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An underwater search expert looking for missing mother Nicola Bulley has said his team is pulling out of the hunt as she is “categorically not” in the area of the river where detectives believe she fell in.

Peter Faulding, a specialist called in by the family who is assisting police with the search, said his team have been unable to locate the 45-year-old.

He said: “We’ve done very thorough searches all the way down to the weir. Police divers have dived it three times, extremely thoroughly.

“That area is completely negative – there is no sign of Nicola in that area. The main focus will be the police investigation down the river, which leads out to the estuary.

“If Nicola was in that river I would have found her – I guarantee you that – and she’s not in that section of the river.”

Mr Faulding, who said he was now pulling his team out of the search, added: “I’m totally baffled by this one to be honest.”

The mother-of-two went missing near to the village of St Michael’s on Wyre, Lancashire, on 27 January, while walking her dog after dropping her daughters off at school.

Nicola Bulley

Detectives say their “main working hypothesis” is that she fell into the river and Superintendent Sally Riley, from Lancashire Police, reiterated at a news conference on Tuesday that this remained the force’s belief at this time.

But Ms Bulley’s family and friends have previously claimed there is “no evidence whatsoever” behind this.

Officers are searching the River Wyre, with the help of Mr Faulding’s company Specialist Group International (SGI), who joined the search for Ms Bulley on Monday.

Read more:
Images released of Nicola Bulley on day she vanished
Community ‘in shock’ over disappearance

However, his team, equipped with a £55,000 side-scan sonar able to pick up objects underwater, have not been able to find any trace of Ms Bulley.

On Wednesday, he told reporters that he believes it is “unlikely” that she has been swept out to sea, adding: “My personal view is that I think it is a long way to go in a tidal river.”

It comes as Ms Bulley’s partner visited the place where police believe she fell into the River Wyre.

Paul Ansell spent 10 minutes on Wednesday along the riverbank near the bench where the 45-year-old’s phone was found, still connected to a work Teams call.

The partner of missing mother-of-two Nicola Bulley, Paul Ansell, (centre in sunglasses) shakes hands with Peter Faulding (in Hi-Vis), the underwater search expert called in by the family to help with the search in the River Wyre in St Michael's on Wyre, Lancashire. Ms Bulley, 45, was last seen on the morning of Friday January 27, when she was spotted walking her dog on a footpath by the river. Picture date: Wednesday February 8, 2023.
Image:
Paul Ansell (centre in sunglasses) shakes hands with Peter Faulding

The lead and harness for Willow, her springer spaniel dog, were found on or close to the bench.

Mr Ansell spoke with Mr Faulding at the scene, and he appeared to take him through aspects of his search, which is now into its third day.

Police divers have also been conducting searches on sections of the river close to the bench.

Mr Ansell was accompanied by a police officer and Emma White, a family friend of Ms Bulley.

Two police dinghies with divers were seen setting off from the riverbank and going upstream to continue the search.

Earlier this week, in a statement released through Lancashire Police, Mr Ansell said their girls “miss their mummy desperately” and “need her back”.

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Paul Ansell’s voicenote: ‘We need her back’

In a voicenote sent to Sky News, Mr Ansell added: “We have to find her safe and well. I can’t put those girls to bed again tonight with no answers.”

Supt Riley said detectives had looked at “every single” potential suspicion or criminal suggestion that had come in and discounted them.

Private underwater search and recovery company, Specialist Group International, in St Michael's on Wyre, Lancashire, using sonar equipment to search for missing woman Nicola Bulley, 45, who was last seen on the morning of Friday January 27, when she was spotted walking her dog on a footpath by the nearby River Wyre. Picture date: Tuesday February 7, 2023.
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A private underwater search company has been using sonar equipment on the River Wyre

She spoke after suggestions Ms Bulley’s phone could be a “decoy” and about gaps in CCTV coverage of the area from where she vanished.

Police said it was still a “possibility” she left the area by one path not covered by cameras which is crossed by the main road through the village.

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Police ‘remain fully open to any information’ in search for Ms Bulley

Officers were trying to trace dashcam footage from 700 drivers who passed along the road at the time she disappeared, which was around 9.20am.

Detectives have revealed they are looking at 500 active pieces of information but have not found “anything of note” yet.

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Labour say there’s been a ‘massive increase’ in NHS appointments – this begs to differ

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Labour say there's been a 'massive increase' in NHS appointments - this begs to differ

“The target was never particularly ambitious,” says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) about Labour’s plan to add two million extra NHS appointments during their first year in power.

In February, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced they had achieved the feat early. He recently described the now 3.6m additional appointments achieved in their first eight months as a “massive increase”.

