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Coroner Opens Formal Investigation into Death of Former Cambridge Academic Jason Arday

Constantvpn.com – A formal coroner’s investigation has been launched into the circumstances surrounding the death of Jason Arday, the 41-year-old scholar whose brief tenure at the University of Cambridge became entangled in one of the most heated academic disputes of recent years. Arday was discovered lifeless at his Battersea residence on 14 August, just days after stepping down from his faculty position. His appointment in 2023 had been widely celebrated as a landmark moment — at 37, he became the youngest Black professor ever to hold a chair at the institution — yet the final months of his career were consumed by allegations that would follow him into the public record long after his departure.

The Coronial Findings and Police Position

Speaking at London Inner South Coroner’s Court on Wednesday, senior coroner Dr Julian Morris outlined the basis for opening the investigation. He noted that multiple reports submitted to his office had raised questions about the manner of death.

“The various reports have given me reason to suspect that Professor Arday died an unnatural death 12 days ago. It therefore follows that I must open an investigation.”

The court heard that family members discovered Arday unresponsive at his home. Despite immediate resuscitation attempts, he was pronounced dead at the scene. The Metropolitan Police had earlier characterised the death as unexpected, stating at the time that it was “not believed to be suspicious.” That initial assessment, however, did not preclude the coroner from pursuing a formal inquiry once documentary evidence warranted further examination.

The distinction between an “unexpected” death and an “unnatural” one carries procedural significance in English coronial law. An unnatural death triggers a mandatory investigation regardless of whether criminal intent is suspected, ensuring that all available medical, toxicological, and circumstantial evidence is reviewed before a conclusion is reached.

The Plagiarism Dispute That Defined His Final Months

Arday’s time at Cambridge was overshadowed by accusations that portions of his published work had been lifted from other sources without adequate attribution. The claims were brought into sharp public focus by Nathan Cofnas, a self-described “race realist” who had held a position at Cambridge before being dismissed from the university in 2024. Cofnas identified what he described as numerous instances of uncredited borrowing across Arday’s publications.

Arday categorically denied that he had plagiarised. He acknowledged, however, that errors existed in his work and offered an explanation rooted in his own neurodivergence. He explained that, as an autistic individual, he had relied heavily on mimicry — the act of imitating patterns and structures — to process and internalise information. In his account, this cognitive strategy could produce superficial similarities between his writing and source material without constituting deliberate appropriation. He argued that comparable minor errors would be found in the output of many academics if subjected to the same level of forensic scrutiny.

Arday characterised the sustained media attention and online vitriol that followed the allegations as having produced what he described as:

“an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack.”

The episode raised broader questions about how academic misconduct allegations are handled in the age of social media, where a single viral post can transform a departmental review into a national spectacle. It also intersected with debates about race, representation, and the standards applied to scholars from underrepresented backgrounds — questions that Cambridge’s own leadership sought to address publicly in the weeks following Arday’s departure.

Family Response and Calls for Accountability

In a statement released after his death, Arday’s family expressed their devastation.

“We are in shock to have lost this amazing father, partner, brother, uncle and son. The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”

Their words pointed to a wider concern: that the volume and tenor of public commentary surrounding Arday’s work may have contributed to a psychological burden that proved fatal. In the aftermath, advocates and colleagues have called for a public inquiry examining how media outlets covered the plagiarism dispute in the period before his death, arguing that editorial choices amplified speculation beyond what the evidence supported.

Cambridge’s chancellor, speaking separately, used the phrase “racist feeding frenzy” to describe the tone of much of the coverage, while the university confirmed that Cofnas — the academic who had levelled the original accusations — had been suspended from his role as part of its internal review process.

A Memoir Set to Reach Shelves

Arday’s memoir, long anticipated by readers who followed his career, is scheduled for publication in the United Kingdom on Thursday. Publisher Simon & Schuster confirmed on Monday that the book will proceed on its original timeline. His family endorsed the decision, stating:

“It is only right that we honour his wishes.”

The forthcoming volume is expected to offer Arday’s own account of his academic journey, his experience of navigating elite British institutions as a Black scholar, and his reflections on the controversy that consumed his final months. Its release will place his voice back at the centre of a conversation that, since his death, has been shaped largely by third-party commentary.

