There has been a 239% increase in homelessness among asylum seekers evicted from Home Office accommodation including hotels in two years, according to a report.
Data analysed by the Refugee Council found that 12,630 households in England faced homelessness after eviction from asylum accommodation in the two years to the end of September 2023.
When the Home Office has finished processing asylum seekers’ claims they are evicted from its accommodation. Many are granted refugee status.
The report, which is published on Thursday, finds that 970 newly granted refugees were facing homelessness in the last quarter of 2021, but the figure for the third quarter of 2023 had jumped to 3,290 households. Many of the households include children. The report states that the rise in homelessness among newly granted refugees is unprecedented and represents “a moment of significant crisis”.
The chief executive of the Refugee Council, Enver Solomon, said: “The process refugees go through when granted status is setting them up to fail from the very start. A mere 28 days to get on their feet and find a private tenancy with no income and no savings is completely unrealistic. This dysfunctional system is causing an entirely avoidable crisis of homelessness and destitution.”
The report calls for further support from government and local authorities for asylum seekers transitioning to refugee status.
The Home Office, however, said on Wednesday that it would close 50 more asylum-seeker hotels by the end of this month. It announced last month that 100 hotels had been closed with a reduction of 20,000 asylum seekers in hotel accommodation since the end of September 2023.
Despite the closures the number of asylum seekers accommodated since the end of September 2023 has not reduced, suggesting that more people are being squeezed into fewer hotels. The Home Office has previously announced a room maximisation policy in hotel accommodation requiring more people to share rooms.
It found that loading the housing costs of UK asylum seekers on to a budget set aside to alleviate poverty abroad was creating “perverse incentives” and that the FCDO had in effect “to take the financial hit” for the Home Office’s overspending.
The chief executive of Care4Calais, Steve Smith, said: “Our volunteers have seen hundreds of people who have been granted refugee status being made homeless over recent months. We know that habitable housing, embedded in communities, provides the best foundation for those granted refugee status, who only want to integrate into society and move forward with their lives.”
The director of the No Accommodation Network, Bridget Young, said: “The closing of hotels should be an opportunity to ensure that everyone awaiting a decision on their asylum claim is provided with accommodation that is safe and good quality, located within communities which are equipped to support them. Focusing solely on closing hotels and speeding up evictions just places people in the asylum system in ever worsening housing or increased risk of homelessness.”
Announcing the latest figures on asylum-seeker hotel reductions on Wednesday, the home secretary, James Cleverly, said: “We promised to end the use of asylum hotels and house asylum seekers at more appropriate, cheaper accommodation; we are doing that at a rapid pace. These closures deliver on the government’s plan to cut the use of hotels in the asylum system and we will keep going until the last hotel is closed.”
The shadow immigration minister, Stephen Kinnock, said Cleverly’s announcement was “celebrating failure”.
“So-called ‘asylum hotels’ didn’t exist before the Tories lost control of the asylum backlog, and Rishi Sunak promised to end them by the end of 2023,” he said. “Yet here we are with around 250 still in use come mid-April.”
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A Bulgarian gang stole £54m of taxpayers’ money over five years by filing thousands of false claims in the largest benefits scam seen in England and Wales.
Galina Nikolova, 38, Stoyan Stoyanov, 27, Tsvetka Todorova, 52, Gyunesh Ali, 33, and Patritsia Paneva, 26, used the benefits system like a “cash machine” to fund their lavish lifestyles.
Footage taken from inside a flat shows one of the fraudsters showering the floor with dozens of £20 notes – money used to buy designer clothes, holidays, designer watches and even a high-end Audi sports car.
Up to £750,000 in bank notes was found stuffed in suitcases at one of their homes alongside forged and false documents.
They made around 6,000 false benefits claims using forged GP letters and fake payslips between 2016 and 2021 through three “benefits factories”, which claimed to assist people with obtaining a national insurance number and benefits to which they are entitled.
However, it was found that after applicants made their claims for benefits through these three sources, they left them in the hands of the organised crime group.
Guilty: (clockwise from top left) Stoyan Stoyanov, 27, Galina Nikolova, 38, Patritsia Paneva, 26, Tsvetka Todorova, 52, and Gyunesh Ali, 33 ( Crown Prosecution Service)
The court heard how the money gained from these fraudulent claims was then laundered. It was moved between several accounts through numerous transfers and withdrawn in cash until the criminals could use it legitimately.
