support.

And here is the thing that should make this politically straightforward as well as economically obvious: voters want it. Our polling shows consistent, cross-country, cross-party support for closer alignment with Europe. This is not a metropolitan fantasy or a Remainer nostalgia project. It is what people across Great Britain, when asked what they want the government to do to grow the economy, actually say they want. The politics and the economics are pointing in the same direction. This doesn’t always happen so when it does, you move.

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There is also a dimension to this that goes beyond our own interests, and which has become considerably more urgent in recent months. Europe is absorbing serious damage from Trump’s tariff war. The transatlantic economic relationship that has underpinned Western prosperity for decades is being deliberately dismantled by an American administration that views trade as a zero-sum competition rather than a shared system. In that environment, a closer and more formally aligned UK-EU economic relationship is not just good for Britain. It is a genuine shield for Europe, a way of deepening the internal resilience of the European economy at precisely the moment external pressure is being applied most aggressively.

We are, in other words, in the fortunate position of being able to do something that is good for us, good for our neighbours, popular with our electorate, consistent with commitments already made, and deliverable without new legislation or fresh negotiation from scratch. The framework exists. The will, on the European side, is there. The public is on board.

The only thing missing is pace.

So to Nick Thomas-Symonds and Maroš Šefčovič: charge the paddles, shock the patient, and get on with it.

Naomi Smith is Chief Executive of Best for Britain.

If the government proposed something that made Trump and the pharmaceutical industry happy, but would cost money - and potentially risk lives - in our NHS, would you vote for it?

No? Possibly? Well, that’s what’s being proposed under the UK-US pharmaceutical deal. And, so far, it’s happening without any meaningful debate in Parliament.

Here’s what you need to know (and bear with me on the technicalities).

Late last year, the government unveiled what it’s calling the “landmark UK-US pharmaceuticals deal”. Put simply, the NHS buys medicines from drug companies via official supply chains and provides them - whether antibiotics or chemotherapy - to us, the patients, free of charge, when we need them.

As part of this process, an independent public body called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) evaluates the affordability of supplying different drugs, using a metric known as QALY or quality adjusted life year. NICE is like the sat-nav of the NHS, issuing clinical guidance and identifying the most cost-effective treatments.

Under this deal, between the US administration and the UK, NICE’s cost effectiveness threshold would rise from between £20-30,000 to between £25-35,000 per QALY. This may sound like an innocuous technical change, but in fact it goes to the very heart of what the NHS is for.

It is worth explaining what these changes will actually do. NICE is effectively increasing the economic value it places on a year of good quality life. By raising this threshold by 25%, more drugs will count as “cost-effective”, so more will be approved - but this will also increase NHS spending because many new medicines are expensive.

The changes also mean drug companies will return much less money to the NHS through rebates. The current payback rate of 22.9% will drop to 14.5% for newer medicines from 2026, meaning the NHS and Treasury will get far less money back when medicine spending rises.

In short, we will be paying more for drugs and getting less back. The OBR has estimated that in the medium term this could cost the NHS an extra £3bn a year. That’s £3bn going to American companies, not into more GP appointments or preventative programmes to stem the growing tide of demand.

And here’s why it matters.

The NHS was set up in the 1940s to tackle the great ills of society and to care for patients throughout their lives, from “the cradle to the grave”. Heavily influenced by Liberal MP William Beveridge; his report was the major intellectual foundation for the post-war welfare state.

These three core principles of the NHS remain today. It is universal, created to meet the health needs of everyone. It is comprehensive, designed to provide a full range of services from GP visits and dentists to hospital treatment and emergency services. Finally, it is free at the point of delivery. The Welsh Labour politician Nye Bevan, who spearheaded the NHS’s creation, added another: that care should be based on clinical need.

77 years on, today’s NHS constitution has seven principles: with the addition of patient involvement, quality of care, multi-agency working, accountability and value for money. While revolutionary at the time, these principles now seem like common sense. But the changes to NICE’s thresholds don’t fit with them.

Conspicuously absent in the role description of NICE, the constitution of the NHS or its founding principles is economic growth. Yet the government announced the change, not because of clinical need, but as part of a UK-US trade agreement aimed at boosting growth. It has also resisted pressure to release its own impact assessment on the effects of the changes made to the NICE thresholds.

I am very doubtful of the wisdom of tying our cherished NHS to a deal of dubious benefit with someone as fickle and faithless as Trump. But even leaving that aside, it is a fundamental departure from the principles of Beveridge and Bevan that have endured to this day. If the government wants to use the NHS as an instrument of growth, we should have a national conversation about that, not slip it through as quietly as possible.

