Education Secretary Gillian Keegan has defended being on holiday during the summer while further evidence of the use of unsafe concrete in buildings came to light.
Ms Keegan was on holiday in Spain from 25 August to 31 August when she admitted that three new cases of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) emerged – one in a commercial building, one in an education “setting” and one in a school in England.
She has been at the forefront of the RAAC crisis that is unfolding in schools in England, where more than 104 schools have been ordered to close or partially close because of the concrete – which is prone to collapse after a period of time.
Earlier today Ms Keegan apologised for her “choice language” after she was caught complaining about not being thanked for doing a “f****** good job” over the crisis.
Challenged by Ridge about whether it was a “mistake” to go on holiday, Ms Keegan replied: “To be honest, for the whole of the summer, obviously I had to sort out industrial action, then I had to do A-levels and I had to do the GCSEs – so the first time I could go on holiday…”
Ridge interjected: “So we should feel sorry for you?”
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Ms Keegan replied: “Not at all. I don’t expect anybody to feel sorry for me. I’m certainly not getting that vibe from you.”
The education secretary said her trip to Spain was a “family occasion”, but that she “worked remotely” while away, adding that the surveys and investigations were still ongoing and she was planning to return “straight away” for when they came back, which she did.
In the interview with ITV News in Westminster – which caught her on camera swearing – the cabinet minister criticised others for being “sat on their arses” and claimed the government had gone “over and above” in addressing concerns relating RAAC.
While her mic was still on, she said: “Does anyone ever say ‘You know you’ve done a f****** good job because everyone else has sat on their arses and done nothing’.
“No signs of that, no?”
Ms Keegan later apologised and admitted she was “frustrated with the interviewer” who was “making out it was all my fault”.
Her outburst came after she had come under pressure over the unfolding crisis, with critics accusing the Tories of a “shambolic” handling of the situation after claiming that risks associated with the dangerous material have been known about for years.
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Top five hot mic moments
RAAC is essentially a lighter-weight form of concrete, used to build roofs, schools, colleges and other buildings from the 1950s until the mid-1990s.
The government said “new information” about RAAC came to light over the summer, prompting them to issue the safety warning just days before the start of the school term.
But experts have long warned the material has now reached the end of its shelf life and is liable to collapse.
As a result of RAAC being identified, pupils face being taught in temporary classrooms, on different sites, or even forced into pandemic-style remote lessons.
In a statement in the House of Commons on Monday afternoon, Ms Keegan promised to publish the full list of affected schools “this week” as she sought to stress that disruption would be minimal.
Asked whether she would like to apologise for how the crisis has been handled, Ms Keegan said she was “really sorry” that pupils were missing school”, but added: “Prioritising safety is the most important point – and I wouldn’t apologise for that.”
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1:44
Labour pushed on school spending
Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, speaking before Ms Keegan’s interview with Ridge, said he believed she had “misunderstood why people are angry”.
“To start the term with this chaotic backdrop – and then to see the education secretary saying why [aren’t] people thank me I think is an insult,” he said.
Former education secretary Baroness Nicky Morgan also told the Politics Hub that the fiasco was every secretary of state’s “worst nightmare”.
But she said her successor had done the “only thing” she could possibly could have done in the situation, adding that England has an “ageing school estate”.
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Gillian Keegan is shown a video of a headteacher reacting to her swearing.
There are questions about who bears responsibility for the RAAC fiasco that is now affecting schools.
Challenged by Ridge on the fact that Labour did not address this problem when it was in government before 2010, Mr Streeting pointed to the budget to rebuild schools being cut and the Conservatives having had 13 years in government to fix this issue.
However, he refused to say how much Labour would spend fixing the issue, saying: “We don’t know how much this is going to cost yet.”
“I can’t point to the figure … because we don’t know [how bad the problem is].”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said it is “completely and utterly wrong” to suggest he is to blame for failing to fully fund a programme to rebuild England’s crumbling schools as he dismissed claims about his record as chancellor.
“Of course I know the timing is frustrating, but I want to give people a sense of the scale of what we are grappling with here: there are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this,” he said.
It might feel like it’s been even longer for the prime minister at the moment, but it’s been a whole year since Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a historic landslide, emphatically defeating Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives and securing a 174-seat majority.