The coroner’s investigation will continue as further evidence is gathered and witnesses are called. A conclusion — whether in the form of a formal finding or a referral to other authorities — will follow once the inquiry is complete. For now, the question at the heart of the proceeding remains straightforward: what exactly happened in the Battersea home on the afternoon of 14 August, and what, if anything, preceded it.

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Crown Prosecution Service Receives Evidence File in Mohamed Al Fayed Sexual Assault Investigation

Constantvpn.com – The Metropolitan Police has formally handed a complete evidential file to the Crown Prosecution Service, marking a critical juncture in the ongoing investigation into allegations of sexual assault linked to the late Mohamed Al Fayed, the former owner of the London department store Harrods. The file centres on a single suspect — a man in his 80s — and concerns two alleged indecent assaults carried out against two women in London. The CPS will now review the material and determine whether a criminal charge can be brought.

What the Investigation Has Uncovered So Far

According to a Metropolitan Police spokesperson, detectives submitted the full evidential package to prosecutors specifically for a “charging decision.” The file pertains to one named suspect and documents two separate incidents of indecent assault on two women in the capital. Officers confirmed they will continue working closely with CPS prosecutors as the matter progresses through the legal system.

The investigation has widened considerably since it began. To date, seven suspects have been interviewed under caution — a formal procedure in which officers inform a person they may be questioned about a suspected offence and that their answers can be used in evidence. The offences under scrutiny include aiding and abetting rape and sexual assault, assisting in the commission of sexual offences, and human trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. Last month, a man and a woman, both in their 80s, were questioned under caution on suspicion of aiding and abetting rape and sexual assault. Earlier in the year, three women — aged in their 40s, 50s, and 60s — along with one man in his 60s, were also questioned as part of the inquiry.

Background: The Al Fayed Allegations

Mohamed Al Fayed, who built Harrods into one of London’s most recognisable luxury retail institutions before selling the business in 2010, died three years ago at the age of 94 without ever facing criminal charges. His death, however, did not end the scrutiny surrounding his conduct. In September 2024, a documentary and podcast series brought public attention to accusations from more than 20 women who alleged he had subjected them to sexual assault over decades. The revelations triggered an extraordinary wave of responses: since those initial allegations surfaced, more than 400 alleged victims or witnesses have contacted lawyers to put forward their accounts.

The scale of the disclosures prompted a formal Metropolitan Police investigation, which has now reached the stage where prosecutors must weigh whether the evidence gathered meets the threshold for prosecution. The CPS operates independently of the police and applies a two-stage test — an evidential stage and a public-interest stage — before recommending that charges be laid. A decision is expected in due course, though no timeline has been publicly confirmed.

Survivor Groups React

Jen Mills and Lindsay Mason, co-chairs of the Justice for Fayed and Harrods Survivors organisation, issued a statement welcoming the police submission. They emphasised that the step matters most directly for the two women at the heart of the current file.

“The submission of a full evidential file to the CPS is a significant step, and it matters most of all for the two women whose allegations are at the centre of it. Both are members of Justice for Fayed and Harrods Survivors and, as with all those impacted by this scandal, we stand alongside them with love and empathy.”

A separate survivor collective, No One Above, pressed for broader accountability beyond the single suspect named in the current file. Its spokesperson urged the Met to demonstrate that it is pursuing evidence against every perpetrator and co-conspirator involved in the alleged network.

“We call on the Met to confirm it is securing evidence on all perpetrators and co-conspirators — including the financial and documentary evidence of how victims were recruited, screened, moved, harboured and silenced.”

Harrods and the Compensation Landscape

Separately from the criminal track, the civil dimension of the scandal continues to unfold. Harrods, which Al Fayed divested in 2010, has indicated it is in the process of settling more than 250 claims for compensation brought by individuals alleging harm connected to the former owner’s conduct. The volume of claims underscores how far the allegations have extended beyond the original cohort of accusers into a much wider population of affected individuals.

What Comes Next

The CPS decision on the current file will determine whether the first criminal proceedings emerge from an investigation that has already drawn hundreds of testimonies and implicated multiple suspects. For the two women whose allegations form the basis of the present charge decision, the outcome will represent either the first formal accountability in a case that has lingered for decades, or a further delay in seeking justice. For the broader community of survivors, the decision will signal whether prosecutors view the evidence as sufficient to open a courtroom process — and whether the investigation’s scope will expand to address the systemic questions raised about recruitment, screening, and silencing of victims over many years.