Specialist CPS prosecutor Ben Reid said: “This case is the largest benefit fraud prosecution ever brought to the courts in England and Wales.
“For a number of years, these defendants conspired to commit industrial-scale fraud against the universal credit system, costing the taxpayer more than £50m.
Wads of cash were found at addresses of the criminals (Crown Prosecution Service)
“This was a sustained attack on a system that is supposed to protect the most vulnerable in our society. But instead, this gang used it as a cash machine to fund their lavish lifestyles.”
All five have pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering-related offences and will be sentenced at Wood Green Crown Court on 28 May.
Mel Stride, secretary of state for the Department for Work and Pensions, said: “I am immensely proud of DWP investigators’ work, in collaboration with the Crown Prosecution Service, to take down this organised crime group.
“Today’s convictions underline our commitment to protecting taxpayers’ money and it is only right and fair that we bring to justice those stealing from the public purse.
“My message is simple – if you are committing benefit fraud, you are cheating the taxpayer, and we will catch you.”
Five members of a benefit fraud gang who falsely claimed £50m in Universal Credit have been brought down in the largest prosecution of its type in English legal history.
The gang made thousands of false claims for Universal Credit using either real people or hijacked identities and backed them up with an array of forged documents, including counterfeit payslips and fake GP letters.
As part of the investigation, police identified three "benefit factories" in London where repeated false claims for benefits originated from.
During raids, police also found "claim packs" containing forged and false documents, as well as bundles of cash stuffed in shopping bags and suitcases, a luxury car, and designer goods including watches, jackets, and glasses.
Bulgarian nationals Galina Nikolova, 38, Stoyan Stoyanov, 27, Tsvetka Todorova, 52, Gyunesh Ali, 33, and Patritsia Paneva, 26, have now pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering-related offences.
Ben Reid, Specialist Prosecutor for the CPS, described it as a "complex and challenging case" which required "close and effective work" between UK authorities and international partners in Bulgaria and the European Union crime agency, Eurojust.
Image:Patritsia Paneva. Pic: CPS
Image:Stoyan Stoyanov. Pic: CPS
Image:Tsvetka Todorova. Pic: CPS
"This case is the largest benefit fraud prosecution ever brought to the courts in England and Wales," he said.
"For a number of years, these defendants conspired to commit industrial-scale fraud against the Universal Credit system, costing the taxpayer more than £50m.
"Submitting thousands of false claims, the organised criminals enriched themselves from government funds designed to protect and help the most vulnerable people in our society."
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He said the CPS and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) would now launch confiscation proceedings against the defendants in an attempt to recoup the stolen money.
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Mel Stride MP, Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions, said: "I am immensely proud of DWP investigators' work, in collaboration with the Crown Prosecution Service, to take down this organised crime group.
"[These] convictions underline our commitment to protecting taxpayers' money and it is only right and fair that we bring to justice those stealing from the public purse.
"My message is simple - if you are committing benefit fraud, you are cheating the taxpayer, and we will catch you."
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A man suspected of fatally stabbing a woman as she pushed her baby in a pram on a Bradford street has been arrested.
Habibur Masum was detained early on Tuesday morning following the death of 27-year-old Kulsuma Akter on Saturday.
Detectives said they had arrested a 25-year-old man in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.
The arrest followed a nationwide manhunt for Mr Masum, after Ms Akter's death in the city centre attack. Her baby was unharmed.
Det Ch Insp Stacey Atkinson, of West Yorkshire Police, said the arrest followed a "tragic incident in which a mother has lost her life in the most horrific of circumstances".
"We understand that this has caused a considerable amount of concern in the local community," she added.
Ms Akter was attacked at about 15:20 BST on Saturday as she pushed her baby in the pram along Westgate in Bradford city centre.
Emergency services were called, but Ms Akter was pronounced dead at the scene a short time later.
On Monday, both Greater Manchester Police and the West Yorkshire force said they had referred themselves to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) as they had previous contact with the victim.
Mr Masum was bailed by magistrates in November after being charged with assaulting and threatening to kill Ms Akter, offences which he had denied.
Court documents show Mr Masum, who is from Oldham, was charged with threatening to kill Ms Akter on 24 November and assaulting her on 23 November. Both offences were alleged to have happened in Manchester.
