The home secretary has welcomed guidance for the police that has told them to share suspects’ ethnicity and nationality with the public, reports the PA news agency.
Yvette Cooper said the government had been clearer for the need for more openness.
It comes after authorities were accused of covering up offences carried out by asylum seekers, and in the wake of riots after the Southport murders which were partly fuelled by social media disinformation.
Cooper said:
We welcome the guidance because this is a step forward, and we have been clear that we need greater transparency and that’s what the public want to see.
But we have also asked the Law Commission, particularly to look at what information can be released to make sure that we’re not also affecting criminal trials that are under way.
That’s where a lot of the restrictions and constraints have been. So we’ve asked the Law Commission to report, very quickly, this autumn on what more can be done to avoid prejudicing criminal trials.
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Yvette Cooper insisted there would be “safeguards and protections” governing the use of live facial recognition as she was questioned about whether its deployment could infringe on privacy.
The PA news agency reports that when Cooper was asked whether the rollout was an infringement on people’s privacy, the home secretary said:
Well, the way this technology is being used is to identify people who are wanted by the court, who maybe should be returned to prison, or who have failed to appear before the court, or who have breached things like sexual harm prevention orders, so serious criminals.
And I think being able to identify them, alongside having proper legal safeguards and a legal framework in place because there do have to be safeguards and protections, but we also need to be able to use the technology to catch dangerous criminals and to keep communities safe.
ShareHome secretary says guidance for police on sharing suspects’ ethnicity and nationality is a ‘step forward’
The home secretary has welcomed guidance for the police that has told them to share suspects’ ethnicity and nationality with the public, reports the PA news agency.
Yvette Cooper said the government had been clearer for the need for more openness.
It comes after authorities were accused of covering up offences carried out by asylum seekers, and in the wake of riots after the Southport murders which were partly fuelled by social media disinformation.
Cooper said:
We welcome the guidance because this is a step forward, and we have been clear that we need greater transparency and that’s what the public want to see.
But we have also asked the Law Commission, particularly to look at what information can be released to make sure that we’re not also affecting criminal trials that are under way.
That’s where a lot of the restrictions and constraints have been. So we’ve asked the Law Commission to report, very quickly, this autumn on what more can be done to avoid prejudicing criminal trials.
ShareNGOs urge Nandy to halt sale of Telegraph over China links
Mark Sweney
A group of nine human rights and freedom of expression organisations have called on the culture secretary to halt RedBird Capital’s proposed £500m takeover of the Telegraph and investigate the US private equity company’s ties to China.
The international non-governmental organisations, which include Index on Censorship, Reporters Without Borders and Article 19, have written to Lisa Nandy arguing that RedBird Capital’s links with China “threaten media pluralism, transparency and information integrity in the UK”.
A consortium led by RedBird Capital agreed a deal in May to buy the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, ending two years of uncertainty over the future of the titles.
The organisations said that RedBird Capital’s chair, John Thornton, sits on the advisory council of the China Investment Corporation, the country’s largest sovereign wealth fund.
Thornton, a former chair of Goldman Sachs Asia, has also previously chaired the Silk Road Finance Corporation.
“Both [are] vehicles through which China has pursued financial influence,” the letter said.
The signatories, who also include Hong Kong Watch, Human Rights in China and the Hong Kong Democracy Council, said Nandy should follow her predecessor, Lucy Frazer, who issued a public interest intervention notice (PIIN) in January last year.
Former Holyrood presiding officer George Reid has died at the age of 86, his family have announced. He died in the early hours of Tuesday at Strathcarron Hospice near Denny, just a few miles from where he was born in Clackmannanshire, reports the PA news agency.
Flags at the Scottish parliament he helped to complete have been lowered as a mark of respect, current presiding officer Alison Johnstone announced.
First minister John Swinney led tributes to Reid, crediting him as being one of the voices that brought him into politics as a teenager.
“I am desperately saddened by the loss of the remarkable George Reid,” the first minister said in a statement on Wednesday. He added:
His passion for Scotland, his principled internationalist worldview, and his empathy for the plight of people everywhere made him a voice that could not be ignored across five decades.
As an MP, he was a trailblazing member of the SNP’s breakthrough victories of 1974. He became, for me, one of the compelling voices of the campaign for a Scottish parliament in 1979.
His was one of the voices that brought me into politics and kindled my belief in independence that has driven my adult life. I feel so privileged to have been shaped by his influence and inspiration.
George was a founding member of the Scottish parliament. More than that, after Holyrood’s difficult early years, he put aside party and provided emphatic national leadership as the presiding officer, ending the controversies over the new building and cementing the institution’s place in modern political life.
