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A record £18.62 billion to put local roads right, after a year in which councils filled 1.9 million potholes, the same as the year before. Breakdowns up 15%, claims up 91%, three in four refused. We rated all 154 highway authorities and read 51 of their own reports.
We ran the census, the results and the 2026 admissions round for all 163 grammar schools. Three children on free school meals next door for every one inside. Nine in ten places at Barnet's top grammar given to boys from outside the borough. 16,446 sat Kent's test; 8,404 passed.
One in four online requests to GP practices arrives between eight and nine. We mapped every practice in England and ranked all 33 London boroughs and 150 councils on same-day booking, phone access, patient experience and doctors per patient, against three years of promises to end the scramble.
Parking firms asked the DVLA for a keeper's name and address 16.9 million times last year to send charges that are not fines. We read the law, the audits, the codes and the court files. The release is lawful, the checks are light, the £70 add-on is in doubt, and the 2019 code is still not law.
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Fares are up 68% since 2010 and the taxpayer now puts in £4.2 billion a year, yet only 66.7% of station stops are on time and April to June 2026 was the worst spring for cancellations on record. We ranked every operator in Britain on punctuality, cancellations, what passengers pay and compensation.
London's boroughs issued 9.5 million parking and traffic fines in 2024-25, up 53% in five years; camera fines have doubled. We rank every borough on tickets per resident, appeals lost and surplus kept, and England's councils on the money, against rules that say revenue 'should not be an objective'.
We ran four salaries through the 2026 tax rules of thirteen places, counting income tax, both sides of social insurance and VAT on what is spent. Italy, France and Germany take over half of what the employer pays out; Britain is ninth, cheapest in Europe on low pay bar Ireland, and climbing fastest.
The prisons are 97.5% full and have sat within a thousand places of the line for most of four years. Three governments let 83,000 people out early to hold it there, and recalls doubled. We read every weekly bulletin since 2015, every prison's crowding, and the plan built on release at one-third.
British law has no age for cosmetics beyond a check for under-threes. We read 1,218 ingredient lists: among the brands tweens buy, one product in seven has a retinoid or an acid and none states an age. Europe capped retinol in 2024; Britain has not. The alerts catch toy make-up, not the trend.
153,966 home burglaries were recorded last year. One in twenty ended in a charge; seven in ten were closed with no suspect, half within the month. London is last of 43 forces at 2.5%. We read every outcome, every London crime, the closure rules and a promise to attend that nobody has measured.
Overseas companies hold 91,109 titles in England and Wales, about 22,000 of them flats. We matched every one to the register meant to name their owners. Four in ten lead to a named person, nearly half of them British. The rest end at a company, a trust, or nothing. 445 penalties; £1.18m collected.
We downloaded every food hygiene rating in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and snapshots back to 2019. A quarter are over two years old, big brands are almost never marked down, franchised chicken shops and corner-shop fascias are, and customers who get ill almost never reach anyone who counts.
Britain swapped sugar for sweeteners in 2018 and has not measured what children drink since 2003. We read the cancer rulings, the regulators' files and the funding lines of the key studies. Industry paid for much of the reassurance. The evidence shows no cancer link. Nobody in the UK is checking.
The pub-table version says the Mayor is strangling London's nightlife with dancing licences and six-month shutdowns. Almost none of it is true. What is true: a fifth of the capital's late-night venues have gone since 2020, 33 councils write the rules, and other British cities are losing far less.
Critics call BBC reporters a left-leaning clique. We took bylines from the BBC News homepage and section pages, found their X and Bluesky accounts, read every post and coded each against a rubric fixed in advance. Most reveal nothing. Of the 16 who do, 12 lean left, four are mixed, none lean right.
An American property trust paid £6.4bn last October for the homes of Britain's two biggest care chains. We traced the money through Companies House, the regulator's files and the operators' own accounts: who owns the homes, who runs them, and how much of the fee reaches the care.
A year after every practice in England was told to keep its online form open all day, requests have nearly trebled, patients say contact is easier, and GPs are in open dispute with the government. We went through the data to answer the question that matters: after you press submit, do you get seen?
Official inflation is 3.1%. The public thinks it is 4.9%, and most people say their costs rose again last month. Both can be right. A deep dive into how the ONS builds the figure, who it does and doesn't describe, and what the evidence says about the gap between the statistic and the shopping trip.
The cap for a typical home rises 4% to £1,723 a year on Thursday. Gas is up 8%, electricity is flat thanks to a VAT cut, and the cheap fixes have gone. What the numbers mean, who they cover, what help exists, and why the forecasts for January now say another 20% or more.
Nearly nine in ten young people use AI tools, most teachers now use them every week, and the government is paying eight companies to build AI tutors for disadvantaged pupils. A guide to what is actually happening in UK schools, what the evidence says, and who wants what.
Five directors of the tutoring profession's membership body quit this month. The Companies House filings, accounts, constitution and AGM papers show a fast-growing body that pays its officers, contracts with its president's company, and whose register of directors does not match its own board list.
A military review, a state dinner with the AI industry's biggest names, two pandas and a 90-minute Oval Office meeting with no readout. Here is the day sorted into three columns: agreed, announced, and merely discussed.
Twenty-one people fell ill in a week and two died after a night out in March. A new genetic analysis by UKHSA and Oxford finds the strain had borrowed genes from harmless throat bacteria, and that the same changes may explain why it burned out.
After the death outside Highgate School, we asked whether fee-paying schools get the same protection as state ones. Haringey's record was fair. Barnet's and Wandsworth's are not: neither has a single private school among its School Streets. It comes down to who gets to choose.
The suspicion after a death outside a fee-paying school is that councils look after state pupils first. Haringey's record says otherwise. The real gap is that the one protection councils have rolled out at scale cannot be used on the main roads where children are most at risk.
Government borrowing is running £8.1bn above the official forecast five months into the year. Here is where that gap comes from, why it shrinks the Chancellor's room for manoeuvre on 28 October, and what the words "headroom" and "fiscal rules" mean when you strip out the jargon.
A federal judge ordered the White House to give CNN, MS NOW and Politico their passes back early on Thursday. We read the complaint, the government's defence, the letter that tried to justify the ban and the ruling itself, and attached all four below.
Washington and Beijing are building separate chip stacks, separate rulebooks and, increasingly, separate internets. As Xi Jinping arrives in Washington, a Reuters analysis shows investors on both sides quietly refusing to choose. Here is what that means for anyone with money in AI.
Smart glasses, AI pins and clip-on recorders are being sold as the computer after the smartphone. A Reuters analysis this week shows the industry has hit the one problem a better chip cannot fix: the people on the other side of the lens.
In his first General Assembly speech, the new Prime Minister accused Russian agencies of trying to interfere in the 2019 election, announced a National Centre for Information Defence and an AI defence pact with Washington. Here is what he said, and what he left out.
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