Police said on Monday they had also arrested a 23-year-old man in Cheshire on suspicion of assisting an offender. He remained in custody, a spokesperson confirmed.
Churches and mosques across Bradford have been opened to allow people to grieve and pray, the assistant curate of Bradford Cathedral said on Monday.
A former NHS worker who deliberately poisoned a young boy with "industrial amounts" of laxatives has been sentenced to seven years in prison.
Ex-auxiliary nurse Tracy Menhinick, 52, administered a non-prescribed medication, namely the laxative lactulose, which caused the child's development and mobility to be affected and led to him being admitted to hospital.
Menhinick, of Aberdeen, then consented to treatments, procedures and operations which she knew were unnecessary, "all to his permanent disfigurement, permanent impairment and to the danger of his life".
She was found guilty in February of wilfully ill-treating the child in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health on various occasions over the course of three years from 2014.
The ill-treatment happened when the boy - who cannot be named for legal reasons - was aged between three and six, at an address in Aberdeen, at Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital, and elsewhere.
Judge Lady Drummond highlighted that a doctor during the trial described the boy as "emaciated" on his last admission to hospital.
The judge told Menhinick: "You had been an auxiliary nurse and knew what you were doing. You caused him to be in that state."
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She added: "The doctors were baffled as to why despite all their intensive efforts to care and treat the child, the many tests and variations in treatments, he was not gaining weight and thriving.
"The level of laxatives he was being given were such that at times he would have floppy episodes when he became limp and had to be resuscitated."
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Lady Drummond noted that the boy has suffered physical scarring.
The judge said: "Why anybody would want to inflict such severe harm and suffering, endangering the life of a young child on multiple occasions over a period of years is beyond understanding."
It was noted that Menhinick's actions were "likely to have had a negative impact" on the boy psychologically.
The judge stated: "Your ill-treatment of him has had a devastating impact on his life."
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Menhinick was sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow on Tuesday after her case had been deferred for a psychiatric report.
Lady Drummond was earlier told by Menhinick's defence that she had a "package of mental health problems" which may have affected her culpability.
The judge noted that Menhinick rejects that she suffers from a factitious disorder imposed on self and imposed on another (previously Munchausen syndrome and Munchausen syndrome by proxy).
Image:Menhinick leaving court last month. Pic: PA
Menhinick, who appeared at court in a wheelchair, was said to now be bed-bound.
Lady Drummond accepted that Menhinick had suffered childhood trauma, but added: "The only appropriate disposal for such serious ill-treatment of a child over a three-year period with such serious consequences must be a significant period of imprisonment.
"That is to mark society's abhorrence of this conduct."
The man wanted over the fatal stabbing in Bradford of a mum from Oldham 'vlogged' himself in Manchester and posted shopping videos in Primark on social media.
Habibur Masum, also from Oldham, is wanted in connection with the killing of 27-year-old Kulsuma Akter. The mum was knifed to death in the Westgate area of Bradford while pushing her baby in a pram down the street.
Masum's social media accounts have now emerged, with the 'travel blogger' posting videos to YouTube walking around Manchester, traveling from the airport and shopping in Primark. Just days before the attack, he posted a picture of him on Facebook posing with a woman and baby beneath a sign that reads 'love'.
He is carrying the child and the woman holds his arm a red heart has been pasted over her face and a black heart over the infant's. The caption on the Facebook photograph reads 'family'.
Masum 'vlogged' on YouTube (Image: YouTube)
On September 26 last year he posted a photo of himself holding a newborn baby in his arms in a hospital, with the caption: "I have become the father of a Son. Both mother and child are alright now. Pray for my baby boy."
On the same site, Masum has posted a self-made tutorial on how to build a baby cot, and another on packing a hospital bag for a newborn. One of his Facebook accounts has 3,800 followers and another 4,300.
A video of Masum shopping for Bangladeshi clothes in Primark was published to his YouTube account "Md Hr Masum Official". It documents him picking out clothes for adults and children.
Masum captured in another YouTube video (Image: YouTube)
On several online profiles, Masum promotes himself as a travel blogger. His YouTube account, which had 27 subscribers on Monday, has a vlog titled 'Manchester To Barcelona travel story as an international Bangladeshi student'.
The five-and-a-half minute video features footage of him walking through Manchester Airport, on the plane and landing in Barcelona and includes shots of his passport. Another YouTube video shows him walking through Manchester in the snow.
