Latest from New Statesman
New Statesman
2 hours ago
- Business
- New Statesman
The benefits of UK consulting go far beyond the economic
Image courtesy of MCA A vast subterranean network of disused coal mines spans the length and breadth of our country. It has long been envisaged that the naturally warmed water could provide a potential source of clean, renewable energy to heat our homes and business. Could our industrial past hold the key to our low-carbon future? Deloitte, working with the government's Mine Remediation Authority, took us a step closer towards realising that vision when it undertook a national effort to test and map mine water heat sources across the UK. Their findings were striking: the potential exists to heat at least 600,000 buildings. More than just a report, Deloitte delivered a roadmap to bring this potential to life, a project now recognised alongside 50 finalists in the upcoming Management Consultancies Association (MCA) Awards 2025, judged by an independent panel of experts and journalists. A project such as Deloitte's could reduce one of this country's biggest sources of emissions, and, in doing so, tackle climate change and reduce energy bills. It is a prime example of how UK consulting's impact goes far beyond our economy, and the extent to which the benefits of the sector's work are felt by wider society. Time and again, consulting firms are the trusted partners that help turn bold goals into practical outcomes. Governments can set policy and companies announce strategies, but it is consultants who help deliver results. From technology to healthcare, energy security to climate action, the sector brings deep specialist expertise and experience to some of the most complex challenges facing our country. Take healthcare. The Health and Care Act 2022 tasked NHS Integrated Care Boards with ensuring that palliative and end-of-life care met population needs. But how could they measure whether they were succeeding? KPMG worked pro bono with the charity Marie Curie to create a robust framework to assess progress, bringing clarity to one of the most sensitive areas of care. Or consider energy. When National Grid sold a majority stake in its gas transmission and metering business, National Gas was born. The task? Separate two intricately connected IT systems without disrupting energy supplies, during a period of heightened concerns over energy security. EY stepped in to design and deliver a fully independent, resilient and scalable IT ecosystem. The project not only met deadlines and budget; it is now seen as a model for other complex IT transformations. Then there is artificial intelligence, for which UK consulting has become the go-to sector for its knowhow and transformational capabilities. In 2023, the UK government set up the AI Safety Institute, the first state-backed agency of its kind. Its success depended on securing top-tier talent. Capgemini Invent applied its experience in human resources and technology, ensuring the organisation is staffed with the brightest minds working in AI today in an exceptionally competitive skills market. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Infrastructure is another key area. Network Rail stood on the cusp of huge modernisation of its track maintenance, moving from manual gauges and using pens and paper and visual inspections to a system employing a state of the art robotic laser device. But the robot, named FELIX, would need to be fully adopted and staff would need to be trained. Moorhouse came in to lead this process, improving safety and efficiency across our railways. When we talk about the impact of UK consulting, much of the focus is on its economic benefits. That is right of course. Not only do we turbocharge Britain's economy – working with the majority of the FTSE 100, bringing innovation and generating jobs – but we're also expanding in our own right. In the past five years, the UK's world-beating consulting industry has doubled in size and exports have trebled. It is no surprise that government has identified us as a growth-driving sector, central to its industrial strategy. However, we believe it is important that UK consulting is appreciated not only for its economic value, but its social value. When a consulting firm overhauls processes in the NHS, enabling significant funds to be reinvested back into patient care, or generates productivity for a manufacturer, or improves efficiency in the transport network, millions of people benefit. Every life in our country is touched by the work of consultants, without most people even knowing it. Of course, it is vitally important that this is achieved efficiently, ethically and with accountability. That's why our Chartered Management Consultant (ChMC) accreditation is gaining traction with consultants across the sector, from specialist SMEs to the 'Big Four'. It is setting new standards of quality and integrity at a time when public trust and value for money are paramount. Indeed, that is why it is important that every single MCA member firm signs up to 'Consulting Excellence' principles, which ensures they meet and surpass the highest standards. As we celebrate this year's MCA Awards finalists, we're recognising consultants not only as economic enablers, but trusted agents of social change. And we're looking to a future where, through innovation, ethics and excellence, UK consulting helps to shape a better, fairer and more resilient country for us all. Related
New Statesman
2 hours ago
- Business
- New Statesman
Ed Miliband keeps winning
