‘They’re trying to milk us’: leaseholders tell of soaring charges amid Labour reform delays

“I don’t say this lightly, but I feel traumatised by this,” said Sarah*, a leaseholder who owns a one-bedroom flat in Moseley, south Birmingham. “Every time I open the front door to my house I’m expecting some frightening letter with lots of zeros on it. It has ruined my life, to be honest.”Sarah works full-time as a school teacher, but has been forced to take up a second job to pay the spiralling bills from the management company of her building.While she was aware of the annual service charge of around £1,400, she wasn’t prepared for the bills for a reserve fund which have risen steeply as the management company aims to secure an extra £400,000 from residents for a roof replacement and other projects

Teachers in England driving homeless pupils to school and washing clothes, research shows

Schools are regularly referring homeless children to food banks, driving them to classes and washing their clothes, according to research.A survey conducted by the housing charity Shelter and NASUWT, also known as the Teachers’ Union, asked 11,000 teachers about their experiences of working with children living in temporary accommodation.There are now a record 175,025 children in temporary housing in England, according to the most recent government figures. Many families affected are living in B&Bs, hostels and overcrowded flats.Most teachers who responded said homeless children had attended their school in the last year

High on ... mustard? Cannabis industry teams up with chefs in push to stand out

Food and stoner culture have always gone together, but these days chefs and cannabis professionals are working together to find thoughtful, new ways to incorporate weed into meals.For National Hot Pastrami Day on 14 January, a celebrated Jewish deli in Chicago teamed up with a local Illinois dispensary to give customers free pastrami sandwiches garnished with cannabis-infused mustard.The “High on Rye” event was held in the parking lot of Ivy Hall dispensary’s Logan Square location. Customers lined up for free pastrami sandwiches from Steingold’s Deli, complete with an intoxicating brown mustard. Asked if the mustard was a one-time gimmick or the beginning of something bigger, Aaron Steingold, the deli’s founder and Jonny Boucher, Ivy Hall’s director of marketing, said they weren’t sure – but they were having a good time

Reform UK’s private health insurance plan would cost £1.7bn, Streeting to say

Reform UK’s policy of tax relief on private health insurance could cost the country £1.7bn, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, is expected to say on Saturday.Streeting will make the claim at a conference organised by the Fabian Society, a socialist thinktank aligned to the Labour party, and will describe the Reform proposal as a “tax cut for the wealthiest”.Before the 2024 general election, Reform pledged to offer tax relief of 20% on all private healthcare policies if it won power. The party claimed in its manifesto that this would improve the general standard of care by reducing demands on the NHS

The ADHD grey zone: why patients are stuck between private diagnosis and NHS care

Sameer Modha knows the ADHD system all too well. He has been diagnosed himself, as have his two children, giving him a clear view of how the system works – and where it breaks down.While his own diagnosis was relatively straightforward, the experience with his daughter was very different. The diagnosis he obtained for his eldest child, after an assessment carried out privately by a “very senior ex-Camhs [child and adolescent mental health service] director, someone who knows the system and has seen a huge amount of this”, was later rejected by the NHS. He was told it was not compliant with guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which sets healthcare standards nationally

Seeing red over the Greens’ advocacy of ‘buy the supply’ housing policy | Letters

I was surprised to see Siân Berry (Letters, 9 January) advocate that Labour “buy the supply” of landlord homes as a way of increasing the stock of social housing. Siân may want to pay more attention closer to home. The Labour council in Brighton and Hove is pursuing exactly that policy, as was featured in the Guardian last year (Right to buy in reverse: how Brighton is tackling its social housing crisis, 26 October).As with many policy areas, the Greens like soundbites and writing letters, but often have vanishingly little interest in actual policy implementation. It was invariably the case when the Greens ran Brighton and Hove city council: a lot of talking about the climate crisis, but little progress in expanding recycling nor city-wide decarbonisation – something that we are now putting right