United Kingdom

Philippa Stroud was appointed chair of the Low Pay Commission, a body reporting to Kemi Badenoch’s Department of Business and Trade, on 30 January. The government-appointed role pays £530 per day for three days of work per month (£19,114 per year).

The Conservative peer is the CEO of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new pressure group that shares its funders with GB News and is linked to some of the world’s most prominent climate crisis deniers, including psychologist Jordan Peterson.

Stroud has been described by The Telegraph as “the most powerful right-winger you’ve never heard of”.

This significant decline, from 1,417 civil inquiries in the tax year 2018-19 to just 627 in 2022-23, signals a troubling trend in the enforcement of tax laws against offshore, corporate, and wealthy taxpayers investigated by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) fraud unit.

This shift has sparked a wave of criticism, with campaigners and critics arguing that HMRC's dwindling enforcement actions are allowing tax dodgers to operate with impunity, undermining the integrity of the tax system.

More than 4,000 parents have joined a group committed to barring young children from having smartphones, as concerns grow about online safety and the impact of social media on mental health.

The WhatsApp group Smartphone Free Childhood was created by the former school friends Clare Fernyhough and Daisy Greenwell in response to their fears around children’s smartphone use and the “norm” of giving children smart devices when they go to secondary school.

“I’ve got a seven- and nine-year-old. Daisy’s got kids of a similar age and we were both feeling really horrified and worried and just didn’t want them to have smartphones at 11, which seems to be the norm now.”

Fernyhough and Greenwell hoped the movement would embolden parents to delay giving their children smartphones until at least 14, with no social media access until 16.

But what they expected to be a small group of friends who help “empower each other” has turned into a nationwide campaign after the group reached the 1,000-person capacity within 24 hours of Greenwell uploading an Instagram post to promote it.

A faith school is censoring science and geography lessons on religious grounds, Ofsted has found.

In a report published this month, Ofsted said Beis Ruchel D'Satmar, an independent Orthodox Jewish school for girls in London, does not allow pupils to study "certain concepts, read content, or complete tasks" that are "not in line with the school's religious beliefs".

This includes science and geography, where Ofsted found "key content" is "removed and omitted".

Despite it being a legal duty, Ofsted said the school does not "actively promote and encourage respect for other people" in relation to the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010.

Ofsted said the school also fails to teach "statutory content" in relationships and sex education (RSE), including concepts such as "sexual consent, sexual exploitation, grooming and abuse". This approach means pupils are left "unprepared for life in modern Britain", Ofsted said.

In 2021, a report from Jewish counter-extremism group Nahamu highlighted how a lack of RSE contributes to forced marriage in strictly-Orthodox Jewish communities.

During a previous inspection, school leaders told Ofsted that "no aspect" of sex education is taught in the school, not even "reproduction in the context of an academic subject like science".

The school has been rated "inadequate" since 2016.

During conversations between inspectors and pupils, Ofsted was prevented by school leaders from asking questions relating to "the protected characteristics, other faiths and beliefs or sex education". In some cases, the headteacher remained "close to the classroom door".

Despite being banned from admitting new pupils in 2019, and currently being in breach of its registration agreement due to exceeding the maximum number of pupils, Ofsted said the school "continues to admit pupils below and above the registered age range".

The London MP has battled to get the Home Office to take responsibility for its mistaken allegations of cheating against many thousands of overseas students

Oliver Griffiths, the chief executive of the UK’s Trade Remedies Authority (TRA), which advises the government on trade defence, said it was keeping lines of communication open with ministers and had been in close contact with the car industry. “We’ll be ready to go if anyone does come to us,” he told the Guardian in an interview.

The European Commission also launched an anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) late last year after warning that global markets were being “flooded” with cheap imports from the world’s second largest economy.