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Blueprints, Ballistics, and the Long War: What Ukraine’s New Missile Deal Really Means

Constantvpn.com – Ukraine’s nightly sky has become a familiar canvas of fire. Russian ballistic missiles — Iskanders, Kalibrs, Kh-101s, and their rotating cast of successors — strike the country with a near-daily rhythm, targeting power stations, residential blocks, and the industrial arteries that keep a wartime economy alive. Against that relentless cadence, Kyiv has needed not just more missiles but the industrial capacity to produce them at scale. That need now has a concrete answer: Britain has transferred the classified design blueprints for the Storm Shadow long-range cruise missile, giving Ukraine the technical foundation to manufacture the weapon domestically rather than waiting for delivery schedules set by allied production lines.

The Political Moment Behind the Transfer

The handover was announced during a visit to Kyiv by Andy Burnham, marking his first trip to the Ukrainian capital in his capacity as prime minister. There he sat down with President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss the next phase of bilateral military cooperation. The timing was deliberate. Ukraine’s front lines have stretched its logistics to breaking point, and the question of whether Western partners can move from supplying finished munitions to enabling indigenous production has moved from the margins of defence policy to its centre.

For Zelensky, the blueprint transfer is less about any single missile and more about a principle: that Ukraine’s defence industry should be capable of closing its own supply loops. A nation that must import every warhead, every guidance kit, and every airframe component remains structurally dependent on the goodwill and production timelines of others. Owning the design means owning the schedule.

What Storm Shadow Actually Is

Storm Shadow is a subsonic, air-launched cruise missile developed by the United Kingdom and in service with the Royal Air Force since the early 2000s. It flies at roughly 250 kilometres of range, steered by an integrated GPS and inertial navigation system, and can carry a variety of warhead configurations tailored to target type. In French service the same airframe is designated SCALP, a reminder that the design already has a proven track record across multiple air forces.

Ukrainian pilots have been flying Storm Shadow sorties since the early months of the full-scale invasion, using the weapon to strike Russian command posts, ammunition depots, and airfields deep behind the front. The missile’s low-altitude flight profile makes it harder to intercept than a ballistic trajectory, though it is slower and therefore more vulnerable to dense point-defence layers than a hypersonic weapon would be.

Why Blueprints Alone Will Not End the Barrage

The strategic arithmetic, however, is unforgiving. Russia fires dozens of missiles in a single night, mixing ballistic types with cruise types, drones, and glide bombs in layered salvos designed to saturate whatever air-defence coverage Ukraine can field. A single cruise-missile design, even one produced domestically, does not by itself neutralise that saturation. Ukraine still requires interceptor missiles, radar coverage, and the industrial throughput to build airframes, guidance electronics, and propellant at a pace that matches the attrition rate.

Correspondent Joe Inwood, reporting from the region, frames the issue plainly: the blueprint transfer is a necessary step, but it does not, in isolation, tip the balance. The daily barrage continues regardless of whether Kyiv can eventually stamp out its own Storm Shadow airframes. What the blueprints buy is time and autonomy — the ability to plan production without negotiating delivery windows with a foreign ministry of defence.

The Broader Industrial Implication

Transferring classified design documentation is a rarer gesture than most observers appreciate. It means sharing not just a drawing but the tolerance specifications, materials science, software architecture, and quality-control protocols that make a weapon reliable in cold, wet, contested conditions. For Ukraine’s existing aerospace and engineering firms — many of which built Soviet-era missile systems before the war — the knowledge transfer shortens a development curve that might otherwise have taken a decade.

It also sets a precedent. If Britain can open its Storm Shadow files, other partners face pressure to do the same with their own cruise-missile, loitering-munition, and interceptor designs. The question shifts from “Can you send us more missiles?” to “Can you teach us to build them?” That shift, if it holds, reshapes the entire architecture of Western military aid from a pipeline model to a capacity-building model.

What Ukraine Still Needs

Domestic Storm Shadow production will not arrive overnight. Tooling, supply chains for composite materials, guidance-component fabrication, and test ranges all require investment and time. In the interim, Ukraine remains exposed to the same nightly salvos that have battered its energy grid and urban centres through successive winters. The blueprint is a key, but the door it opens leads into a factory that must first be built, staffed, and brought to operational tempo.