The University of York’s Professor Karl Claxton, a respected health economist, estimates that the deal will lead to 4,500 additional deaths every year. Dozens of doctors, academics and health experts have written to the Prime Minister and health secretary warning they are “extremely concerned” about ending up with a deal that “worsens patient outcomes, damages our NHS, and fails to serve the economic and scientific interests of the UK”. With lives potentially at stake, it is astonishing to me that the government refuses to release its own impact assessment. Such a lack of transparency is shocking; I have repeatedly raised this issue with ministers and will continue to do so.

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We should be clear. No new money has been announced to cover this. If the Treasury wants to use the NHS to stimulate growth, at the very least, it should pay for the costs, not expect the NHS to fund it out of its existing budget.

It seems evident that we risk the NHS no longer being just about care based on clinical need. In the pursuit of zero tariffs on UK pharmaceutical exports, we risk placing growth above lives.

In one memorable episode of the political satire ‘Yes Minister’, fictional politician Jim Hacker is confronted by a hospital with no patients. In the face of Hacker’s outrage, civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby defends the productivity of its 500 administrators.

Hacker: “You think spending more money on fewer patients so we can employ more administrators is a good way of spending the taxpayers’ money?”

Humphrey: “Certainly.”

Hacker: “This money is solely to make sick people better.”

Humphrey: “No, no, no, Minister. It is to make everybody better.”

Hacker: “But there are no patients!”

We are losing sight of what matters once more. The NHS should not be viewed as an engine for growth; to quote Hacker, it is for healing the sick.

We still have an opportunity to influence this. The deal is currently just an agreement in principle, with details now being fleshed out. The government must release the impact assessment and stop turning a deaf ear to concerns.

I worry for the NHS if they don’t.

Layla Moran is the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon and chair of the Health and Social Care Select Committee.

TikTok. Instagram. YouTube. SnapChat. WhatsApp. WeChat. With viral videos, instant connection and algorithmic addition at our fingertips, is it any wonder that teenagers spend an average of three hours a day on social media? Meanwhile, anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions are reportedly rising. And even before the global outrage over X’s AI-tool Grok generating sexualised images, social media platforms were already flooded with harmful content that no child should see. So what’s the next logical step? Should social media be banned for teenagers?

In December, Australia became the first country in the world to ban social media for teenagers. French lawmakers followed suit and passed a bill to ban social media use for under-15s. So did Spain and other countries. Could the UK be next? Well, yesterday (March 9th), MPs voted 307 to 173 against including a social media ban in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, but remained open to education minister Olivia Bailey’s proposal for more flexible restrictions in the future.

Ahead of the vote in parliament, Esther Ghey, the mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey, urged MPs to ban social media. “Children on social media, including gaming platforms are currently being exploited, radicalised, and harmed emotionally and physically, and in the most tragic cases, young lives are being lost. Brianna was one of these children,” she said. However, yesterday’s result does not mean the ban is off the table. Instead, the government said it will wait for the results of a three-month consultation into whether - and how - to restrict access to social media before reaching a decision.

But could an outright ban really be the solution, or is it too simplistic?

One of the main arguments in favour of a social media ban is the sharp rise in mental health problems. Research by the Sutton Trust and UCL found that almost half of young people are experiencing conditions such as depression and anxiety. Given the vast role social media now plays in teenagers’ lives, common sense may tell us that these platforms, or accessing them too young, may harm teenagers’ mental health. But, it seems the evidence may be more nuanced.

In 2024, scientists at the University of Cambridge reviewed 143 studies - involving more than one million adolescents - to examine the link between the use of social media and mental health problems. They could only find a weak correlation. This does not mean social media is harmless - but it suggests that screen time alone cannot explain the mental health crisis. More research is needed to understand when and how social media becomes harmful, and crucially, how children can be shielded from harmful content.

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A memo to Rachel Reeves: to anger graduates once may be regarded as misfortune. To do it multiple times looks like a career change.

Reeves inherited a broken student loans system that dated back to the heady days of New Labour and really started coming apart during the Cons-Lib coalition, when increasing numbers of graduates found the interest payments on their loans were now outstripping their repayments.

Compound interest was working its dark magic, and loan balances were growing rather than shrinking.

To be clear, this was not a problem of Reeves’ making. And yet, somehow, she managed to adopt it as her own.

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