In December last year, he asked Samin's UK Visas Support Centre for help getting a visa to holiday in Europe. He went to Barcelona after he was granted a Schengen visa, said the owner of the support hub, Samin Ahmed.
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An Instagram account linked to his YouTube is titled "adventure.makes.happy" with the bio "traveling it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller" (sic). It contains images of landscapes credited to various people, including several to his private Instagram, and is followed by 1,906 people.
According to his Facebook he grew up and went to school and university in Sylhet, Bangladesh, and married in September 2022. Between 2021 and 2023 he studied for a master's degree in marketing at the University of Bedfordshire, his LinkedIn shows.
Masum was last seen on Saturday at 3.30pm, when he was captured on CCTV getting on a bus at Market Street. He then got off the bus at 3.42pm on Killinghall Road.
Habibur Masum is wanted by police (Image: PA)
A 23-year-old man has been arrested in Cheshire in connection with the murder investigation. He was arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender.
Last night, he remained in custody. Any current sightings of Habibur Masum should be reported to police via 999.
Any other information that could assist the investigation should be reported via Live Chat online or by calling 101, quoting log 1071 of 6 April. Information can also be given to the Major Incident Public Portal via this link.
Information can always be given anonymously via Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
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Jason Beer KC, lead counsel for the inquiry, has effectively issued a very long legal dressing down to the Post Office for a track record of disrupting the inquiry with late disclosure of documents, despite the fact “the Post Office [said it] aspired to eliminate disruption wherever it was possible to do so.”
He is now saying that on 28 March the Post Office submitted another tranche of 1071 late documents that “make reference to 19 specific individuals within the Post Office.”
Beer says “15 documents were said to be, quote, of high relevance, and 44 documents were said to be documents of interest.”
The Post Office said some of these documents might be duplicates.
Today’s session at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has started with criticism of the repeated “late and problematic disclosure of evidence” from the Post Office, which has necessitated postponing some hearings in the past. This discussion is delaying the appearance of Alan Bates.
If you want to watch the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today, then there is a live stream here. I will be following along and will bring you any key lines that emerge. It is Alan Bates giving testimony and so we are expecting to hear about his experience as a victm and then a campaigner.
He has already arrived at the inquiry.
At 10 o’clock the next state of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal inquiry starts, and I will be following it closely here. Alan Bates – the real life character featured in the ITV drama that did so much to focus attention on the scandal will take the stand at Aldwych House and tell his story. Our First Edition newsletter today featured Rupert Neate talking to our colleague Jane Croft, who has been covering the story since 2018, about it. Here is a snippet:
“The impact this scandal has had on thousands of people’s lives has been truly devastating,” Jane says. “These are ordinary people, without money and connections that have been caught up in this real David and Goliath battle.”
In personal impact statements to the inquiry, the victims have spoken about losing everything. “It’s not just their money,” Jane says. “It’s their liberty, their partners, their families, their homes. Some spoke about their children being bullied at school, being shunned by their local community, and being referred to as ‘the postmaster who stole old people’s pensions’.”
“They want justice and for the truth to come out,” Jane says. “It feels like the Post Office knew the Horizon IT system wasn’t working properly, but they continued to prosecute these innocent people anyway.”
In 2015 the Post Office told a House of Commons inquiry: “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it has been recorded in a branch’s accounts.” This was untrue, a high court judge ruled in a landmark court case four years later.
A recording from 2013, unearthed by Channel 4 News, shows Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s head lawyer, confirm that former chief executive Paula Vennells had been briefed about a “covert operations team” that could remotely access the Horizon system and adjust branches’ accounts. In 2015 Vennells told the Commons business select committee that “we have no evidence” of miscarriages of justice.
Vennells, who has handed back a CBE awarded to her for “services to the Post Office and to charity”, will give evidence, live-streamed here, for three days from Wednesday 22 May.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor who was one of the MPs questioning Vennells in 2015, has called for a “thorough police investigation”.
“I don’t think it’s good enough that we keep falling back on ‘let the inquiry do its work’ – this is much more serious,” he said. “There needs to be an investigation into corporate manslaughter and individuals at the Post Office.”