Over that time, Sir Keir and his party have regularly reset or restated their list of milestones, missions, targets and pledges – things they say they will achieve while in power (so long as they can get all their policies past their own MPs).
We’ve had a look at the ones they have repeated most consistently, and how they are going so far.
Overall, it amounts to what appears to be some success on economic metrics, but limited progress at best towards many of their key policy objectives.
From healthcare to housebuilding, from crime to clean power, and from small boats to squeezed budgets, here are nine charts that show the country’s performance before and after Labour came to power, and how close the government are to achieving their goals.
Image: Sir Keir Starmer has been in office for a year. Pic Reuters
Cost of living
On paper, the target that Labour have set themselves on improving living standards is by quite a distance the easiest to achieve of anything they have spoken about.
They have not set a specific number to aim for, and every previous parliament on record has overseen an increase in real terms disposable income.
The closest it got to not happening was the last parliament, though. From December 2019 to June 2024, disposable income per quarter rose by just £24, thanks in part to the energy crisis that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
By way of comparison, there was a rise of almost £600 per quarter during the five years following Thatcher’s final election victory in 1987, and over £500 between Blair’s 1997 victory and his 2001 re-election.
After the first six months of the latest government, it had risen by £144, the fastest start of any government going back to at least 1954. As of March, it had fallen to £81, but that still leaves them second at this stage, behind only Thatcher’s third term.
VERDICT: Going well, but should have been more ambitious with their target
Get inflation back to 2%
So, we have got more money to play with. But it might not always feel like that, as average prices are still rising at a historically high rate.
Inflation fell consistently during the last year and a half of Rishi Sunak’s premiership, dropping from a peak of 11.1% in October 2022 to exactly 2% – the Bank of England target – in June 2024.
It continued to fall in Labour’s first couple of months, but has steadily climbed back up since then and reached 3.4% in May.
When we include housing costs as well, prices are up by 4% in the last year. Average wages are currently rising by just over 5%, so that explains the overall improvement in living standards that we mentioned earlier.
But there are signs that the labour market is beginning to slow following the introduction of higher national insurance rates for employers in April.
If inflation remains high and wages begin to stagnate, we will see a quick reversal to the good start the government have made on disposable income.
VERDICT: Something to keep an eye on – there could be a bigger price to pay in years to come
‘Smash the gangs’
One of Starmer’s most memorable promises during the election campaign was that he would “smash the gangs”, and drastically reduce the number of people crossing the Channel to illegally enter the country.
More than 40,000 people have arrived in the UK in small boats in the 12 months since Labour came to power, a rise of over 12,000 (40%) compared with the previous year.
VERDICT: As it stands, it looks like “the gangs” are smashing the government
Reduce NHS waits
One of Labour’s more ambitious targets, and one in which they will be relying on big improvements in years to come to achieve.
Starmer says that no more than 8% of people will wait longer than 18 weeks for NHS treatment by the time of the next election.
When they took over, it was more than five times higher than that. And it still is now, falling very slightly from 41.1% to 40.3% over the 10 months that we have data for.
So not much movement yet. Independent modelling by the Health Foundation suggests that reaching the target is “still feasible”, though they say it will demand “focus, resource, productivity improvements and a bit of luck”.
VERDICT: Early days, but current treatment isn’t curing the ailment fast enough
Halve violent crime
It’s a similar story with policing. Labour aim to achieve their goal of halving serious violent crime within 10 years by recruiting an extra 13,000 officers, PCSOs and special constables.
Recruitment is still very much ongoing, but workforce numbers have only been published up until the end of September, so we can’t tell what progress has been made on that as yet.
We do have numbers, however, on the number of violent crimes recorded by the police in the first six months of Labour’s premiership. There were a total of 1.1m, down by 14,665 on the same period last year, a decrease of just over 1%.
That’s not nearly enough to reach a halving within the decade, but Labour will hope that the reduction will accelerate once their new officers are in place.
VERDICT: Not time for flashing lights just yet, but progress is more “foot patrol” than “high-speed chase” so far
Build 1.5m new homes
One of Labour’s most ambitious policies was the pledge that they would build a total of 1.5m new homes in England during this parliament.