What the deal does guarantee is that the question of Ukrainian missile self-sufficiency has moved from aspiration to engineering schedule. Whether that schedule outruns the attrition curve is the question the next several years will answer — not in press conferences, but in the quiet arithmetic of production lines and interception rates.

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At the Top of Carn na h-Easgainn, a Grandmother Watched Her Granddaughter Finish a Decade-Long Quest

Constantvpn.com – The wind off the Highlands plateau carried the sound of cheering as Laura Baillie, 38, stepped onto the final summit of a project that had consumed years of her weekends, her early mornings, and her weekends spent navigating chest-deep bracken in some of Scotland’s most remote corners. Carn na h-Easgainn, a modest 2,025-foot (617-metre) rise near Tomatin south of Inverness, was deliberately chosen as the last peak. It sits at the end of an estate track, meaning no scrambling, no exposed ridge, no reason for the people who mattered most to be left behind in a car park. Among those people was her 89-year-old grandmother, who would turn 90 the following month.

“I left that one for last so that friends and family can join. I left them a super-easy one, it’s an estate track all the way up.”

By standing on that final summit, Baillie joined a select cohort of roughly 100 individuals who have completed what the Scottish Mountaineering Club calls the “full house” — the act of reaching every one of the UK’s 1,072 classified summits across six distinct hill categories. She is also among the youngest women to have done so, a distinction that carries particular weight given the sheer logistical sprawl of the undertaking, which stretches from the Scottish Highlands to the uplands of England, Wales, and Ireland.

What the Full House Actually Demands

The challenge is not a single list but a composite of six classifications, each with its own altitude threshold and geographic scope. Together they total 1,072 peaks:

Munros (282) — Scottish mountains exceeding 3,000 feet (914 metres). Munro Tops (226) — additional summits above 3,000 feet that lack sufficient topographic separation from their parent peaks. Corbetts (222) — Scottish peaks between 2,500 and 3,000 feet (762–914 metres). Grahams (219) — Scottish hills between 1,968 and 2,500 feet (600–762 metres). Donalds (89) — Lowland Scottish hills above 2,000 feet (610 metres). Furths (34) — mountains over 3,000 feet located in England, Wales, and Ireland.

The breadth of the task means a full-house attempt is never a single expedition. It is a rolling programme spanning seasons, regions, and weather regimes that no single trip can satisfy. Baillie’s effort involved wild camping, remote routes with no phone signal, and hiking in conditions ranging from driving rain to freezing fog.

A Property Manager, Not a Pro Athlete

Baillie works as a property manager in Glasgow. She is not sponsored, not a full-time athlete, and not affiliated with any climbing outfit. The full house was a personal project layered onto an ordinary working life. She estimates she undertakes roughly 75 per cent of her walks alone, navigating isolated stretches of the Scottish interior where mobile reception simply does not exist.

“So I do check in with family and friends, give them my routes at the beginning of the walk, my ETA for when I finish. I check in to keep people informed so I don’t have mountain rescue out looking for me.”

That solitary rhythm — the long silences, the self-reliance, the constant route-finding from a paper map — shaped the character of the project as much as the physical distance did. The Corbetts, in particular, tested her patience and nerve.

“There is a lot of pathless terrain, chest-deep bracken and you’re just cursing yourself and wondering why you can’t just find another hobby.”

The Munros, by contrast, tend to follow more defined paths, though Baillie notes that experienced walkers routinely abandon marked trails to stitch together summits in sequences no guidebook prescribes. Confidence, she says, grows with repetition: the more time spent reading a map in the field, the more natural it becomes to improvise a line between peaks that others would treat as separate outings.

The Final Ascent and the Family at the Top

Choosing an estate-track summit for the finale was a practical decision with deep emotional logic. Baillie had spent weeks contacting estate owners and energy companies to confirm land access. With her grandmother approaching her 90th birthday, her mother was granted permission to drive the family vehicle all the way to the top of Carn na h-Easgainn, eliminating the need for an elderly woman to walk even a short distance in uncertain weather.

“With my gran turning 90 next month, my mum was granted access to drive her all the way to the summit, which is so, so special.”

The image of an 89-year-old woman standing beside her granddaughter on a Highland summit, surrounded by friends who had gathered for the occasion, gave the achievement a dimension that no certificate or club record could replicate.

