John Power

‘Technology is addling young people’s brains, impacting on their education and attainment, impacting on their health and wellbeing,’ Wes Streeting said on the Today programme this morning. It followed his remarks yesterday that ‘social media should be treated like tobacco – it’s extremely addictive, and bad for our health’. He was commenting on the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges’ (AOMRC’s) response to a consultation, launched by Sir Keir Starmer at the beginning of the year, on the impact of social media on teenagers.

This morning the government was able to celebrate some sorely needed good news. Long-term net migration has fallen sharply to 171,000 per year, down from 331,000 this time last year. Net migration is now less than a fifth of what it was at the peak of the post-Covid immigration wave. If we discount the Covid years it is the lowest that net migration has been since 2012. It’s a remarkable achievement whichever way you cut it, though there is still clear room for improvement. The number of people immigrating for asylum has increased slightly from 87,000 to 88,000.

Wes Streeting’s resignation letter began with a paragraph praising his own record in managing the NHS. He said: “The results are in and I am pleased to report that I have delivered against the ambitious targets you set for me when I became your Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Today's figures confirm that we surpassed our waiting times target despite strikes, and that waiting lists fell by 110,000 in March - the biggest monthly drop outside of Covid since 2008 - meaning that we are on track to achieve the fastest improvement in NHS waiting times in history. The only question that matters in government is whether we leave our successors a better situation than we inherited. Ambulance response times for heart attacks and strokes are now the fastest in five years.

BBC Verify is in retreat. Last June the Beeb launched the ‘Verify Live blog’ as part of its push for ‘greater transparency’. But already the blog has gone quiet. This morning the Times reported that Verify’s executive editor has emailed staff to announce that the blog had been ‘put on pause for the last few weeks’ and would not be restarted. Verify lives on in a neutered form within the wider BBC News website.

On Sunday, the Health Foundation published new analysis of ONS data, finding that between 2012/14 and 2022/24 the average Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) has dropped by two years. The think tank suggested that poor quality housing, poverty and Covid-19 could be causal factors, and concluded that ‘the UK’s health is declining’. The Guardian described this development as a ‘grim picture’. GB News suggested that this new evidence proved that plans to raise the state pension age are unfair.

Yesterday, Zack Polanski told Sky News that ‘the war on drugs has clearly failed over and over again. In fact we have the highest drug deaths in Europe and for the past 14 years every single year drug deaths have increased.’ He made these two claims in response to criticism that his party has received for its policy on illegal drugs, which is, according to the Greens’ website, to ‘end prohibition and replace it with a system of legal regulation’. On the first point, other countries in Europe have higher death rates. In 2023, England and Wales saw 93 deaths per million people overall, compared with 135 per million 15- to 64-year-olds in Estonia, 130 per million in Latvia and 94 per million in Norway.

On Monday, the House of Lords threatened to derail the government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill by reintroducing an amendment which would ban social media for the under-16s. The Commons will vote on amendments today. This is the third time that the Lords have attempted to force this amendment into the legislation. On each occasion that it has been added, the government has whipped its MPs to reject the amendment. The Prime Minister wishes to delay the implementation of a social media ban until a consultation that he commissioned into online harms for teenagers concludes this summer.

The premature death of two young people from meningitis after an outbreak of the disease in Kent is a tragedy. Susan Hopkins, the CEO of the UK Health Service Agency has called the speed at which this particular infection is spreading ‘unprecedented’. But thanks to the concerted efforts of successive British governments, tragedies related to this disease are becoming rarer and rarer. Since 1998, the number of deaths in England caused by invasive meningococcal disease in the UK has fallen by around 86 per cent. That long-term progress is important context for what is happening in Canterbury and London. The outbreak, linked to the University of Kent, has so far involved 20 suspected cases of MenB, a strain of meningitis.

On Tuesday, Reform UK held a press conference in a petrol forecourt near the spa town of Buxton. The party paid for motorists to receive a 25p discount on their petrol, warning that the return of the final 5p fuel duty cut – scheduled by Rachel Reeves – amounts to a rise in ‘petrol prices at the worst possible moment’. In 12 years, the price of petrol has barely changed at all Undoubtedly people are struggling with the cost of living at the moment for a whole host of reasons. But in the grand scheme of things, the amount that we pay for petrol in fuel stations is, by historic standards, actually very reasonable. In April 2012, the average weekly price of a litre of petrol was 142.17p. The average at the start of this month was 137.8p.