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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday that he had a detailed discussion of possible security guarantees for Ukraine during a “productive meeting” with prime minister Keir Starmer at Downing Street. “We also discussed in considerable detail the security guarantees that can make peace truly durable if the United States succeeds in pressing Russia to stop the killings and engage in genuine, substantive diplomacy,” he wrote on X. Zelenskyy added that the leaders also touched on investment in Ukrainian drone production and urged the UK to join Nato’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) programme for equipment and munitions.
Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelenskyy agreed there was a “powerful sense of unity and a strong resolve” to secure peace in Ukraine during a breakfast meeting on Thursday, Downing Street said. In a readout of the meeting, a Number 10 spokesperson said they “then looked ahead to tomorrow’s talks between President Trump and President Putin in Alaska, which present a viable chance to make progress as long as Putin takes action to prove he is serious about peace”.
The UK economy grew at a faster rate than expected in the second quarter, official figures show, despite a slowdown from a strong start to the year amid pressure from tax increases and Donald Trump’s global trade war. Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed growth in gross domestic product slowed to 0.3% in the three months to the end of June, down from a rate of 0.7% in the first quarter.
Rachel Reeves has said that Thursday’s GDP figures “show that the economy beat expectations in the second quarter of this year”. Speaking at a construction site in Doncaster, the chancellor said “there’s still more to do to make sure that people in all parts of the country benefit” from growth.
The Liberal Democrats urged environment secretary Steve Reed to rule out the sale of Thames Water to Hong Kong infrastructure company CKI, if it enters special administration, and for any deal to receive parliamentary scrutiny before being agreed. In a statement shared on Thursday, the Lib Dems said a “Conservative loophole” in legislation passed by the last government could allow the deal to go ahead without an automatic national security check.
No-fault eviction evictions by bailiffs in England have risen by 8% in the 12 months since Labour came into government, new data shows. The party has pledged to end no-fault evictions under its renters’ rights bill, which is in the final stages of going through parliament. The new data on no-fault evictions published on Thursday by the Ministry of Justice comes a week after Rushanara Ali resigned her role as homelessness minister after a report that she gave tenants at a property she owned in east London four months’ notice to leave before relisting the property with a £700 rent increase within weeks.
The BBC has apologised and retrospectively edited a segment of Radio 4’s Thought for the Day after the head of a refugee foundation described comments by Robert Jenrick about asylum seekers as “xenophobia”. The remarks by Krish Kandiah, a theologian who heads the Sanctuary Foundation, prompted an angry response from Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary. The BBC said it had removed “some of the language used” by Kandiah from a version posted online, saying it was not appropriate for the faith-based radio segment. However, Alf Dubs, a Labour peer who came to the UK as a child refugee, said he believed xenophobia was an accurate description of Jenrick’s comments in the Mail on Sunday last weekend.
Claims of an exodus of wealthy “non-doms” in response to tax rises may be overblown, according to a report that suggests that the number leaving the country is in line with official forecasts. Early monthly payroll data from HM Revenue and Customs appears to indicate that the number of non-dom departures are in line with official predictions, according to sources cited by the Financial Times.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson has said that the government has no plans to change the figure of 9% interest that people pay on their student loans. Seperately, Phillipson declined to say whether the government would be prepared to allow universities an inflation-linked tuition fee increase each year to improve their financial situation.
Speaking on Thursday – A-level results day in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – the education secretary called the “entrenched divide” in outcomes and the lack of progress for white working-class children “concerning”. Phillipson said: “Every single young person collecting their results today should have the opportunity to pursue their dreams … but, too often, opportunities depend on background rather than talent. The entrenched divide in outcomes seen over the last few years and the lack of progress for children from white working-class backgrounds is particularly concerning.”
Talking to Times Radio on Thursday, Phillipson said international students made an “important contribution” to the UK’s universities and economy, and “will always be welcome in the UK”. But, she added that “some institutions, their business model has allowed them to become too dependent on international students, and therefore too open to any fluctuations that may happen around that”.
Phillipson also said on Thursday said that the government is “taking our time” to make sure it gets right its guidance on gender-questioning children in schools. She added that there is “no obligation” for people to call non-binary teachers Mx instead of Miss or Sir.
“Alarmingly high” levels of toxic forever chemicals have been detected at English airports – in some cases thousands of times higher than proposed EU safe levels – with experts raising concerns over the potential impact on drinking water sources. Seventeen airports recorded elevated levels of Pfas in the ground and surface water sample on their sites, according to unpublished Environment Agency documents, obtained exclusively by the Ends Report and the Guardian via an environmental information request.
The waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has increased, NHS figures show. An estimated 7.37 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of June, relating to 6.23 million patients – up from 7.36 million treatments and just under 6.23 million patients at the end of May.
Plans to disclose the ethnicity and immigration status of criminal suspects in the UK have been condemned by race campaigners for setting a dangerous precedent for “dog-whistle politics”, which will make “Black and brown communities more vulnerable”. The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, has welcomed new police guidelines released on Wednesday which encourage forces to release the race and nationality of those charged in high-profile cases.
Greenpeace have attached a new work, titled Butchered, by the renowned artist Anish Kapoor on to a Shell platform in the North Sea – the world’s first artwork to be installed on an active offshore gas site. Greenpeace said the work was a stark visualisation of the wound inflicted on humanity and the Earth by the fossil fuel industry, and aimed to represent the collective grief and pain over what has been lost, as well as a call for reparation.
Updated
Struggling Thames Water has said a new reservoir in Oxfordshire could cost more than three times the original budget, pushing the eventual cost to be covered by water bill payers to as much as £7.5bn.
In a blow to government plans for an expansion in the number of reservoirs across south-east England, the heavily indebted utility said a review of the Abingdon project had sent the estimated cost of construction from £2.2bn to between £5.5bn and £7.5bn.
Only last year, Thames told the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) that its assessment of likely costs was “robust”.
But the company has now told regulators that further tests, including of the ground and local waterways, had shown the final bill would be more than twice, and possibly three times, the current forecast.
If the reservoir goes ahead, customers will pick up the tab. About half the costs are due to be recovered from Thames Water’s 16 million customers across London and the south-east, with Affinity Water and Southern Water customers sharing the rest.
Thames customers already face a 35% increase in bills over the next five years under a settlement by the sector regulator Ofwat, while those with Affinity face a 26% lift and with Southern the rise is 53%.
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has pledged to build nine major reservoirs – the country’s first in 30 years – in her determination to take on “the blockers” opposing construction projects and renew the UK’s ageing infrastructure.