Context: The Club, the Dog, and the Elite Few

The Scottish Mountaineering Club, founded in 1889, administers the full-house tally and has counted among its members many of Scotland’s most accomplished climbers. Admission to the club itself requires completion of at least 50 Munros plus demonstrated experience in rock climbing and hillwalking across all seasons. The full house, by comparison, is a far more extreme commitment — a lifetime-scale project for most who attempt it.

The register of completers remains tiny. Just over 100 names appear on the club’s list. In April of last year, the tally gained an unlikely new entrant: Betty, a nine-year-old Kerry Blue Terrier, who walked the final required summits alongside her owner Shona Marshall, becoming the first dog to finish the full house. The episode underscored how the challenge, while physically demanding, is ultimately a matter of sustained commitment rather than elite athletic ability — a threshold that a determined walker, or in one memorable case a determined terrier, can cross given enough time and resolve.

For Baillie, the decade of weekends, the thousands of miles of bracken and bog, and the solitary stretches of signal-free Highland have now closed. The next chapter is simpler: a grandmother’s 90th birthday, a Glasgow office, and the quiet satisfaction of having ticked off every last summit on the list.

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Constantvpn.com – Les Howard said he became suspicious and tried to delete the scam app When Les Howard could not find change for parking during a trip to the coast, a quick response (QR) code on the meter seemed to be the answer. But the next day, the 61-year-old realised he had become the victim of an increasingly common scam as criminals started taking money from his bank account in £60 chunks. Reports of QR code-related scams have gone up by 700% in the past four years, figures by Report Fraud have revealed.

Experts say criminals are finding different ways to exploit the codes as they become a common part of everyday life. This could be disguising suspicious links in emails, gaining access to victims' messaging apps or convincing people who are out and about to download fraudulent apps to steal their money and data. That is what happened to Howard, from Widnes, who was visiting Caernarfon in North Wales with his wife.

"We went to the car park where we normally go," Howard told the BBC Scam Secrets podcast. "I normally have change in the car to pay for the parking, but this time I didn't. "So there was a QR code to download and get an app and pay via an app." Experts say criminals are finding different ways to exploit people using QR codes Other people in the car park were doing the same thing but Howard recalled how he became suspicious.

"I thought 'I don't like the idea of this because I'm going to have to put my card details into an app that I've only just downloaded, which wasn't of my choosing'." So he stopped, deleted the app from his phone and parked somewhere else. But by then he said he received a notification on his phone that £1 had been taken from his account. The next day, another notification came through, but this time for £60, to the same recipient so he called his bank.

"I told them I'd downloaded it, I tried to stop, but I'd obviously gone too far," he said. "She said 'it's a good job you rang up, because they've set up a monthly £60 subscription'." The council responsible for car parks in the area, Cyngor Gwynedd, said it did not use QR codes for parking payments, and had removed two fake QR code stickers from its car parks in the past year. Criminals have used similar tactics in car parks and railway stations across the country.

Data from City of London Police released under the Freedom of Information Act suggests the problem of QR code-related scams – known as "quishing" – is growing. Report Fraud, which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, told the BBC it received 2,743 reports mentioning QR codes in the past 12 months – in the year ending in August 2022 it was just 341. This is likely to be an underestimate with many victims not choosing to report.

"We're definitely seeing a rise in the use of QR codes to conduct a range of criminal activity," Ollie Whitehouse, the chief technology officer for the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), told Scam Secrets. "I think as they become more commonplace, naturally criminals will jump on to the back of that." BBC Scam Secrets: QR Code Scams On this episode, Shari Vahl, Dr Lis Carter and Alex Wood hear how criminals are finding different ways to exploit those little black and white squares. This includes persuading people to scan QR codes that link a victim's messaging app with a criminal's device, Whitehouse said.

Some people have been scammed even though the QR code they are scanning is genuine. The National Cyber Security Centre advises people to use the QR scanner that comes with their phone – usually the camera – rather than downloading a separate app. That is because some apps contain adverts so it can be hard knowing which link to click on.

Keith Betton said he would never download a QR scanner app again Keith Betton, from Farnham in Surrey, was trying to buy a book about sports cars he had seen advertised in a magazine. The 66-year-old scanned a QR code on the advert, using an app he had downloaded. What he only realised afterwards was that he had been offered two links – one to buy the book, and another to a website where he was asked to enter payment details.

