UK News

MI6 will be led by a woman for the first time in the foreign intelligence service’s 116-year history. Blaise Metreweli, who joined the Secret Intelligence Service in 1999, will become the 18th chief of the organisation and take over from Sir Richard Moore later this year. She is currently responsible for technology and innovation at the service and said she ...

A project to build the UK’s largest road tunnel has been granted £590m by the government. Constructing the Lower Thames Crossing, linking Tilbury in Essex and Gravesend in Kent, will cost an estimated £10bn. Plans for the 14.5-mile (23km) route were approved in March after a 16-year process that has already cost £1.2bn. Chancellor Rachel Reeves said the crossing would ...

Rachel Reeves has announced an extra £29bn per year for the NHS in England, along with funding boosts for defence and housing, as she set out the government’s spending plans until the end of the decade. The chancellor also promised more money for artificial intelligence and transport projects, saying “renewing Britain” was at the heart of her plans. But the ...

The government has set out plans to end the use of hotels to hold asylum seekers by 2029, a move Rachel Reeves says will save £1bn a year. Unveiling her Spending Review on Wednesday, the chancellor pledged £200m to “cut the asylum backlog, hear more appeal cases and return people who have no right to be here”. Ministers say hotels ...

Sir Keir Starmer has defended the UK’s £3.4bn deal to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, while retaining control of a UK-US military base on Diego Garcia. At prime minister’s questions, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch called it a “terrible” deal and asked “why on earth” British taxpayers should be paying for tax cuts in Mauritius. Last week, ...

Arrests for illegal work have surged this past year as police focus on “unscrupulous” employers who exploit undocumented migrants, the government says. Immigration officers arrested more than 6,400 people in the past year in raids at businesses across the UK, data released by the Home Office shows. It said the figure is 51% higher than the previous year. It did ...

A passenger plane from Heathrow to Detroit had to return to the London airport due to a cracked windscreen. Delta Air Lines flight 017 was carrying 188 passengers and 12 crew on board when the pilot reported the fault shortly after taking off at 11:44 BST on Saturday morning. The crew followed procedure by returning to London Heathrow, where the ...

The government is struggling to cut the amount of foreign aid it spends on hotel bills for asylum seekers in the UK, the BBC has learnt. New figures released quietly by ministers in recent days show the Home Office plans to spend £2.2bn of overseas development assistance (ODA) this financial year – that is only marginally less than the £2.3bn ...

Scottish Labour has taken Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse from the SNP in a closely fought by-election. The party’s Davy Russell won with 8,559 votes, with a majority of 602 over the SNP. The vote followed the death of SNP MSP Christina McKelvie, who had represented the constituency since 2011. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said his party had “proven the ...

  Zia Yusuf has resigned as the chairman of Reform UK, saying working to get the party elected was no longer “a good use of my time”. In a post on social media, Yusuf did not expand further on his reasons for stepping down. However, it comes after he said it was “dumb” for the party’s newest MP to call ...