There has not yet been any new official data published on new houses since Labour came to power, but we can use alternative figures to give us a sense of how it’s going so far.
A new Energy Performance Certificate is granted each time a new home is built – so tends to closely match the official house-building figures – and we have data up to March for those.
Those numbers suggest that there have actually been fewer new properties added recently than in any year since 2015-16.
Labour still have four years to deliver on this pledge, but each year they are behind means they need to up the rate more in future years.
If the 200,000 new EPCs in the year to March 2025 matches the number of new homes they have delivered in their first year, Labour will need to add an average of 325,000 per year for the rest of their time in power to achieve their goal.
VERDICT: Struggling to lay solid foundations
Clean power by 2030
Another of the more ambitious pledges, Labour’s aim is for the UK to produce 95% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.
They started strong. The ban on new onshore wind turbines was lifted within their first few days of government, and they delivered support for 131 new renewable energy projects in the most recent funding round in September.
But – understandably – it takes time for those new wind farms, solar farms and tidal plants to be built and start contributing to the grid.
In the year leading up to Starmer’s election as leader, 54% of the energy on the UK grid had been produced by renewable sources in the UK.
That has risen very slightly in the year since then, to 55%, with a rise in solar and biomass offsetting a slight fall in wind generation.
The start of this year has been unusually lacking in wind, and this analysis does not take variations in weather into account. The government target will adjust for that, but they are yet to define exactly how.
VERDICT: Not all up in smoke, but consistent effort is required before it’s all sunshine and windmills
Fastest economic growth in the G7
Labour’s plan to pay for the improvements they want to make in all the public services we have talked about above can be summarised in one word: “growth”.
The aim is for the UK’s GDP – the financial value of all the goods and services produced in the country – to grow faster than any other in the G7 group of advanced economies.
Since Labour have been in power, the economy has grown faster than European rivals Italy, France and Germany, as well as Japan, but has lagged behind the US and Canada.
The UK did grow fastest in the most recent quarter we have data for, however, from the start of the year to the end of March.
VERDICT: Good to be ahead of other similar European economies, but still a way to go to overtake the North Americans
No tax rises
Without economic growth, it will be difficult to keep to one of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ biggest promises – that there will be no more tax rises or borrowing for the duration of her government’s term.
Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said last month that she is a “gnat’s whisker” away from being forced to do that at the autumn budget, looking at the state of the economy at the moment.
That whisker will have been shaved even closer by the cost implications of the government’s failure to get its full welfare reform bill through parliament earlier this week.
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5:03
One year of Keir: A review of Starmer’s first 12 months in office
But the news from the last financial year was slightly better than expected. Total tax receipts for the year ending March 2025 were 35% of GDP.
That’s lower than the previous four years, and what was projected after Jeremy Hunt’s final Conservative budget, but higher than any of the 50 years before that.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) still projects it to rise in future years though, to a higher level than the post-WWII peak of 37.2%.
The OBR – a non-departmental public body that provides independent analysis of the public finances – has also said in the past few days that it is re-examining its methodology, because it has been too optimistic with its forecasts in the past.
If the OBR’s review leads to a more negative view of where the economy is going, Rachel Reeves could be forced to break her promise to keep the budget deficit from spiralling out of control.
VERDICT: It’s going to be difficult for the Chancellor to keep to her promise
OVERALL VERDICT: Investment and attention towards things like violent crime, the NHS and clean energy are yet to start bearing fruit, with only minuscule shifts in the right direction for each, but the government is confident that what’s happened so far is part of its plans.
Labour always said that the house-building target would be achieved with a big surge towards the back end of their term, but they won’t be encouraged by the numbers actually dropping in their first few months.
Where they are failing most dramatically, however, appears to be in reducing the number of migrants making the dangerous Channel crossing on small boats.
The economic news, particularly that rise in disposable income, looks more healthy at the moment. But with inflation still high and growth lagging behind some of our G7 rivals, that could soon start to turn.
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.
Gunnar Strömmer reportedly said that Swedish authorities had confiscated more than $8.3 million worth of criminal profits since a law related to seizures was passed in 2024.