Child made homeless every eight minutes

Homeless children, photo Eflon (Creative Commons)

Homeless children, photo Eflon (Creative Commons)   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

At least 135,000 children will be homeless and living in temporary accommodation across Britain on Christmas day – the highest number for 12 years – according to the housing charity Shelter.

It estimates that a child loses their home every eight minutes – 183 children a day. At this rate, 1,647 children will become homeless between now and the general election on 12 December, and more than 4,000 by 25 December.


NHS ‘promises’ and privatisation

The Tory government’s pledge to boost GP numbers by 5,000 has fallen short by over 90%.

In 2015, former health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, pledged that they would raise the number of full-time-equivalent GPs in the NHS up from 34,492 in September that year.

But new NHS figures show only a rise of 370, just 7% of what the government promised.

GP groups said that the number of non-trainee GPs had actually fallen by more than 1,000 during this time.

The figures show again that Tory promises on the NHS can’t be trusted.

As well as lying over nursing numbers during the election, Boris Johnson is also facing questions over privatisation in the NHS after new research revealed that £15 billion of health service contracts have been handed to private companies since 2015.

The finding exposes health secretary Matt Hancock’s promise that there would be “no privatisation of the NHS on my watch”.


Unequal Britain

Inequality in Britain is among the worst in the developed world, according to a report by thinktank IPPR North, which found that parts of England have higher mortality rates than places in Turkey, Romania and Poland.

It said Britain is “consistently more divided than any comparable country” when it comes to vital topics such as productivity, income, unemployment, health and politics, the research found.

Six UK billionaires control as much wealth as the poorest 13 million with a combined fortune of £39.4 billion.