Photo byIt's been a cheery couple of weeks for Ed Miliband. Despite a raft of negative briefings in the weeks prior to the spending review, Miliband's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero ended up being one of Rachel Reeves' biggest winners. Alongside the cancellation of a previously trailed cut to the Warm Homes Plan, DESNZ received a 16 per cent increase in spending power (more than any other department). And now, following a period of internal wrangling with the Number 10 and the Treasury, the former Labour leader has announced the extension of the Warm Homes Discount, a policy which offers a £150 energy bills discount to those on low incomes. Insiders tell me it is something the Energy Secretary has been working on behind the scenes for months. Energy bills – and the government's pledge to cut them by £300 before the end of the parliament – will be a key metric of Labour's success at the next election. Frustration over the slow pace of reduction, alongside fury over the Winter Fuel Payment, were big issues on the doorstep during the locals (it wasn't a good night for Labour). In the wake of voting, one insider close to Miliband pointed to the Warm Homes Discount – which was first introduced in 2011 – and questioned why the government did not make more of it following the decision to cut Winter Fuel. It is, after all, a means-tested benefit intended to support not just elderly people, but millions of households on low incomes to reduce their energy bills. The extension announced on Thursday will see a further 2.7 million households eligible to receive this benefit; over 6 million households will now be able to access the discount. It will be paid for via a deal which the government has struck with the energy regulator, Ofgem. Currently, energy bills include the socialised costs of energy companies' unpaid debts, the government has done a deal to reduce the overall debt burden on energy companies. This accompanies the recent cut to the Energy Price Cap, which comes into effect in July, meaning a double whammy of energy bill reductions. All of this suggests that despite speculation that Keir Starmer might be about to make an about-turn on support for net zero, the Prime Minister is firmly staying put. Not only has Miliband's funding been bolstered, but his department has been responsible for some of the government's most recent positive news: 100,000 new jobs at Sizewell C, solar panels for newbuild homes, schools, and hospitals, and now the extension of the Warm Homes Discount. And Starmer has made clear that, in directly taking on Nigel Farage, he won't look to ape the Reform UK's net zero scepticism but will seek to prove how the green transition can help low-income, marginalised communities, as well as slashing the UK's carbon emissions. That Starmer is staying close to Miliband is unsurprising. The PM has, after all, always been environmentally minded (he is a pescatarian, did you know?). Perhaps his most famous case as a human rights lawyer was representing two Greenpeace Activists against McDonalds in the 1997 McLibel trial. Starmer, who's former Kentish Town home is a short walk from Miliband's ends in Dartmouth Park, was also encouraged to run to be an MP in 2015 by his predecessor as Labour leader. The pair have a shared political history; it's easy to speculate that Starmer feels some loyalty there. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Connections aside, it's clear Starmer sees the electoral benefit of his Energy Secretary's clean power drive, particularly after the disastrous Winter Fuel Payment saga and the government's subsequent U-turn. Reducing the UK's reliance on imported natural gas and other fossil fuels will lead to lower energy bills; a result on which Starmer's premiership will be heavily judged (and to some extent, already is). And in this new turbulent international climate – the arguments for energy security remain; Miliband was the first to make them. After months of underestimation from his detractors, the Energy Secretary and his agenda are safe, for the time being. It all now rests on the success of his delivery. Related
New Statesman
3 hours ago
- Health
- New Statesman
The anger of the Leeds maternity families
Photo by Kelly Hill / Millennium Images, UK It was November 2020 when Fiona Winser-Ramm first raised safety concerns about maternity services in Leeds to the healthcare watchdog. Her daughter, Aliona Grace, had died at Leeds General Infirmary in January that year, 27 minutes after she was born. An inquest into the death in 2023 found a 'number of gross failures of the most basic nature that directly contributed to Aliona's death'. The family experienced 'neglect by the midwives', and a 'gross failure in care'. Aliona should not have died. So today's (20 June) decision by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to rate the maternity care provided by Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust (LTHT) as 'inadequate' is bittersweet. 'I've been waiting five and a half years for this moment,' Fiona tells the New Statesman. And while she feels 'vindicated', she is also deeply angry. She questions how many babies might have been saved had the CQC listened when she – and others – first raised concerns, years ago. 'As far as we're concerned, the CQC have failed catastrophically in their regulatory duties to safeguard the public,' she says. Today's CQC findings are based on unannounced inspections of the maternity units at Leeds General Infirmary and St James's University Hospital in December 2024, following, it said, 'concerns received from whistleblowers, people using the services and their families about the quality of care being delivered'. The regulator has demanded LTHT make 'immediate improvements' after finding there was a shortage of staff, as well as staff being reluctant to raise concerns because of a perceived 'blame culture' at the Trust, incomplete record-keeping, and staff not having 'meaningful interactions with the people they cared for'. The CQC's director of operations in the north, Ann Ford, said the concerns of families and whistleblowing staff had been 'substantiated' during the inspection and 'posed a significant risk to the safety of women, people using these services, and their babies'. It was, she said, 'concerning that appropriate investigations weren't always carried out after incidents had taken place, meaning staff couldn't always learn from them to help prevent them from happening again.' But this is not good enough for many families. Just months after Aliona Grace's damning inquest finding in 2023, the CQC inspected both Leeds maternity units and rated them 'good' – much to Fiona's disbelief. 