Within seconds, he had been asked to agree a zero pounds transaction on his banking app, which he agreed. "I don't hear anything more for a while," Betton said. "And then about a month later, my bank contacted me because there was an amount of £59.99 from a company in Prague trying to take that money off my account." It turned out this was the second charge of that amount that had been taken from Betton's account.

He eventually managed to get a refund from his bank. The NCSC said QR codes were also increasingly being used in phishing emails to disguise links to malicious sites. Microsoft said this was the fastest-growing scam technique aimed at people's emails, with 18.7m cases recorded in March of this year.

This is because QR codes allow scam links to "slip through" on email, while a URL embedded in a message might be filtered out as spam, said Professor Filipo Sharevski of DePaul University in Chicago, who has studied the malicious use of QR codes. The black and white squares also make it easier for criminals to hide the true website they are taking you to, he said, because even if your phone lets you preview the link before clicking, it is often shortened or disguised. Another reason QR codes are so valuable to criminals is that people are often naturally trusting of them, Prof Sharevski said.

His team has carried out experiments placing QR codes around his university campus and in workplaces, to study people's willingness to scan them. "We don't question our boarding pass on our phone, we don't question our concert ticket," he said. "We learn slowly through scam experiences.

Our phone rings… we abandon that. "We get an email, and we abandon that…but these QR codes, we have no reason to suspect them." Tell us which stories we should cover in Cheshire These seaside apartments were a ghost city – then police say scammers moved in We thought we were buying Welsh jewellery but the shop was an AI scam Financial losses from scams hit £1.3bn a year as criminals turn to AI

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Constantvpn.com – Mayors across England will be given new powers to overrule local councils on some planning decisions. The change would apply to proposals with more than 150 homes, more than 15,000 square metres of commercial space or buildings over 30 metres. Mayors in 13 areas including Manchester, Liverpool, the West of England and the West Midlands will gain similar powers to Sir Sadiq Khan in London, who is already able to "call in" planning decisions.

Housing minister Matthew Pennycook said the powers were an "essential part of the toolkit that mayors need to effectively deliver new homes and regeneration". The Conservatives questioned whether it was right for councils to lose the "ability to make planning decisions in their own communities". The powers will also be available to mayors in the Combined Authorities in North East England, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, York and North Yorkshire, Hull and East Yorkshire, Greater Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, East Midlands, and Tees Valley.

Paul Bristow, the Conservative mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, told BBC Breakfast that if he had local powers, he would approve "tomorrow" a couple of blocked schemes that he said would "get new homes built that families could move into and charge economic growth". Bristow said "it's not about overriding what local people want", but about developers and councils finding a compromise on projects instead of just saying no – which he believed the "perceived threat of intervention" would help. In London, where Khan already has the power to review decisions on certain developments , external , housebuilding has fallen in recent years.

But Pennycook insisted the "call in" powers had helped the mayor "unblock strategic growth sites" in the capital. Bristow said if he had a similar local plan it would be "much more light touch" than London. In the 2024 general election, the Labour government promised to build 1.5 million homes in England by the end of the decade, but housebuilders have warned the target could be missed.

Pennycook said the government was "absolutely determined to stick with that ambition". He acknowledged the target was "really stretching" but said nearly 180,000 children were in temporary accommodation and "any smaller target wouldn't be commensurate with the scale of the challenge". Bristow said the government has "no chance whatsoever" to meet its 1.5 million target.

"We need economic growth in this country, we need to get building and families need places to live, and at the moment, the planning system just isn't working." In addition to gaining the new "call-in" powers, mayors are set to be able to grant "up-front permission", which the government says will allow building to begin "without a developer having to apply". A consultation on how the powers will work is due to be published next week. The government has sought to stress that local councils will continue to decide the majority of applications and that all decisions must still follow planning rules.

It has also said mayors will get a "bigger say" over how housing funding is spent in their area, with the government directing national agency Homes England to focus on local mayors' priorities. New Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who served as mayor for Greater Manchester for nearly a decade, has repeatedly expressed his desire to transfer more powers to local mayors. "Challenge does need to be made to local decision-making and actually it cuts both ways," he told the Sunday Times.

"Sometimes it's the other way round. It's the local authority putting forward something that's unacceptable in terms of the impact on the community. It's a two-way street." Last month, Burnham promised to give all mayors a share of income tax revenue, saying he wanted to "bring power home" to "every postcode".