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But new data, obtained by independent fact checking charity Full Fact and shared exclusively with Sky News, reveals this figure actually signalled a slowing down in new NHS activity.

There was an even larger rise of 4.2m extra appointments over the same period the year before, under Rishi Sunak’s government.

The data also reveals how unambitious the target was in the first place.

We now know two million extra appointments over the course of a year represents a rise of less than 3% of the almost 70 million carried out in the year to June 2024.

In the last year under Mr Sunak, the rise was 10% – and the year before that it was 8%.

Responding to the findings, Sarah Scobie, deputy director of independent health and social care think tank the Nuffield Trust, told Sky News the two million target was “very modest”.

She said delivering that number of appointments “won’t come close to bringing the treatment waiting list back to pre-pandemic levels, or to meeting longer-term NHS targets”.

The IFS said it was smaller than the annual growth in demand pressures forecast by the government.

What exactly did Labour promise?

The Labour election manifesto said: “As a first step, in England we will deliver an extra two million NHS operations, scans, and appointments every year; that is 40,000 more appointments every week.”

We asked the government many times exactly how it would measure the pledge, as did policy experts from places like the IFS and Full Fact. But it repeatedly failed to explain how it was defined.

Leo Benedictus, a journalist and fact-checker at Full Fact, told Sky News: “We didn’t know how they were defining these appointments.

“When they said that there would be more of them, we didn’t know what there would be more of.”

Leo Benedictus, journalist and fact checker at Full Fact, obtained the key data from the NHS after a Freedom of Information request
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Leo Benedictus

Even once in government, initially Labour did not specify their definition of “operations, scans, and appointments”, or what the baseline “extra” was being measured against.

This prevented us and others from measuring progress every month when NHS stats were published. Did it include, for instance, mental health and A&E appointments? And when is the two million extra comparison dating from?

Target met, promise kept?

Suddenly, in February, the government announced the target had already been met – and ever since, progress on appointments has been a key boast of ministers and Labour MPs.

At this point, they did release some information: the definition of procedures that allowed them to claim what had been achieved. They said the target involved is elective – non-emergency – operations excluding maternity and mental health services; outpatient appointments and diagnostic tests.

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Why has Starmer axed NHS England?

However, we still did not have a comprehensive baseline to measure the two million increase against.

The government data instead relied on a snapshot: comparing the number of appointments carried out from July to November 2024 with the number from July to November 2023, and adjusted them for the number of working days in each period.

This did not tell us if the NHS had already been adding appointments under the Conservatives, and at what pace, and therefore whether this target was a big impressive ramping up of activity or, as it turns out, actually a slowing down.

Since then, a number of organisations, like Full Fact, have been fighting with the government to release the data.

Mr Benedictus said: “We asked them for that information. They didn’t publish it. We didn’t have it.

“The only way we could get hold of it was by submitting an FOI request, which they had to answer. And when that came back about a month later, it was fascinating.”

This finally gives us the comparative data allowing us to see what the baseline is against which the government’s “success” is being measured.

Full Fact passed the data to Sky News because it had seen our reporting about how the information published by the NHS in February was not sufficient to be able to assess whether things were getting better or worse.

What the government says now

We put our findings to the government.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “On entering office last July, the secretary of state [Wes Streeting] was advised that the fiscal black hole meant elective appointments would have to be cut by 20,000 every week.

“Instead, this government provided the extra investment and has already delivered 3.6 million additional appointments – more than the manifesto commitment the British public voted for – while also getting more patients seen within 18 weeks.

“In the nine months since this government took office, the waiting list has dropped by over 200,000 – more than five times as much as it had over the same period the previous year – and also fell for six consecutive months in a row.”

Health Secretary Wes Streeting leaves 10 Downing Street, London, following a Cabinet meeting. Picture date: Tuesday May 6, 2025. PA Photo. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire
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Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Pic: PA

We put this to Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak’s chancellor during his last two years as prime minister, and health secretary for six years under David Cameron and Theresa May.

He said: “What these numbers seem to show is that the rate of appointments was going up by more in the last government than it is by this government. That’s really disappointing when you look at the crisis in the NHS.

“All the evidence is that if you want to increase the number of people being treated, you need more capacity in the system, and you need the doctors and nurses that are there to be working more productively.

“Instead what we’ve had from this government is the vast majority of the extra funding for the NHS has gone into pay rises, without asking for productivity in return.”

Jeremy Hunt told Sky News that "the vast majority of the extra funding for the NHS has gone into pay-rises, without asking for productivity in return"
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Jeremy Hunt speaks to Sky’s Sam Coates

Edward Argar, shadow health secretary, accused the government of a “weak attempt […] to claim credit for something that was already happening”.

“We need to see real and meaningful reform that will genuinely move the dial for patients,” he added.