'It was pure bleach in our wounds,' she says. How could the regulator have read all that came out in the case and believed there were no major problems? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Fiona and her husband, Daniel, are now connected with more than 100 other families who say they too received poor maternity care from the LTHT. In a statement, some of those families say today's findings 'only just scratch the surface of the known issues [and] are only a fraction of the failings and problems that bereaved and harmed families in Leeds experienced during their care and the care of their babies'. The families argue 'safety failings have not appeared out of nowhere in the last two years', but have been 'systemic for 5-10 years, if not more'. A BBC investigation in January suggested that the deaths of at least 56 babies could have been prevented at the Trust between 2019 and 2024. The families believe there is plenty of blame to go around: the individuals – Fiona says some of the staff involved in Aliona's birth are facing fitness-to-practise hearings, yet are still working in the meantime. As well as systemic failings within LTHT: that it has 'been aware of deep-rooted failings in maternity services for years and have relied on grieving and traumatised families staying silent or isolated, to evade accountability'. And finally, there's the regulator. 'I think the CQC are also responsible for the deaths of perfectly healthy children as well,' Fiona Winser-Ramm told the New Statesman. In a statement, the CQC's Ford said that the inspection of Leeds in 2023 had been focused specifically on safety and leadership. 'We found some areas where the trust needed to improve and we made that clear, but we also identified some good practice,' she explained. Since then, the regulator had 'received a number of concerns from families and staff' which, alongside its own 'risk monitoring', prompted December's inspections. Action has already been taken to ensure safe staffing levels, she said, and maternity services at LTHT will continue to be closely monitored. Ford added that the CQC was working hard to continue to improve how the organisation listened to and involved 'people who use services when we assess quality and safety'. In response to CQC's 'inadequate' ratings, the chief executive of Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Professor Phil Wood, said he was 'extremely sorry to the families who have lost their babies when receiving care in our hospitals'. He sought to reassure any new parents planning to have their baby in Leeds that the Trust was 'absolutely committed to providing safe, compassionate care' and that the 'vast majority' of 8,500 births each year are 'safe and positive experiences for our families'. Wood said he recognised the Trust needed to be 'better at listening to our staff and acting on their concerns' and that he was sorry it had 'fallen short'. Improvements to maternity services are already underway, he said, including the recruitment of 55 midwives since autumn 2024. This is not the first time the CQC has been accused of failing to act on staff or family concerns. The regulator has been mentioned in each of the major maternity scandal reports of the past decade. Bill Kirkup's 2015 review into the deaths of babies at Morecambe Bay detailed how the CQC had declined to investigate maternity incidents in 2009 'principally on the grounds that the five incidents were deemed unconnected… but also because it was not thought that there were systemic problems'. This was not the case. In 2022, Kirkup's investigation into maternity care at East Kent lamented that the regulator had given maternity services 'a less stringent rating' of 'requires improvement' when the Trust's overall grade was 'inadequate'. Unfortunately, Kirkup wrote, 'This implied that problems in maternity care were not as bad as elsewhere, not only downplaying the very significant problems that had existed for several years, but also deflecting attention to those areas seen as higher priorities.' And at Shrewsbury and Telford, where it's thought 1,500 women and babies were harmed or died between 2000 and 2019, in as late as 2015 the CQC judged maternity services to be 'good'. The former midwife Donna Ockenden, who led the inquiry into the Shrewsbury and Telford units, wrote that her team was 'concerned' that some of the findings of reviews carried out by the CQC and others 'gave false reassurance about maternity services at the Trust, despite repeated concerns being raised by families'. It was her view that 'opportunities were lost to have improved maternity services at the Trust sooner'. For Fiona Winser-Ramm today is 'just the start'. On Tuesday (17 June), she and several other families met with the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting. They want both a full, independent inquiry into Leeds's maternity care, led by Ockenden (who is currently reviewing the cases of more than 2,000 families let down by maternity services in Nottingham) and a national public inquiry into maternity services. The latter must hold people to account and explain how we got to a point at which half of England's maternity units are inadequate or require improvement. Streeting, she says, truly listened and seemed moved. 'He now needs to do the right thing.' [See also: Labour promised to fix the NHS but seems set on breaking it even more] Related
New Statesman
4 hours ago
- Business
- New Statesman
Let the non-doms leave
