JCVI decision comes two weeks after body recommended against routine vaccination of children
Covid vaccines will be offered to all 16- and 17-year-olds without needing the consent of their parents, after government experts reversed their advice from just two weeks ago.
The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said older teenagers should be offered their first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab and advice on when to offer the second dose would come later.
Continue reading...Analysis: official advisers have called for jabs to be given to children aged 16 and 17 in a rethink of policy
Just weeks ago, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) recommended that children over the age of 12 should only be vaccinated if they were extremely vulnerable or lived with someone at risk, citing concerns about an inflammatory heart condition linked to the Pfizer/BioNTech jab. Now the JCVI has tweaked that decision to allow children aged 16 and 17 to be routinely offered the vaccine.
Continue reading...Ministers need to get a grip on ‘reckless U-turns and confusion’, shadow transport secretary says
No 10 is facing claims that its international travel policy is in chaos after Boris Johnson ditched a plan for an “amber watchlist” that would have created a five-tier warning system for England.
After a revolt in the cabinet and a backlash from the travel industry, government sources said on Monday night that Boris Johnson would not be going ahead with proposals for an amber watchlist tier to warn travellers which countries were at risk of turning red.
Continue reading...Labour’s deputy leader opens up about being a carer, byelections, and achieving a ‘cultural shift’ in the workplace
Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, has said her own experience as a care worker helped to convince her more flexible working could be a “win-win” for staff and employers.
Speaking to the Guardian after announcing new policies last week on employment rights and flexible conditions, Rayner said she had helped negotiate family-friendly working when she was a trade union representative.
Continue reading...Steve Baker, MP for Wycombe, urged ministers not to ignore the cost of living crisis in constituencies like his
Boris Johnson faces another backbench rebellion over the Treasury’s spending this autumn, as a high-profile Tory MP hit out at “intolerable” levels of hunger and poverty in his affluent home counties constituency, and urged ministers to abandon plans to cut universal credit.
Steve Baker, a leading Brexiter and MP for Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, called on ministers not to ignore the cost of living crisis faced by people “in real trouble” in constituencies like his who had been “tipped over the edge” financially by the pandemic.
Continue reading...The increasingly draconian approach to irregular migration betrays the spirit of the 1951 refugee convention
Seventy years ago, the 1951 UN refugee convention established the rights of refugees to seek sanctuary, and the obligations of states to protect them. Increasingly, it seems that much of Europe is choosing to commemorate the anniversary by ripping up some of the convention’s core principles.
So far this year, close to 1,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean, more than four times the death toll for the same period in 2020. Many will have been economic migrants. Others will have been fleeing persecution. Increasingly, Europe does not care. All were “irregular”. And all must be discouraged and deterred through a strategy of cruelty.
Continue reading...Foreign secretary backs Israeli PM’s claims Iran was behind drone strike that killed Briton and Romanian
The UK has said it is “highly likely” that Iran carried out an “unlawful and callous attack” on a ship in the Middle East, which left a Briton dead.
The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the government believed the drone attack on the oil tanker off the coast of Oman was “deliberate, targeted, and a clear violation of international law by Iran”.
Continue reading...Signs that detainees were victims of trafficking are being overlooked, say campaigners
Lawyers are challenging the Home Office policy of deporting people to Vietnam who could be victims of trafficking after the UK sent a second charter flight to the country within a matter of weeks.
The challenge follows concern from lawyers and charities that some victims of trafficking could be wrongly removed from the UK under a speedy processing system for migrants in detention known as “detained asylum casework”.
Continue reading...The Home Office appears to be in breach of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, says legal charity
European citizens who have applied for settled status are being detained and threatened with deportation, a development that contradicts assurances from ministers and appears to contravene the Brexit withdrawal agreement.
The Home Office has served EU nationals with removal directions even though they could prove they had applied for settled status, which should protect their rights to remain in the UK.
Continue reading...Data analysis finds large-scale cuts to youth services and increase in racial disparity 10 years on
The conditions that led to riots across England 10 years ago still exist today, experts have warned, as data analysis showed significant cuts to youth services in affected areas and an increase in racial disparity in stop and search.
On 4 August 2011, police officers shot and killed Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old mixed-race man, in Tottenham, north London. His death sparked a wave of civil unrest that started the capital and spread to other cities, causing property damage to the value of £40m a day.
Continue reading...The government’s words at the global education summit are completely at odds with its behaviour. Whatever the event achieves will be despite its UK hosts, not because of them
With all the fanfare Covid would allow, the global education summit opened in London this week. Ahead of the meeting, the minister for European neighbourhood and the Americas was on rousing form. “Educating girls is a gamechanger,” Wendy Morton said, going on to describe what a plan would look like to do just that.
The UK, co-hosting the summit with Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, plans to raise funds for the Global Partnership for Education, from governments and donors. The UK government has promised £430m over the next five years.
