Price increases are making it tougher for households to make ends meet, and unlicensed lenders offer loans to the desperate at astronomical interest rates. Last year the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) researched 3,363 people. One in forty were borrowing from unlicensed lenders. CSJ thinks there are about a million people in England doing this. ‘Overwhelmingly, people borrow when they're desperate. For everyday costs of living, like a gas or electricity bill, or a pram, and then they get exploited by those seeking to extort them for as much money as they can get out of them, offering arbitrary terms, little to no paperwork and an extortionate repayment rate.’ ‘It's just endless,’ one victim said: 'I went from a £150 loan to owing £6,000 in months'. The CSJ report highlights separate data from 1,252 victims, questioned last year by the Illegal Money Lending Team, which prosecutes loan sharks in England. The figures suggest the borrowers are among the poorest in society.

Christians Against Poverty (CAP) is a Christian debt help charity which is calling on the Government to 'act now' and increase support for those on low incomes with everything at its disposal. They saw calls to their debt helpline rise by 47% this January compared to last year, and requests for emergency fuel vouchers have doubled. CAP said, ‘We, along with many other charities and think-tanks, say that the upgrading of Social Security (the amount benefits and pensions go up in April) needs to be more than planned. Also they could pause deductions to Universal Credit as they did at the beginning of the pandemic. The third thing needed is a cost of living review; the level of social security has not matched the actual cost of living, even for the barest of essentials, for many, many years.’

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and 200+ church leaders sent an open letter to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. They said a stronger commitment to renewable energy would help address the climate emergency and help people to weather the cost of living crisis. Letter signatories include fifty Anglican and Catholic bishops, including the lead environment bishops. Their call for financial and fiscal support for renewable energy and energy efficiency - solar and wind energy - was met in the spring statement, but retrofitting of homes and other buildings across the UK to reduce heating bills and decrease carbon emissions was not. They also proposed a windfall tax on fossil fuel companies to address the cost of living and no support for new oil and gas developments if we are to limit global heating to 1.5°C.

Scotland’s school curriculum should be scrapped and replaced with a ‘traditional’ system, the Scottish Tories have said, amid warnings that classroom discipline has almost completely broken down. Teachers are now routinely being attacked, spat on, and sworn at by children as young as four. Mike Corbett, of the NASUWT teaching union, said serious issues had been reported even at the best state schools. He accused the Government of turning a blind eye to the problem by refusing to commission research into poor behaviour; it was as if it didn't really want to know the scale of the problem. Scottish Tories have now called for a ‘national conversation’ about replacing the country’s Curriculum for Excellence, which was supposed to help develop ‘well-rounded’ and confident children. This ‘un-Scottish’ approach has failed and its introduction over a decade ago has coincided with the country plummeting down international education league tables.