Is the NHS getting better or worse?

New polling carried out by YouGov on behalf of Sky News this week also reveals 39% of people think the NHS has got worse over the past year, compared with 12% who think it’s got better.

Six in 10 people say they do not trust Keir Starmer personally on the issue of the NHS, compared with three in 10 who say they do.

That is a better rating than some of his rivals, however. Just 21% of people say they trust Nigel Farage with the NHS, and only 16% trust Kemi Badenoch – compared with 64% and 60% who do not.

Ed Davey performs better, with 30% saying they trust him and 38% saying they do not.

Ms Scobie of the Nuffield Trust told Sky News “the government is right to make reducing long hospital treatment waits a key priority […] but much faster growth in activity is needed for the NHS to see a substantial improvement in waiting times for patients.”

The government is correct, however, to point out the waiting list having dropped by more than 200,000 since it’s been in office. This is the biggest decline between one July and the following February since current waiting list statistics were first published under Gordon Brown.

The percentage of people waiting less than 18 weeks for treatment is also falling for the first time, other than a brief period during the pandemic, for the first time in more than a decade.

There is still a long way to go, though. Figures released last week showed the total number of people waiting for NHS treatment in England had risen again in March, following six months of positive progress.

The latest figures show 6.25m people waiting for 7.42m treatments (some people are on the list for more than one issue). That means more than one in 10 people in England are currently waiting for NHS treatment.

There continues to be a fall in the number who have been waiting longer than a year. It’s now 180,242, down from almost 400,000 in August 2023 and over 300,000 in June 2024, the Conservatives’ last month in power.

But that number is still incredibly high by historical standards. It remains over 100 times higher than it was before the pandemic.

The government has a separate pledge that no more than 8% of patients will wait longer than 18 weeks for treatment, by the time of the next election. Despite improvements in recent months, currently more than 40% wait longer than this.


The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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Starmer’s winter fuel cut U-turn claim ‘not credible’

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Starmer's winter fuel cut U-turn claim 'not credible'

Sir Keir Starmer’s claim he is U-turning on cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners because he now has the money is not “credible”, Harriet Harman has said.

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The Labour peer, speaking to Sky News political editor Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, said the prime minister made the move as it was so unpopular with voters.

PM signs Chagos deal – politics latest

She also said Labour’s poor results at the local elections and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were the “straw that broke the camel’s back”.

Sir Keir said on Wednesday he would ease the cut to the winter fuel payment, which has been removed from more than 10 million pensioners this winter after it became means-tested.

He and his ministers had insisted they would stick to their guns on the policy, even just hours before Sir Keir revealed his change of heart at PMQs

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Winter fuel payment cuts to be reversed

Baroness Harman said: “It’s always been contested and always been unpopular.

“But the final straw that broke the camel’s back was the elections. The council elections and the Runcorn by-election, where the voters were saying, ‘this is not the change we voted for’.

“At the end of the day, you cannot just keep flying in the face of what voters – particularly if they’re people who previously voted for you – wanted.”

Baroness Harman is unconvinced by Sir Keir’s claim he can U-turn because there is more money due to good economic management by the government.

“I don’t think that’s credible as an argument,” she said.

“It really is the fact that voters just said ‘this is not the change we voted for, we’re not going to have this’.”

The challenge for the government now, she said, is deciding who will get the allowance moving forward, when they’ll get it, and when it will all be announced.

Read more:
Ex-PM suggests who should miss out on winter fuel payments

What are the options for winter fuel payments?

  • The Institute for Fiscal Studies has looked into the government’s options after Sir Keir Starmer said he is considering changes to the cut to winter fuel payment (WFP).
  • The government could make a complete U-turn on removing the payment from pensioners not claiming pension credit so they all receive it again.
  • There could be a higher eligibility threshold. Households not claiming pension credit could apply directly for the winter fuel payment, reporting their income and other circumstances.
  • Or, all pensioner households could claim it but those above a certain income level could do a self-assessment tax return to pay some of it back as a higher income tax charge. This could be like child benefit, where the repayment is based on the higher income member of the household.
  • Instead of reducing pension credit by £1 for every £1 of income, it could be withdrawn more slowly to entitle more households to it, and therefore WFP.
  • At the moment, WFP is paid to households but if it was paid to individuals the government could means-test each pensioner, rather than their household. This could be based on an individual’s income, which the government already records for tax purposes. Individuals who have a low income could get the payment, even if their spouse is high income. This would mean low income couples getting twice as much, whereas each eligible house currently gets the same.
  • Instead of just those receiving pension credit getting WFP, the government could extend it to pensioners who claim means-tested welfare for housing or council tax support. A total of 430,000 renting households would be eligible at a cost of about £100m a year.
  • Pensioners not on pension credit but receiving disability credits could get WFP, extending eligibility to 1.8m households in England and Scotland at a cost of about £500m a year.
  • Pensioners living in a band A-C property could be automatically entitled to WFP, affected just over half (6.3m).