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves also repeatedly attacked Conservative plans over non-dom tax status. Having defended the status against calls for abolition for years, in March Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt announced it would adopt Labour’s policy and scrap the status. However, the way they are planning to do so has been criticised for including a significant number of loopholes.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast this morning, Reeves said:
The government’s plans that they announced in March about non-doms, they said they were taking our policy, well it turns out they’ve taken it but left a load of loopholes in it. And so if you are a non-dom you can still get out of paying inheritance tax: in the first year of their policy there’s a 50% discount, we don’t get 50% discounts on our taxes.
People who go out and work today – teachers, plumbers, doctors, they don’t get a 50% discount – why should some of the wealthiest people in the country get that discount? We would abolish that and we would put that money into frontline public services, where it belongs.”
Shadow cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson said ahead of the March budget that it would be an “abject humiliation” for the Tories if they implemented Labour’s policy.
Non-dom status allows foreign nationals who live in the UK, but are officially domiciled overseas, to avoid paying UK tax on their overseas income or capital gains. Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, has previously enjoyed non-domiciled status. In April 2022 she agreed to pay UK tax, saying her arrangements were not “compatible with my husband’s job as chancellor”.
Back with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves for a moment, one other theme she picked up in her media round this morning was that by investing in HMRC she expected a Labour government would do a better job of bringing in tax revenue than under the current administration. Labour has said it will invest up to £555m a year in boosting the number of compliance officers.
She told viewers of BBC Breakfast:
You can ramp it up pretty quickly. At the start you might need to bring in extra resource but then you need to train people up within the government to do this work.
This isn’t rocket science, previous governments have managed to close that tax gap, as it’s called.
Labour’s shadow financial secretary to the Treasury James Murray also touched on the topic when he was on Sky News this morning. He said:
We’ve got to invest in and improve the customer service at HMRC because, you know, we had this urgent question in parliament just before the recess, which was about HMRC closing its phone line for six months a year. Because the service was so bad, they just decided to close the phone line. And we say, look, you have to invest in digital solutions and modernise HMRC.
Former home secretary Suella Braverman has said that the Conservatives are heading for a certain defeat in the next election, but appeared to rule out standing against Rishi Sunak in a leadership contest in the short-term.
Speaking on LBC, PA Media reports Braverman said:
I’m very concerned, I’m very concerned about what poll after poll demonstrates, and it’s my job – and I sought to do this as home secretary – to speak honestly, to speak the truth, even if it may be uncomfortable.
I owe that to the people who have sent me to parliament, and I owe that to you, and so the honest truth is that we are heading for a defeat, to put it mildly, at the general election.
I very much hope that we change course and that we improve the offer to the British people. Ultimately, measures on tax cuts, measures on migration, measures on national security and social cohesion are insufficient by this government.
We need to go further, we need to demonstrate to the British people that we’re on their side, that we’re serious about stopping the boats, that we’re actually serious about curbing unprecedented levels of illegal migration, and unfortunately we haven’t managed to do that.
She added “I’m not thinking about any kind of leadership campaign. Rishi Sunak is our prime minister, I fully expect him to lead us into the next general election.”
Braverman departed as home secretary during Liz Truss’s short term as prime minister for causing a security breach by sending official documents from a personal email account. Rapidly reinstated into the same job by Rishi Sunak when he formed his first cabinet, she was sacked by him in November for writing an article criticising London’s police which had not been agreed in advance by No 10.
My colleague Martin Pengelly in Washington has had an early sight of the new Liz Truss book, the apocalyptically titled Ten Years To Save The West from the woman who had 49 days in Downing Street. Here is a snippet from his piece:
When the queen died so soon after Truss had become her 15th and final prime minister, Truss writes, the news, though widely expected after the monarch’s health had deteriorated, still came “as a profound shock” to Truss, seeming “utterly unreal” and leaving her thinking: “Why me? Why now?”
Insisting she had not expected to lead the UK in mourning for the death of a monarch nearly 70 years on the throne and nearly 100 years old, Truss says state ceremony and protocol were “a long way from my natural comfort zone”.
Other prime ministers, she writes without naming any, may have been better able to provide “the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary”.
Labour’s shadow financial secretary to the treasury James Murray was also on the media round this morning, and while on Sky News, that David Cameron visit to meet Donald Trump led to an awkward exchange where Kay Burley was pushing him to say whether shadow foreign secretary David Lammy should also be making overtures to the presumptive Republican nominee for the US election in November.