Earlier this week, he announced a secondment programme to send high-performing civil servants to work in mayoral offices. The approach has faced criticism from some in his own party and the Liberal Democrats, who fear it could create a "two-tier system" that discriminates against those areas that do not have an elected mayor. Planning bids for new homes rise in England but building remains low, data suggests Affordable housing quota for London falls to 20% Responding to the new powers for mayors, Sir James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, said the government was "simultaneously stripping councils across the country of their ability to make planning decisions in their own communities, while making it easier to build traveller sites against local wishes".

Sir James also suggested Labour mayors had failed to meet housing targets, adding: "The Conservatives are the only party with a plan to get Britain building and moving again with our plan to scrap stamp duty on the family home." Gideon Amos, the Liberal Democrat housing and planning spokesperson, said "taking powers away from communities and local councillors is taking powers away from local people". "Instead of silencing residents and handing mayors a blank cheque, the government should be empowering local councils with the resources to deliver genuinely affordable homes alongside the infrastructure to support them," he added. Mothin Ali, deputy leader of the Greens, said "more powers for mayors to direct local councils" was "more tinkering from the Labour government when local authorities continue to be forced by government into austerity budgets".

Reform UK accused Labour of "centralisation in disguise", saying: "Westminster is stretching its tentacles outward instead of giving real power, resources and decision-making capabilities to devolved authorities." Sign up for our Politics Essential newsletter to keep up with the inner workings of Westminster and beyond.

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Footage Appears to Show Police Chase Minutes Before Fatal A66 Collision

Constantvpn.com – Security-camera video captured on a residential street near Middlesbrough appears to show police chase activity unfolding just moments before a devastating collision on the A66 that claimed seven lives, including two serving officers. The clip, recorded on Lime Road at approximately 03:36 BST on a Saturday morning, captures multiple marked police vehicles in pursuit of a civilian car. Investigators note that the pursuit had already concluded before the fatal impact occurred, and the police car struck in the crash was not participating in the chase. The timing gap between the two events — roughly three minutes — has drawn public attention to whether the pursuit played any role in the sequence of events that followed.

What the Footage Captures and What It Does Not

The Lime Road recording shows several police vehicles following a car along the road at a time when traffic was minimal. Witnesses and analysts who reviewed the clip describe the pursuit as brief and contained to a short stretch of street. Crucially, the vehicle later involved in the A66 collision was a separate marked police car positioned at a marked crossing point. A Volkswagen Passat, travelling the wrong way along the dual carriageway, struck that stationary police vehicle at speed. Seven people died in the impact. Because the pursuing units had already dispersed before the crash, Cleveland Police confirmed that the chase and the fatal collision were distinct incidents separated by a short interval.

The proximity in time and geography between the two events has nonetheless prompted questions from families of the victims and from local residents. Cleveland Police acknowledged the footage and stated that it would be reviewed as part of the wider inquiry. The force emphasised that the presence of the chase on camera does not establish a causal link to the crash, but that every available recording would be examined to ensure a complete picture of the minutes leading up to the collision.

“The Independent Office for Police Conduct has opened an investigation following a mandatory referral from Cleveland Police. The IOPC will examine all circumstances surrounding the crash, including the role of any police activity in the area at the time.” — Summary of the referral

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) took over oversight of the inquiry after Cleveland Police made the statutory referral required when officers are killed in the line of duty. The IOPC’s remit covers the actions of all police units present in the vicinity during the relevant time window, the positioning of the marked vehicle at the crossing, and the broader operational context. Families of the seven deceased have been offered support through the force’s dedicated liaison team while the investigation proceeds.

Frequently Asked Questions

Was the police car hit in the crash part of the chase? No. Cleveland Police confirmed that the marked vehicle struck by the Volkswagen Passat was not one of the units involved in the pursuit. The chase had ended before the collision took place, and the two events are treated as separate incidents for investigative purposes.

Where and when was the footage recorded? The clip was captured by a security camera on Lime Road near Middlesbrough at approximately 03:36 BST on a Saturday morning. It appears to show police chase vehicles for a brief period before the camera’s field of view ends. The A66 collision occurred roughly three minutes later at a nearby location.

What is the current status of the investigation? The Independent Office for Police Conduct is conducting the inquiry following a mandatory referral from Cleveland Police. The investigation will review all available video, witness statements, and operational records to establish the full sequence of events. No timeline for completion has been publicly announced.

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