Throughout it all, his articulation of the case for Scotland deciding her own future was as compelling to me when I sat with him in his home just four short weeks ago, as it was when I was a teenager.
Helena Horton
A Chinese firm is reportedly a leading contender to buy Thames Water if the heavily indebted company collapses in coming weeks.
Hong Kong’s CKI, which invests in power and other utility companies in the UK, is among those lining up to acquire the water and sewerage supplier if it enters a special administration regime (SAR), according to the Times.
It has reportedly said it would be prepared to operate under tougher penalties for environmental breaches than Thames’s class A creditors, who have put together their own purchase bid.
The creditor group has said the company cannot afford to operate with an expected £1bn of fines coming down the track, which are levied by the regulator for breaches such as illegally dumping sewage. In May, Thames was hit with a record £104m fine over environmental breaches involving sewage spills.
The environment secretary, Steve Reed, has in recent months stepped up preparations for the possibility of putting Thames into SAR – effectively a form of temporary nationalisation.
On Tuesday the government confirmed it had appointed FTI Consulting to make contingency plans for a potential collapse. The appointment indicates that FTI is the first choice to act as administrator if the government enacted an SAR, although a court would ultimately approve such a step.
Thames, which supplies 16 million customers in London and south-east England, has been racing to pull together a deal to avoid financial collapse.
The government has been trying to avoid such an outcome, with the Treasury threatening that a potential £4bn bill from the SAR could be forced on to Reed’s department. This process would ensure that the taps stayed on for customers but would heap immediate costs on to the government.
However, the government’s Water (Special Measures) Act contains a provision for SAR costs to be recouped from customer bills further down the line.
Responding to reports that Nigel Farage would be meeting US vice-president JD Vance today, leader of the Liberal Democrats Ed Davey said last night:
Nigel Farage could use his meeting with JD Vance to tell the White House that in Europe we stand together against Putin’s aggression. But Farage won’t do that because he’s much more interested in pleasing Trump than in standing up for British values and European security.
Updated at 06.09 EDT
Nasar Meer, a professor of social and political sciences at the University of Glasgow, has written an opinion piece for the Guardian today on the topic of routinely disclosing the ethnicity of police suspects.
Supporters say more “transparency” will prevent malign forces from flourishing – but the argument is profoundly flawed, he writes:
Updated at 06.00 EDT
In an interview this morning, the policing minister, Diana Johnson, said she had seen facial recognition technology in action in Croydon, London, where the Metropolitan police had put together a watchlist of wanted individuals, and the list was deleted after the exercise. “So it was very tailored,” Johnson told BBC Breakfast.
She added:
There are laws about how this has to be done in terms of human rights, equalities law, data protection laws.
I think one of the concerns people, perhaps rightly, have is the need to consolidate that into one piece of legislation or one law, and that’s something we’re going to consult on later in the year, about how live facial recognition technology should be used and the oversight of it to make it as transparent as possible for the public to really feel this is something that the police are using properly.
Johnson had earlier told Times Radio:
There is quite a lot of misinformation out there about what this actually does and how it’s used.
She said:
And I know in the past, there’ve been concerns about bias, particularly around certain ethnic groups or genders or age. And the way that this is now structured, the algorithms that are being used have been independently tested, so I’m confident that the live facial recognition that we’re rolling out today actually is within the law and does not have the bias that has happened previously.
According to the Home Office, the technology will be used to track down high-harm offenders. Seven English forces will have access to 10 vans equipped with cameras, across Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Surrey, Sussex, Thames Valley and Hampshire, following on from recent deployments by London’s Met police and South Wales police, reports the PA news agency.
Ch Supt Tim Morgan of South Wales police said the technology had “never resulted in a wrongful arrest in south Wales, and there have been no false alerts for several years as the technology and our understanding has evolved”.
But human rights campaigners have “concerns” about “this incredibly intrusive technology”, Shami Chakrabarti, a former director of the civil liberties advocacy group Liberty, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
The former shadow attorney general said:
Some would say this is yet another move towards a total surveillance society – challenges to privacy, challenges to freedom of assembly and association, and problems with race and sex discrimination because of the higher likelihood of false matches in the context of certain groups.
She said that “the public generally understand that police powers are governed by statute, so there’s a public conversation, there are parliamentary debates and votes”, but warned there was no law specifically covering live facial recognition to gather evidence. “It’s particularly odd that this has all been developed pretty much completely outside the law,” she said.
Chakrabarti said she “welcomed” plans to consult ahead of possible new legislation, but warned that to date, “it’s been a bit of a wild west – the police procuring technology from whichever companies they see fit, the police drawing up watchlists of who they’re looking for and what level, what severity of crime should be sufficient for deployment, and pretty much marking their own homework”.
ShareSharp growth in gap between public spending and taxes in Scotland leaves deficit twice as large as UK’s
Severin Carrell
The gap between public spending and taxes in Scotland has grown sharply to more than £26bn, leaving it with a deficit twice as large as the UK’s, official data shows.
The latest annual report on Scottish expenditure and tax revenues shows the notional fiscal deficit – the gap between overall spending and overall tax receipts – stood at 11.7% of Scottish GDP in the last financial year.
The UK’s deficit was 5.1% for 2024/25, and the revenue gap has grown in Scotland. In the previous year, it stood at 9.7% of GDP.
Those figures, which include all types of spending and tax raising by both the Scottish and UK governments, include Scotland’s notional share of revenues from North Sea oil and gas. Those fell last year, contributing to the increasing fiscal gap.
Overall, the two governments raised £91.4bn in taxes but spent £117.6bn – a figure which includes Scotland’s notional share of spending in other parts of the UK or overseas in areas such as defence, trade and foreign affairs.
The Scottish government said these annual accounts, part of the Government expenditure and revenue Scotland (GERS) series, showed that domestic tax receipts grew faster than all devolved government spending and social security spending for the fourth year running.
The data has continuing significance because the Scottish National party government in Edinburgh plans to make independence part of next year’s devolved elections again. Scotland’s ability to finance its spending independently is a crucial issue in that debate.
Shona Robison, the Scottish finance secretary, said:
The decisions we have taken here in Scotland are helping support sustainable public finances.
Scotland’s public finances are better than many other parts of the UK, with the third highest revenue per person in the UK, behind only London and the south-east.
Ian Murray, the secretary of state for Scotland, who represents the UK government, said:
These figures underline the collective economic strength of the United Kingdom and how Scotland benefits from the redistribution of wealth inside the UK.
By sharing resources with each other across the UK, Scots benefit by £2,669 more per head in public spending than the UK average. It also means that devolved governments have the financial heft of the wider UK behind them when taking decisions.
Updated at 06.10 EDT
Trump administration accuses UK of failing to uphold human rights
Rachel Hall
The Trump administration has accused the UK of backsliding on human rights over the past year, citing antisemitic violence and “serious restrictions” on free speech.
The annual US state department assessment, which analyses human rights conditions worldwide, highlighted laws limiting speech around abortion clinics, as well as the way government officials “repeatedly intervened to chill speech” online after the 2024 Southport attack.
The report stated:
The government sometimes took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, but prosecution and punishment for such abuses was inconsistent.
The report cited the “safe access zones” around abortion clinics, which it said “could include prohibitions on efforts to influence … even through prayer or silent protests”.
JD Vance, right, seen here with David Lammy at Chevening, previously said the UK had conducted a ‘backslide in conscience rights’. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP
Criticism over the handling of free speech – in particular relating to regulations on online hate speech – was also directed at the governments of Germany and France.
A UK government spokesperson said:
Free speech is vital for democracy around the world, including here in the UK, and we are proud to uphold freedoms whilst keeping our citizens safe.
The document, previously seen as the most comprehensive study of its kind, has been significantly rewritten and downscaled by the Trump administration, including in areas such as government corruption and LGBTQ+ rights.
It spares criticism for US allies such as Israel and El Salvador while escalating disapproval of perceived foes such as Brazil and South Africa. The document was published after months of delay amid reports of internal dissent at the state department over its contents.
Rajeev Syal
In case you missed our news story on the topic:
Police forces should consider disclosing the ethnicity and migration status of suspects when they are charged in high-profile and sensitive investigations, according to new official guidance.
After a row over claims that police “covered up” the backgrounds of two men charged in connection with the alleged rape of a child, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing have backed plans to release details of nationality when there is a “policing purpose” for doing so.
This could be to reduce the risk to public safety, “where there are high levels of mis- or disinformation about a particular incident”, or in cases of significant public interest, senior police said.
The decision to release new guidance has been praised by a former senior prosecutor, who said it could help counter rumours and disinformation which spread on social media.
But it will also anger some anti-racist campaigners, who have expressed concern that such proposals could risk framing violence against women and girls as an issue of ethnicity instead of misogyny.
The decision comes after Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, urged police to release the details of ethnicity last week.
Forces are already encouraged to publicise charging decisions in serious cases, the NPCC said.
Decisions on whether to release this information will remain with forces, an NPCC statement said, with wider legal and ethical considerations.
The Home Office will decide if it is “appropriate in all the circumstances” to confirm immigration status of a suspect, the guidance said.
Facial recognition will be used “in a very measured, proportionate way”, the policing minister has vowed.
Policing minister Diana Johnson vowed on a breakfast interview on Wednesday that facial recognition would be used ‘in a very measured, proportionate way’. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
Asked about allegations a wider rollout of facial recognition was the “thin end of the wedge”, leading to a “total surveillance society”, Diana Johnson told BBC Breakfast:
With the greatest of respect, that’s not what this is about. This is about giving the tools to our police officers to enable them to keep us safe. And the live facial recognition results in London, where it’s been used, in the past 12 months, over 580 arrests were made, and these included people who were wanted for rape, for GBH (grievous bodily harm), for robbery, for domestic abuse, and also for sex offenders who were breaching their conditions of being out in the community.
So I think this is a really powerful tool for policing.
And it’s actually a tool, it’s not an automated decision maker. So, the police officer has to look at what’s being put up on the screen and decide what to do next, so there’s that human involvement, but it is a really powerful tool, which I think the public would actually be supportive of being used in a very measured, proportionate way to go after those individuals that the police are looking for for these serious offences.
Updated at 05.06 EDT
Releasing suspects’ ethnicity and nationality won’t stop all instances of disinformation, says policing minister
Disinformation could still spread around suspects arrested under new guidance for police, a minister has said, reports the PA news agency.
Police forces have been told to share suspects’ ethnicity and nationality with the public after authorities were accused of covering up offences carried out by asylum seekers, and after riots following the Southport murders which were partly fuelled by social media disinformation.
The interim guidance by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing comes after mounting pressure on police over the details they make public.
Asked on BBC Breakfast whether not revealing nationality and ethnicity until a suspect is charged, rather than when they are arrested, means disinformation could still spread in the community as it did after Axel Rudakubana’s murders in Southport, policing minister Diana Johnson agreed. Johnson said:
(Disinformation) is a bigger problem for society, I think, but in terms of particular individuals, what normally happens is at charge, information is released. That’s what’s happened before.
Johnson said:
We were very supportive of being as open and as transparent as possible and this interim guidance will set out that on charge, usually name and addresses are given.
We also, in most cases, will want to see nationality or ethnicity given as well. This goes back to last year and what happened, that appalling atrocity in Southport.
She said the government has asked the Law Commission to look into the guidance to make sure any future trial is not prejudiced by information released.
Asked if information about a suspect’s asylum status will be shared in new guidance, Johnson replied:
To date, it’s not something that the Home Office comment on in terms of asylum applications that are made by individuals.
More on this story in a moment. Also today, Keir Starmer will co-chair a meeting with pro-Ukraine allies after a call with US president Donald Trump and European leaders about ending the war scheduled to take place at about midday.
According to The Times, US vice-president JD Vance will meet Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for breakfast in the Cotswolds. In the afternoon, JD Vance is scheduled to visit US troops at Royal Air Force Fairford in Gloucestershire.
In other developments:
A Trump administration report has accused the UK of backsliding on human rights over the past year, citing increased antisemitic violence and growing restrictions on free speech. The annual US state department assessment, which analyses human rights conditions worldwide, flagged what it described as “serious restrictions” on freedom of expression in the UK.
A former cabinet minister has said the UK government is “digging itself into a hole” over Palestine Action and fellow Labour peers and MPs were regretting voting to ban the group. The warning by Peter Hain, who opposed proscription, came as a Labour backbencher who supported it said the issue would arise again when parliament returned in September.
Scottish Green Party members will begin voting for the party’s new leadership from Wednesday. The ballot to replace the current team of co-leaders Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater will be open until 22 August, with the results to be published a week later.
More than 46,000 public bodies spurned the offer of a free King Charles portrait. According to a Guardian exclusive, the Cabinet Office has refused a freedom of information (FoI) request to disclose exactly where the pictures did end up amid falling public support for monarchy.
A group of nine human rights and freedom of expression organisations have called on the culture secretary to halt RedBird Capital’s proposed £500m takeover of the Telegraph and investigate the US private equity company’s ties to China. The international non-governmental organisations, which include Index on Censorship, Reporters Without Borders and Article 19, have written to Lisa Nandy arguing that RedBird Capital’s links with China “threaten media pluralism, transparency and information integrity in the UK”.