Murray said:
I know David’s been to America quite a bit. He’s got colleagues on both sides of the aisle. There’s Republicans as well as Democrats. You know, he’s built those bridges because I think he recognises that we need to have an alliance. I don’t know his diary. But you know, if we get into government, if president Trump is reelected, we need to have a relationship with the US whoever is in the White House.
David Cameron has held talks with Donald Trump in Florida. In a statement on Monday, a Foreign Office spokesperson said: “Ahead of his visit to Washington, the foreign secretary will meet former President Trump in Florida today. It is standard practice for ministers to meet with opposition candidates as part of their routine international engagement.”
Cameron’s counterpart, US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, met with people from the opposition Labour party on his last visit to the UK.
Cameron will head on to Washington where he is expected to hold talks with Blinken, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. He is also hoping to meet the House speaker, Mike Johnson. We are expecting at least some public words from Cameron during the day.
Labour figures continue to be asked in the media about Angela Rayner’s housing arrangements from a decade ago. Speaking on BBC Breakfast, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said Rayner was “a good friend and a colleague of mine and I have full faith and trust in her.”
Speaking on the Today programme when asked about the issue, Reeves told listeners:
I think she was on this programme and answered questions about the sale of her house almost a decade ago now, when she was married to her former husband.
So these allegations are from something that happened a decade ago. She has sought legal advice since Michael Ashcroft wrote this book.
She’s confident and I’m confident that she has paid her tax, but today is about asking the wealthiest in our country to pay their fair share of tax to fund our public services.
Rachel Reeves has said Labour’s spending plans will make a “massive difference” to the lives of people, promising two million additional appointments a year in the NHS, 700,000 emergency dental appointments, free breakfast clubs in all primary schools as well as investment in scanners and new technology in hospitals.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, despite cautioning that should it form the next government, Labour would face “the worst economic inheritance since the second world war.”
She said:
I’m under no illusions about the scale of the challenge that I would inherit if I become chancellor. Both the economic inheritance that I’ve spoken about with debt, living standards and taxes, but also the inheritance in terms of the state of public services on their knees after 14 years of Conservative government, particularly our NHS.
That is why the focus today is about how we can raise that additional £5bn by the end of the parliament. Numbers that don’t just come from me, but which come from the National Audit Office, and a speech given in January this year about the money that is on the table that we could bring in through cracking down on tax avoidance by properly resourcing HMRC.
Nick Robinson suggested the figures were insignficant compared to the total government budget, descrbing them as a “rounding error” and “loose change down the back of the treasury sofa”.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has said an incoming Labour government would launch a £5bn crackdown on tax avoiders to close a gap in its spending plans exposed by Jeremy Hunt scrapping the non-dom regime to finance tax cuts.
Warning households and businesses that Labour was prepared to adopt tough measures to tackle tax fraud and non-compliance, Reeves said the funding would be used to pay for free school breakfast clubs and additional NHS appointments.
Labour’s plan will reduce “the tax gap” – the difference between the amount of money HMRC is owed and the amount it actually receives – to previous levels after it increased by more than £5bn over the past year.
Reeves will also raise £2.6bn over the next parliament by closing what she described as loopholes in the government’s plans to abolish exemptions for non-doms – people who are not “domiciled” in the UK for tax purposes.
The government reforms will allow non-doms to use family trusts to avoid inheritance tax and to have a 50% discount in the first year of when new rules apply. Reeves said she would ban the use of trusts to avoid the tax and scrap the 50% discount.
It comes a month after Labour’s spending plans were thrown into question by Hunt adopting two of the party’s top revenue-raising policies at the budget to fund a cut in national insurance.
Good morning. Labour has been setting out plans to try to recoup more money from tax avoidance in an attempt to show that it has the money on hand to fund its pledges without breakign the fiscal rules it has set for itself. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has been doing the media round today, more on that in a moment. Here are your headlines today …
The main event today though will be when the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry resumes in London. Alan Bates, former subpostmaster and founder of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance appears. The inquiry, chaired by the retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, began in 2022.
It is Martin Belam here with you again today. I do try to read all your comments, and dip into them where I think I can be helpful, but if you want to get my attention the best way is to email me – martin.belam@theguardian.com – especially if you have spotted my inevitable errors and typos, or you think I’ve missed something important.
