New GCSE was announced under previous government in 2022 but now ‘sitting in limbo’, says Mary Colwell, one of its architects

The natural history GCSE has been shelved because it is “seen as a Conservative party initiative”, one of the architects of the proposed new qualification has said.

The conservationist and campaigner Mary Colwell told the Guardian she was “hugely frustrated” with the halt to the proposed new GCSE, which had been announced in 2022 and was supposed to be taught in schools by 2025.

Health bosses reportedly concerned about government’s focus while council leaders are said to believe building targets are unrealistic

Good morning. Keir Starmer is giving a speech on Thursday and you can tell it is important because No 10 started briefing on what it is going to say in a news release to journalists sent out last Friday. He is going to announce a “plan for change” that will include “measurable milestones”. In the advance briefing Keir Starmer said it would be “the most ambitious yet honest programme for government in a generation”.

But hang on – hasn’t Starmer announced plenty of “measurable milestones” already? In 2023 he announced five missions , which he said were not just conventional performance targets but part of an attempt to make government more strategic and focused on the long term. The five headline missions all included sub-missions, so arguably there were around 26 targets or pledges in the document. Then, as the election approached, Labour simplified matter by announcing six first steps for change .

Health bosses accept the need to focus on the government’s political priority but say ministers will need to accept trade-offs to achieve it. “If the priority is putting all the money into electives, what we will see is warzone A&E departments and all sorts of other things being sidelined,” said an NHS source. “It will have a number of casualties, including mental health, community care and waits in A&E.”

Local councils have told the government its flagship plan to build 1.5m new homes in England over the next five years is “unrealistic” and “impossible to achieve”, the BBC can reveal.

The vast majority of councils expressed concern about the plan in a consultation exercise carried out by Angela Rayner’s housing department earlier this year.

Labour-run Broxtowe council in Nottinghamshire described the proposed changes as “very challenging, if not impossible to achieve”.

South Tyneside, another Labour-run council, said the plans were “wholly unrealistic”, while the independent-run council in Central Bedfordshire, said the area would be left “absolutely swamped with growth that the infrastructure just can not support”.

Peter Wanless of the NSPCC calls for more preventive action on child poverty, a ban on ‘morally repugnant’ smacking and favours guardrails online rather than bans

The boss of the UK’s leading children’s charity has attacked the Conservatives for their failure to improve outcomes for children, saying that, while they were in power, “pretty much every indicator” went in the wrong direction.

In a frank interview days before he steps down, NSPCC chief executive Peter Wanless said ministers had “good intentions”, citing a review of children’s social care and online safety reforms – but that in the end, “you’ve got to be judged by the actions”.

The granular detail of Kim Leadbeater’s bill for England and Wales is yet to be agreed, and some MPs want reassurances before finally backing it

As a few low murmurs broke out in a respectfully reflective House of Commons chamber after its historic vote on assisted dying in England and Wales, one figure in the public gallery had a special interest in the result.

Back in 2015, Rob Marris, the former Labour MP for Wolverhampton South West, had tabled the previous attempt to pass a bill changing the law. It was comprehensively defeated.

Cash from dictatorships and shell companies is entering the political system via legal loopholes

Loopholes in the law are allowing “dark money” to infiltrate UK politics, with almost £1 in every £10 donated to parties and politicians coming from unknown or dubious sources, analysis reveals.

Cash from companies that have never turned a profit, from unincorporated associations that do not have to declare their funders, and banned donations from overseas donors via intermediaries are all entering the system, according to research by Transparency International (TI).

PM says previous government ‘deliberately liberalised’ post-Brexit immigration as he announces deal with Iraq

Keir Starmer has accused the Conservatives of running an “open borders experiment” after new figures showed that net migration to the UK hit a record high of nearly 1 million in a period covering Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s administrations.

The prime minister announced a deal with Iraq to tackle people-smugglers and a white paper to overhaul the visa system, before demanding “an explanation” from Kemi Badenoch for her party’s decision to “deliberately liberalise immigration” after the Brexit vote.

For 14 years, the Tories presided over a muddle of unrealistic pledges. Labour should try a little honesty instead

• Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant

Yesterday Kemi Badenoch said the Conservative government “got it wrong” on immigration, and promised a “strict numerical cap”.

We’ve been here before. In the summer of 2010, I was chief economist at the Cabinet Office. Not long after the election, I sent David Cameron an unsolicited paper about his pledge to reduce migration to the “tens of thousands” . It said that this would almost certainly present him with the unpalatable choice between deliberately damaging the UK economy and labour market, and conspicuously failing to deliver a high-profile political commitment. I suggested, gently, ways in which the target could be modified.

Jonathan Portes is professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London and a former senior civil servant

Kemi Badenoch gave speech on Wednesday referring to James Cleverly’s 2023 visa rule changes, while government says it is important to tackle causes of high migration

Government figures reckon the latest annual net migration figure will be around 500,000, Sam Blewett says in his London Playbook briefing for Politico.

Government officials and the Tories both reckon the ballpark provisional figure will be somewhere around 500,000, well down from that record high of 745,000 in 2022. There will be those who argue the latest figure is massive pretty much whatever it is — but if Starmer is serious about bringing down the numbers, he can thank a suite of measures that would have been much more unpalatable for a left-leaning party to have introduced.

Tomorrow, immigration figures will be released that should show a drop in net migration. This is because of the changes we made in the last year of the Conservative government.

The figures we saw for 2023 were astonishing. They highlighted a big problem we must be honest about. Even if we see a decline in tomorrow’s data, the fact is immigration, both legal and illegal, is too high.

We want to see net migration coming down, but we have to do so in a way that is tackling the causes of net migration, because if much of net migration has been driven by recruiting workers from overseas, you also have to look at what the impact on the economy would be.

Party leader could revive deportations for people who arrive on small boats but did not recommit to Rwanda plan

Kemi Badenoch is considering a new cap on visas if the Conservatives return to power and has admitted that previous Tory governments had failed to keep their promises on immigration.

In her first policy intervention as party leader, she also said pulling out of human rights laws “may not be the most radical thing” that her future government will have to do to control the flow of people into the UK.