Housing secretary says developers will have to prove there is no way to save pub, as she prepares planning shake-upAll pubs will get protection from being turned into housing or offices under a shake-up of planning laws in England to be presented by Angela Rayner this week.The housing secretary will publish a new national planning policy framework aimed at loosening planning laws even further to help build 1.5m homes by the end of the parliament. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 10:09 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Latest reading on Wednesday likely to frame scale of challenge for new PM to ease pressures on households amid Iran war fallout British households are facing a renewed cost of living squeeze, with official figures expected to show this week that soaring energy bills drove up inflation in July to close to 3%.As the Iran war continues to send shock waves through global energy markets, economists predict the surge in UK gas and electricity bills last month will push Britain’s headline inflation rate to 2.9%. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 08:42 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Assessment’s finding of a jump in UK productivity emphasises urgent need to appoint a national statisticianThe keen new chancellor, John Healey, responded to last week’s better-than-expected economic news by claiming the government was “bringing hope back”. Growth did not plunge as feared after Donald Trump unleashed war on Iran – with GDP expanding at a pretty decent 0.4% in the second quarter.But what if we should have held on to a bit more hope all along? A new assessment of the UK’s recent productivity suggests this critical measure of the country’s economic strength may have been systematically underestimated. Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 09:30 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

US tax policy deprives the government of revenue and overwhelmingly serves the interests of the richAfter the House passed its version of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) last year – the one that paired a $5tn-plus tax cut with $1tn-plus of cuts from food stamps and Medicaid – the House speaker, Mike Johnson, explained that “this is not giving tax cuts to the millionaires”. The beneficiaries, he said, were “small business owners” that “provide the jobs in every community in America”.Johnson was playing to the myth of the modest, sturdy Main Street job creator. It is an appealing story. It’s also the most consequential piece of BS distorting American policy that deprives the government of tax revenue, stunts American capitalism, twists regulations, thwarts competition and overwhelmingly serves millionaires’ interests. Continue reading...

15 Aug 2026 10:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Nurses collapsing, builders with heatstroke, bus drivers in cabs that reach 44C. The new PM wanted to spend the summer talking about the cost of living – he should change his plansI don’t think I have ever written before about a British strike directly related to the climate emergency. But that’s exactly what began late last week in north London, with a zeitgeisty connection to Andy Burnham’s fixation on buses: picket lines outside depots and massed walkouts, while the temperatures in the relevant parts of the capital and its suburbs hovered at about 34C (93F).Last Friday, more than 1,500 drivers employed by the transport giant Arriva began a planned run of 26 stoppages through to October, affecting bus routes spread between London and Essex. Everything is being led by the union Unite, whose recent grievances include alleged company union-busting and assaults by the public on staff. But the fundamental basis of the dispute is at the heart of the national condition: the near-impossibility for millions of people of working through another insanely hot summer.John Harris is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

16 Aug 2026 11:33 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Partners say they ‘don’t recall’ leaked papers and are accused by lawyers of being misleading as more whistleblowers come forwardGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastKPMG staff misled colleagues who tried to investigate leaks of confidential client information, a parliamentary inquiry has heard.The audit and consulting firm and leading clients such as Westpac, Macquarie and Optus faced a grilling on Friday. Westpac’s representative threw his weight behind the Labor-led inquiry’s calls for the Albanese government to reform the big four firms. Continue reading...

15 Aug 2026 04:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Solar eclipses are far easier to manage than Europe’s cross-border electricity politicsIn the end, the solar eclipse did not cause the electricity grid to flicker. The early drop-off in solar generation was manageable, just as the National Energy System Operator (Neso), the state-owned body responsible for keeping the lights on, predicted. Gas-fired generators still had to be paid nose-bleed prices to fire up, and power via high-voltage interconnectors to continental Europe was also expensively sourced. But the system worked.A summer of heatwaves, however, has highlighted European grids’ reliance on those interconnectors – including seven between the UK and the continent – in an age of extreme weather and greater use of intermittent renewables. On Thursday, another low-wind “heat dome” day, a fifth of power to the British grid was coming from the continent at 10am. Cables from France alone were meeting 11%, or 3.54 gigawatts, of demand, or more than twice as much as the output at that time from the UK’s entire fleet of windfarms. Continue reading...

13 Aug 2026 17:13 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN