United Kingdom

Gig economy companies supplying “freelance” workers to shops, restaurants and warehouses may be operating illegally, the government has warned, after a series of Observer reports highlighting their use.

Justin Madders, the employment rights minister, last week wrote to YoungOnes and Temper, which provide thousands of purportedly self-employed workers to British businesses, to tell them their business practices could be breaching employment law and staffing agency regulations.

In almost identical letters to the Dutch-owned platforms, Madders states that “bogus self-employment is entirely unacceptable” and he will “not hesitate to ask all relevant authorities to scrutinise employers or agencies whose behaviour appears to be exploitative”.

Madders is concerned the freelance workers on the platforms are not receiving employment rights. He adds it is unacceptable for businesses to claim people are self-employed “when it does not represent the reality of the relationship”.

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The letters come after the Observer revealed gig shop workers who refused to pay charges to YoungOnes to receive their wages within three days were left waiting for payment over Christmas.

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The new payment system has led to further complaints against YoungOnes. Workers who decline to pay a fee to receive their wages quickly have to wait for clients to pay YoungOnes, which can cause difficulties for gig workers, who cannot rely on a regular wage packet to pay bills.

When your mailbag brims with 25,000 letters and emails every day, deciding which to answer first is daunting. When lurking within are pleas for help from some of the country’s most vulnerable people, the stakes only get higher.

That is the challenge facing the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as correspondence floods in from benefit applicants and claimants – of which there are more than 20 million, including pensioners, in the UK. The DWP thinks it may have found a solution in using artificial intelligence to read it all first – including handwritten missives.

Human reading used to take weeks and could leave the most vulnerable people waiting for too long for help. But “white mail” is an AI that can do the same work in a day and supposedly prioritise the most vulnerable cases for officials to get to first.

By implication, it deprioritises other people, so its accuracy and how it reaches its judgments count, but both matters remain opaque. Despite a ministerial mandate, it is one of numerous public sector algorithms yet to be logged on the transparency register for central government AIs.

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People who work with benefit claimants are now voicing “serious concerns” about how the system handles sensitive personal data.

Meagan Levin, the policy and public affairs manager at Turn2us, a charity which helps people facing financial insecurity, said the system “raises concerns, particularly around the lack of transparency and its handling of highly sensitive personal data, including medical records and financial details. Processing such information without claimants’ knowledge and consent is deeply troubling.”

According to the information so far released, the data is encrypted before the originals are deleted, and is held by the DWP and its cloud computing provider. The name of the provider is one of many pieces of information about the system that have been redacted.

Prevent’s assessment of the danger posed by Axel Rudakubana followed policy at the time, an official review will find but it will criticise the scheme for rejecting extra help to tackle his interest in violence.

This week the government is expected to publish the review into Prevent’s handling of the three referrals of Rudakubana, the last of which was three years before he commited his atrocity on a school summer holiday dance class in Southport.

The decisions of Prevent, the official scheme to spot people before they become terrorists, have been criticised by the prime minister, and the government has announced inquiries into what it does and how wide its remit is.

Sir Peter Fahy, the former police lead for Prevent, warned the revelations about the scheme’s three rejections of adopting Rudakubana’s case – which were first reported by the Guardian – have plunged counter-terrorism into one of its worst reputational crises.

Some in policing compare their willingness to answer questions after Rudakubana changed his plea to guilty last Monday to those in mental health and other sectors, who they say have avoided answering questions.

Prevent learning reviews are not usually made public but the government has decided to make an exception for the one into the Southport killer. Some of the families worst affected by the atrocity have had access to a copy since Friday.

Counter-terrorism policing is bracing itself for further criticism when it is made public, as Rudakubana had been deemed unsuitable for Prevent because he did not follow any ideology.

Fahy said: “counter-terrorism policing has been damaged reputationally, it has been in the forefront of criticism. There is a misunderstanding about what Prevent is about.

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Neil Basu, the former head of counter-terrorism, told the Guardian a new scheme should be set up to tackle those obsessed with extreme violence, and Prevent’s focus on spotting terrorists should not be diluted.

He said: “The narrative danger of the current conversation is you don’t know the scale of this problem – you massively underestimate it – and you will assume they can all be stopped. They can’t. The reality of both is that both conclusions are disturbing. The scale is vast and you’ll never stop them all. It shouldn’t stop us trying though and the review is the best place to start …

“You do need a parallel well-funded system that doesn’t expand and divert the counter-terrorism mission.”

WH Smith is in secret talks to sell its entire high street business in Britain more than 230 years after it opened its first shop in central London.

Sky News can exclusively reveal that the listed retail group, which has a market capitalisation of almost £1.5bn, has been in negotiations with a number of prospective buyers of the division for several weeks.

WH Smith will confirm the plan to the London Stock Exchange on Monday morning.

The company's high street arm comprises roughly 500 stores, employing about 5,000 people across the country.

It is currently part of the same group as WH Smith's faster-growing, more profitable travel retail business which operates from airports, train stations and hospitals.

The travel retail business comprises 600 shops in the UK, roughly half of a global operation numbering about 1,200 travel retail outlets.

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Run by Carl Cowling, chief executive, the disposal of its high street arm and repositioning as a pure-play travel retail company is likely to be welcomed by investors, one analyst said this weekend.

WH Smith's high street division, which recorded flat operating profit of £32m last year, still largely sells greeting cards, books and stationery, while the travel arm has a wider offering of food and drink, and technology products.

The travel business now accounts for 75% of the company's revenue, and 85% of profits, reflecting its higher margins.

It is growing particularly quickly in the US market.

The company's retail business in hospitals is also growing rapidly, with 145 stores in 100 hospitals across the UK, and scope for openings in 200 further sites, it said in its last set of results in November.

News of the potential sale represents a watershed moment in the history of the British high street.

WHSmith's first store was opened in 1792 by Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna in Little Grosvenor Street, London.

Archived

MPs and peers have launched an inquiry into the UK’s ability to protect undersea internet cables that link the country with the rest of the world, following heightened threats of sabotage from Russia, China and other hostile states.

The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, which scrutinises government decision-making on national security, aims to assess the UK’s readiness for potential attacks on critical underseas communication cables.

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According to the parliamentary committee’s chairman, Matt Western, 99% of the country’s data passes through underseas internet cables, making them a soft target for action by foreign states seeking to covertly damage the UK.

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The UK relies on about 60 cables to connect it with the rest of the world that provide resilience if one or two are deliberately or accidentally damaged. However, MPs and peers have raised concerns that a simultaneous attack on multiple cables, particularly during times of heightened tension or conflict, could cause significant disruption.

According to the UK’s 2025 National Risk Register, in a reasonable worst-case scenario, the loss of transatlantic subsea cables linking to the UK would cause “considerable disruption” to essential services, including financial services, that rely on offshore datacentres and offshore service providers.

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cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/95793

Times are desperate. And the only way out is to come up with more ways to exploit ourselves.

Archived

New polling commissioned by Common Wealth shows strong and widespread public support for community-owned energy projects, and a good level of interest in participating in them through volunteering time, investing money, and reducing energy use. The Labour government’s Local Power Plan (LPP) aims to support local authorities and community groups to develop thousands of such projects, contributing to the UK’s pathway to net zero and building community wealth. Along with partner organisations (Power to Change, Locality and Ashden), Common Wealth is undertaking research on how the Local Power Plan (LPP) can be designed and implemented to maximise its effectiveness in enabling a widespread expansion of the sector in a way that works for communities. As part of this, our new polling with YouGov shows:

• 62 per cent of the public would support a community-owned renewable energy project in their area, compared to 40 per cent support for a privately-owned project.
• 53 per cent of the public say they would be likely to reduce their energy consumption in support of a community energy project, with 24 per cent and 14 per cent likely to volunteer their time and invest money respectively.

Lack of funds and lack of time were major reasons raised by those who said they were unlikely to participate, and there are differences in likelihood to participate across age, gender, education levels and social grade.

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Southport killer Axel Rudakubana was under the care of an NHS mental health service for about four years before he "stopped engaging", a hospital trust has said.

Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust confirmed he had been under its care between 2019 and 2023.

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A spokesperson for Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust said it "welco)med an independent public inquiry" into the failures to identify the risk posed by the teenager.

The statement added that Rudakubana, from Banks in west Lancashire, had stopped engaging with the service in February 20

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31610867

The world's largest iceberg is on a collision course with the British territory of South Georgia - potentially putting millions of penguins and seals in danger.

The trillion-tonne slab of ice, named A23a, broke free from its position last month and started drifting northwards.

The "megaberg" - which is twice the size of Greater London and 130 feet tall - is expected to approach the remote island off Antarctica in the next two to four weeks.

Sneaky paywall workaround: https://archive.is/yZow0

I have considered this drug in the past but I thought the expense and the side effects would make it not worth it. Looks like maybe it is indeed not worth it, given how bad the side effects can be.

UK pay growth rose in November despite evidence of employers cutting jobs after Rachel Reeves’s tax-raising budget, underlining a dilemma for the Bank of England as it considers cutting interest rates next month.

With the government under pressure on the economy, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said annual growth in average weekly earnings rose by 5.6% in the three months to the end of November, up from 5.2% in the three months to October.

City economists had forecast total annual pay growth would accelerate. The reading matched estimates for total pay, but was marginally higher than expected for regular pay, excluding bonuses.

At the same time, the figures showed the UK unemployment rate for people aged 16 and over rose to 4.4% in the three months to November, up from 4.3% in the three months to October, highlighting some evidence of a cooling jobs market since the autumn budget.

Alex Sobel, Labour MP for Leeds Central and Headingley, and a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR), told PoliticsHome that forced labour continues to be a “very broad” issue across UK supply chains – particularly in the supply of cotton, manufactured goods, and commodities like cocoa, coffee and palm oil.

He said that the government should not sign trade agreements with countries that refuse to agree to human rights commitments.

"We're not going to raise human rights standards if we ignore it in trade," he said.

Starting next week, the JCHR – with members from both the Commons and the House of Lords – will start an inquiry to assess the effectiveness of the UK’s response to forced labour exploitation and its impact on UK supply chains.

“People are definitely becoming more aware of it,” Sobel said.

“Other jurisdictions, particularly the European Union, are legislating on it and the UK government as well is moving on this.”

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Sobel suggested that there has been a lack of political will in the last few years to refresh the legislation.

“On an issue like forced slavery, you need a prime minister or business secretary who are very committed and very interested in this area,” he said, pointing to former Tory prime minister Theresa May as the last example of a leader before Keir Starmer who was committed to the topic.

In Sobel’s view, the responsibility for preventing the sale of forced labour goods in the UK needs to lie with the government and businesses rather than with the consumer.