UK has high rate of teenagers missing meals due to poverty, OECD says – as it happpened

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The UK has suffered a sharp decline in its performance in the latest round of influential international academic tests, wiping out recent progress, as the widespread disruption caused by Covid continued to take its toll on education, the Guardian reports.

Yesterday, when he was being interviewed at the Resolution Foundation conference, Keir Starmer was asked by Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor of the Economist, if he could say in what way his policies were different from the Conservatives'. Starmer was able to provide a half-decent answer, but he did not entirely dispel her suggestion that in many areas the policy overlap is getting more and more pronounced.

Today's announcement is an admission of years of Tory failure on both the immigration system and the economy, as net migration has trebled to a record high under the Tories since they promised to reduce it at the last election.

Labour has said repeatedly that net migration should come down and called for action to scrap the unfair 20% wage discount, raise salary thresholds based on economic evidence, bring in new training requirements linked to the immigration system, as well as a proper workforce plan for social care. Immigration is important but the system needs to be controlled and managed. But whilst the Conservatives have finally been forced to abandon the unfair wage discount that they introduced, they are still completely failing to introduce more substantial reforms that link immigration to training and fair pay requirements in the UK, meaning many sectors will continue to see rising numbers of work visas because of skills shortages.

What that means is, if you've got a shortage occupation, not just health and social care workers - that might be also engineers, might also include now bricklayers - employers will still be able to recruit at less than the threshold. And yet the government is still doing nothing to tackle those skills.

We think the Migration Advisory Committee should look at this very swiftly before it is introduced, particularly at the impact this is going to have on British citizens who fall in love across borders.