Rachel Reeves is reportedly considering changes to the rules around 'non-doms' – people who declare themselves to be 'non-domiciled' in the UK in order to pay less tax – in response to a protracted media campaign against the policy. On a daily basis, newspapers from the Telegraph to the Independent are warning that the abolition of the non-dom regime is causing an exodus of millionaires. This week, estate agents have protested that the top end of the London property market is now in freefall. The mansions stand empty! Questions to ask about these reports include: are they bullshit? And why should I care? Does it matter if the non-doms are leaving? New research suggests a surprising answer. Firstly, these claims have at least a whiff of the farmyard in that they are being made by people who have a clear financial interest in the matter. If I was selling prime central London property, I would definitely use the media to push the narrative that the wildly overpriced houses I was pushing were in fact going for a song. That's not to say they're lies, but they are claims made in the absence of the actual data on non-doms (which will be released by HMRC next month). Fortunately, there is other data that does tell us a verifiable story about what happens when you change the non-dom rules, because these rules have been changed before – by George Osborne, in 2017. The changes Osborne announced in his 2015 Budget amounted to a £1.5bn tax hike on non-doms. Last month, a study was published which shows what happened next. Immediately after the 2015 Budget, the emigration rate of non-doms rose, peaking in 2018 – but by 2019, it was lower than it had been before the change was announced. So the policy was announced and an 'exodus' appeared to follow, but it wasn't an exodus. It was people bringing forward a change they had been planning to make anyway. The second conclusion was even more important: the people who paid the least tax were the most likely to leave. The millionaires who left were the fiscally useless, the do-nothing rich. A common misconception is that rich people are economically similar. But there are two very different species: people who earn loads of money and people who have loads of money. People who earn lots of money typically pay a lot of tax. A banker in London on £600,000 a year should pay about £245,000 in income tax and National Insurance (assuming maximum pension contributions), contributing as much to the state in three years as the average Brit contributes over their whole working life. This makes them very important from a fiscal point of view. But it also means they're less likely to leave when there's a tax change, because they have a great job that it would be hard to get elsewhere, and because they demonstrably already tolerate a high level of taxation. And after the 2015 Budget, this is what they did: they stayed. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The other species are different. They are simply parking their wealth here, paying little tax, and leaving when the rules change. Arun Advani, the economist who led this research, told me that under the non-dom regime, the UK had effectively been a tax haven for people who had money here but didn't earn money here: 'Everyone thinks, because they're very wealthy, that means they must be paying a lot of tax,' he said, but the people who left after 2015 were recognisable as being 'not very well connected' to the economy by income – 'but that's also why they weren't paying very much tax. So the cost of losing them is much lower.' It's very possible that this is what's happening now: we are losing people whose connection to the economy was fleeting and low in value. The stateless rich will be missed in some parts of London. Showrooms for ugly, dangerous cars will fall quiet; gaudy clothes with someone else's name written all over them will go unsold; bad Mayfair restaurants and galleries for gaudy, laughable art will have to reconsider their value propositions. But the rest of us might benefit, thanks to the property market. Expensive London property drags the rest of the housing market upward, imposing trickle-down inflation on homeowners. It also eats into our housebuilding capacity. When I walked through London's wealthiest constituency with its MP, Joe Powell, recently we had to raise our voices over the sound of drills: every other property was a building site, an investment being serviced. The UK currently spends around £3bn a month on repair and maintenance of existing housing, more than six times what it spends on building new public housing. If the non-doms leave, housing might become both more affordable, and easier to build, for people who want to live here for reasons beyond their tax bill. It's also worth noting that leaving the country – any country – is something the stateless rich do constantly. In a normal year, with no tax changes announced, around a quarter of non-doms who have arrived recently (within the last two years) will leave anyway, and even among long-stayers (up to 15 years), one in 25 will leave each year. Maybe shopping in Harrods and driving a Lamborghini leaves you feeling empty and bored, and forces you to roam the planet seeking a fulfilment money can never buy? Who cares. They're off to Dubai. Before the government performs another U-turn, it should ask whether anyone will miss them. [See also: Has Rachel Reeves given in to the non-doms?] Related
New Statesman
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
What Bonnie Blue and Andrew Tate have in common