Continue reading...Latest updates: latest figures show increase of more than 70,000 compared to previous week
Here are the main points from the Downing Street lobby briefing.
The chancellor has said previously that the triple lock is government policy. But we recognise people’s concerns. We’ve got to ensure fairness for both taxpayers an pensioners.
Thank you @RNLI for all that you do. https://t.co/MkdOU1IHaP
Just made a donation. If you’d like to too - and help save lives - please visit https://t.co/TnJtqXeXbg pic.twitter.com/tk6a8Zky3k
These are from Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, a thinktank focusing on pay and inequality, on today’s furlough figures. (See 11.44am.)
Two big take-aways from today's furlough stats. 1. almost 2 million workers still furloughed as the scheme's phase out started. That's more than I expected and the rate of decline halved in June from May (lesson = labour market chat has become too complacent) pic.twitter.com/xZgxG1AmAp
2. Furlough is now an older workers story. The young (who were most likely to have been furloughed) are flowing off the scheme much faster. Older workers are more likely to be parked on it and as a result, for the first time, they have the highest furlough rates pic.twitter.com/Ot6ThssfJa
Continue reading...Foreign secretary says government will not ‘hold country back’ because some are not getting vaccinated
The government is using the threat of domestic vaccine passports to coax and cajole people into getting fully vaccinated, the foreign secretary has admitted.
Dominic Raab said ministers did not want to “hold the country back” just because some individuals were not coming forward to get inoculated, confirming publicly what many suspected about Boris Johnson’s sudden decision to throw his weight behind certification for nightclubs.
Continue reading...Former No 10 adviser pressed for appointment to be hurried through, saying he had ‘ordered it’ from PM
Dominic Cummings personally called a former colleague on the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and asked if his company would work for the government on its response to the Covid pandemic, leading to the award of a £580,000 Cabinet Office contract with no competitive process.
In an email on 20 March 2020, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser asked the most senior civil servant responsible for contracts to sign off the budget immediately, and that if “anybody in CABOFF [the Cabinet Office] whines”, to tell them Cummings had “ordered it” from the prime minister.
Continue reading...Health secretary’s comments came after a week of declining cases ended with 4,000 increase in one day
Sajid Javid has said “no one really knows” what trajectory the Covid pandemic will take in the weeks ahead, as new cases across the UK rose after seven days of consecutive declines.
The latest Covid data, published on Wednesday, showed 27,734 people testing positive across the UK – up by 4,000 from a day earlier.
Continue reading...Cllr Mark Blake says an enforcement approach to curb youth violence will fail, while Prof Saville Kushner says stop and search will undermine democratic policing. Plus letters from Mary Jones, TG Ashplant, Susan Ellery, Lynn Beudert and Christopher Reilly
Boris Johnson’s announcements around his crime reduction strategy are worrying and predictable (Weird and gimmicky’: police chiefs condemn Boris Johnson’s crime plan, 27 July).
As a councillor in Haringey who previously led on the council’s work with the Metropolitan police, I’m filled with dread at the thought of the Met ramping up stop and search in some supposedly “evidenced” response to knife crime.
Continue reading...Monarch used secretive procedure to become only person in country not bound by a green energy rule
The Queen’s lawyers secretly lobbied Scottish ministers to change a draft law to exempt her private land from a major initiative to cut carbon emissions, documents reveal.
The exemption means the Queen, one of the largest landowners in Scotland, is the only person in the country not required to facilitate the construction of pipelines to heat buildings using renewable energy.
Continue reading...Ministers to discuss plans, with talks also to determine if they will apply to England only or all UK nations
Plans to significantly open up international travel are expected to be announced on Wednesday, with UK ministers poised to let people who have been fully vaccinated in the US and EU avoid quarantine if arriving from amber list countries.
The move would benefit millions of people by finally letting them be reunited with family and friends based in the UK, as well as businesses in the aviation and tourism sectors that have been hit hard by the pandemic.
Continue reading...The prime minister, Boris Johnson, said it was important that people did not draw premature conclusions about several days of better Covid case data and urged the public to remain cautious.
'I've noticed that obviously that we're six days into some better figures, but it is very, very important that we don't allow ourselves to run away with premature conclusions about this,' Johnson said.
'People have got to remain very cautious and that remains the approach of the government.'
Continue reading...Government’s proposals include more frequent stop and search and making community service street cleaners ‘more visible’
MPs and campaigners have sounded alarm at a series of proposals in the government crime reduction plan, including more frequent stop and search, a trial of “alcohol tags” and criminals undertaking “visible” community service cleaning streets.
Liberty said the permanent relaxation of search powers would “compound discrimination in Britain and divide communities” and the former shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said it was “alarming and counter-productive.”
Continue reading...