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has committed to just one major fiscal event a year, meaning just one annual budget in the autumn.

Autumn budgets normally take place in October, with the last one at the end of the month.

If this year’s budget is around the same date, it will leave little time for the extra winter fuel payments to be made, as they are paid between November and December.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the Electoral Dysfunction podcast the economy will have to be “strong enough” for the government to U-turn on winter fuel payment cuts.

He also said the public would have to wait for the budget for any announcement.

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The ‘scary spotlight’ on music stars amid Kneecap terror charge

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The 'scary spotlight' on music stars amid Kneecap terror charge

Before the amps are even switched on in Brockwell Park, there’s been a lot of noise about who should or shouldn’t be performing.

It’s where Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap are set to play their first major show since band member Mo Chara was charged for allegedly displaying a flag in support of the terrorist group Hezbollah at one of their gigs.

Before that, there had been calls for festivals to reconsider booking the band over their political stances, and several have done, which prompted artists like Brian Eno, the Mystery Jets and CMAT to sign an open letter accusing Westminster and the British media of a campaign to “remove Kneecap from the public eye”.

They put their names to wording that said “in a democracy, no political figures… have the right to dictate who does and does not play at music festivals.”

The band have since claimed they’re the victims of “political policing” designed to silence their views on Gaza.

So what’s the reality like for artists who are outspoken at a time when the world is so divided?

As some of the biggest names in music gathered in London for the Ivors, an annual celebration of songwriting, Self-Esteem – aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor – said the level of scrutiny can be “terrifying”.

‘The problem with the internet’

She told Sky News: “The problem with the internet is you say one thing, which gets scrutinised, and then you shit yourself, you really do… then you’re advised not to. And then you’re like ‘don’t advise me not to!’

“You second-guess anything you want to say any more… but any time I do that, I think ‘well that’s why you’ve got to say it then’.”

She said it can be frustrating that focus turns on to pop stars’ opinions instead of “the people doing the bad things”.

Read more:
Why are Kneecap controversial?

Self-Esteem - aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor - spoke to Sky News about the topic.
Image:
Self-Esteem, aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor

‘Being a pop artist isn’t just about the music’

Former Little Mix singer Jade said: “To be a pop artist these days, it’s not just about music, it’s: ‘What’s your political stance?’

“I’ve always been quite vocal about those things, but in doing so you have even more of a scary spotlight on you, constantly assessing what your thoughts are as a human…it is scary.”

Trinidad-born London artist Berwyn, whose songs depict his struggles with UK immigration, says: “Silencing freedom of speech… is a road we don’t want to walk down.

“I’m not a politician, this is a very complicated issue, but I do absolutely believe in a human’s right to express themselves freely.”

But is that freedom of speech dependent on what side you’re coming from?

Berwyn speaking to Sky News
Image:
Berwyn speaking to Sky News

‘Unethical investments’

Soon, an event called Mighty Hoopla will take place at Brockwell Park as part of its programme of six festivals this summer.

Artists performing at that are coming under increased pressure from pro-Palestine groups to quit because it’s owned by a company called Superstruct, which has links to an American investment firm called KKR.

Critics argue that any KKR-affiliated events should be a red flag to artists as campaigners claim it “invests billions of pounds in companies” that do things like “develop Israeli underground data centres”, and they say it has shares in companies that “advertise property on illegally occupied land in the West Bank”.

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Mighty Hoopla itself has said while it “cannot control investments made in our parent companies”, it wants to “state its clear opposition to KKR’s unethical investments”.

And Superstruct – which puts on over 80 festivals around the world – says while horrified by the crisis in Gaza: “We are aware that there is a significant amount of debate… around our festivals.

“Our owners, made up of our promoters and several investment firms, support us to achieve the highest standards… fans and artists rightly expect.”

They insist that operationally, Superstruct is independently run and all its “revenue and profits… remains entirely within our business… towards the ongoing development… of our festivals.”

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Kid Cudi says Diddy ‘messed with his dog’
Bono calls for Israel to be ‘released from Netanyahu’
Chris Brown posts message as singer is bailed

Even deciding where to perform can have political connotations for musicians these days.

As Tom Gray, a founding member of the rock band Gomez, now chair of the Ivors, explains: “The amount of commercial interest required to get a young artist into the public eye means they have to keep their head down a lot and that’s a terrible shame.

“It’s not just artistic expression, but personal human expression is one of the fundamental things that allows people to feel they have agency.”

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