Photos by Daniel Mihailescu/AFP and Gilbert Flores/Variety When Messalina, the third wife of Roman Emperor Claudius, was sure her husband was asleep, she would slip out of the palace and head to the brothels of Rome. Donning a blonde wig and adopting the stage-name Wolf Girl, she would spend the night entertaining clients who had no idea they were sleeping with an empress, staying until dawn when the pimps forced her to leave. She didn't do any of this, of course. The account of Messalina's scandalous urge to prostitute herself comes from the satirical poet Juvenal, born years after her death. A similarly sordid and fantastical tale of the empress challenging Rome's most notorious whore to a contest of who could satiate the most men in a night is told by Pliny the Elder, who would have been in his twenties during the events he claims to chronicle. Messalina wins, incidentally, with a score of 25 men. This might seem rather tame by today's standards. Young women competing to outdo one another in terms of sexual depravity is a moral panic at the moment. OnlyFans, the site for content creators to profit off their fans, has created an arena for the kind of acts Roman authors had to dream up in their fevered imaginations. Derbyshire-born pornographic model Lily Phillips became something of a household name last year with her documentary on sleeping with 100 men on camera in a day (four Messalinas, if you care to measure that way). And that's one tenth of the figure claimed in January by fellow Derbyshire OnlyFans star Bonnie Blue – a woman who rose to prominence posting videos of herself having sex with 'barely legal' men. Blue (a pseudonym, of course – Messalina would approve) is in the news right now for two reasons. First is her latest attempted stunt: a 'petting zoo' where (she says) she intended to be tied up in a glass box in central London and invite any men passing by to use her however they chose. Cue a wave of online backlash, and OnlyFans suspending her account. There will be no petting zoo event – but, as with the Lily Phillips documentary, the incident ensured that a whole lot of people who had never come across Blue now know her name. If that wasn't enough to shock you, Blue is in the headlines again after announcing a collaboration with manosphere influencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate. The pair have apparently made a podcast together, and posted to social media teasing their fans about the upcoming content. Tate, the poster boy for 21st century toxic masculinity, hardly seems a fan of Blue, tweeting to his followers: 'Bonnie is the end result of feminism. She is what The Matrix wanted to create.' At first glance, it's hard to see what porn actress who specialises in taking depravity to new heights under the banner of female empowerment and sex positivity and a former kickboxer who teaches impressionable young men that women are objects and is facing criminal charges in both Romania and the UK would have to talk about. Not unless they admit they're in the exact same game, anyway. And that game is winning at the attention economy. Both have made careers out of hacking the algorithms that run our online lives: Blue by turning pornography into extreme performance art, Tate with a mix of get-rich-quick tutelage and old-fashioned misogyny repackaged for an era of lost young men (leaving aside his side hustle recruiting webcam girls to make money for him). Both have had to push into ever more eye-catching territory to keep the clicks coming: Blue with increasingly creative stunts, Tate by branching out from his usual oeuvre of insisting women exist purely for male pleasure to arguing that it is 'gay' to enjoy food. Both assert they have made millions from OnlyFans and other online platforms: Blue claimed her income was $2.1m a month (one reason OnlyFans is highly likely to reinstate her account – and if it doesn't, there'll always be another platform that will), while Tate's content is so lucrative YouTube is continuing to profit off it despite banning him in 2022. Those platforms, by the way, know exactly what they're hosting. Their aim is to lock users into the sites for as long as possible, regardless of the content keeping them there. The degradation of X since Elon Musk's takeover in 2022 lays this out: you can still find genuinely stimulating discourse and debate there, but you'll have to wade through the crypto scammers, incendiary tirades, fake stories, conspiracy theories, AI photos and pornographic videos to find it. The latter isn't just you, in case you were wondering. Porn on Twitter isn't new, but it has become so ubiquitous that MPs have been warned not to scroll on their phones during parliamentary debates in case adult content pops into their feeds and they face the fate of Neil Parish (the Tory MP forced to resign for exactly that offence). True, the algorithms serve you what they think you want to see, but so many accounts are posting salacious photos and videos to grab attention and boost engagement figures that the odds it'll turn up in your feed whether you've ever searched for such content before are too high to risk. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe If that's entry level, the collaboration announced between Tate and Blue is top-tier attention hacking. What could spark more outrage – and therefore more clicks – than a podcast between arch anti-feminist Tate and a woman he claims to despise? As one Tate fan pointed out: 'you just gave her 1000's of new onlyfans subscribers.' Much less hassle than her petting zoo plan. The Roman authors who helped turn Messalina into a by-word for female promiscuity were playing a similar game two thousand years ago, amplifying the contrast between her royal status and her debauched behaviour as a shock tactic. (In the end, she was executed for adultery, and the way ancient writers discuss her tells us a lot more about Roman anxiety to a new imperial regime than it does about her actual life, but that's another story.) Those outraged by Blue's antics, whether out of disgust for the work she does or revulsion that she is associating herself with someone like Tate, are handing them both the very currency they trade in. [See more: Geoff Dyer's English journey] Related
