Ian Harrison watches a film in which, 16 years ago, he is on the streets begging for money in Covent Garden.

Recorded in 2008, we see a fresh-faced 19-year-old Ian, who has been evicted from his flat, telling the camera he is going to take as many drugs as he can get.

“I want to get so far gone, all my problems go away, just for tonight,” he says.

Watching this, 35-year-old Ian blinks slowly.

He nods and lets out a big sigh. Then his teenage self says something prescient: “Nothing changes, only time, and the people I’m begging from.”

Ian nods again: “He is right. Look where I am now!”

Ian is still homeless, his face now wears the years he’s lived on the streets and the addiction to heroin and crack he is still battling.

And although he has a room in a hostel for the moment, his life is on the same cliff-edge it was all those years ago.

It is significant that Ian became homeless in the late 2000s, towards the end of the Blair/Brown era, when a drive to tackle rough sleeping had successfully reduced numbers on the streets by two-thirds and kept them low for a sustained period.

The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global economic downturn saw homelessness numbers begin to rise, and steadily do so for a decade until a period during the pandemic triggered a drive to get people off the streets.

But now it is peaking again and last year Ian was among 11,993 rough sleepers in London – the highest ever recorded in the capital.

Labour‘s deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, described the situation as “shameful” as she took over the task of sorting it out.

Ms Rayner will lead a new cross-government taskforce to tackle the issue, which has echoes of Tony Blair‘s cross-department approach.

However, the success of Blair’s rough sleeping unit, launched in 1999, was also attributed to its focus on attempting to tackle the causes of homelessness, not just finding people places to stay.

This is something Ian feels is lacking now.

Despite having a roof over his head, his single room looks like the streets have followed him in.

The floor is covered in rubbish, the sink and walls stained, flies buzz around a small boxy space that smells not dissimilar to the cardboard home he lived in under the Hammersmith flyover a few months ago.

Ian grew up in care and says he hasn’t learned how to look after himself.

He says: “I struggle with a lot of basic things in life. I never had parents to say brush your teeth, get in the shower do this, do that, when you grow up into an adult you don’t have that stuff.”

‘Hard to be stable in a place like this’

He is off the drugs and has a prescription for methadone, but says his environment doesn’t help.

“It’s hard to be stable in a place like this, because it’s a very unstable place to be in,” he says.

“If you are picking someone up and putting them in a hostel with 26 other people who are all addicts, it’s not going to take long before it’s going to rub off on you.”

He is in supported accommodation but says it doesn’t offer the support he needs, which is self-care, organisation and, frankly, a great deal of therapy.

No one has ever addressed the root causes of Ian’s problems.

“From a very young age, you know, I went through a lot of sexual abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse, which was sustained daily, for years,” he says.

“They say you need therapy, but to get the therapy you need to be completely clean of drugs and alcohol for a couple of years. But that’s part of the illness, it’s part of the symptoms of the illness.”

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‘Stuck in a merry-go-round for 20 years’

It will be the task of Ms Rayner’s cross-department team to try to turn around the lives of people like Ian – and it won’t be cheap.

But the Sky News producer who filmed the footage back in 2008 and has known Ian since that time, has seen him go through countless hostels (around 30, says Ian) and mental institutions, only to eventually end up back out on the streets.

The long-term cost of not solving Ian’s problems is incalculable.

“I’ve been stuck in a merry-go-round for 20 years,” he says.

“l become homeless, get into a hostel, become homeless. You give up.”

Asked what his 19-year-old self would have hoped to being doing in his 30s, Ian says: “To be honest, I thought I’d be dead by now. And I wouldn’t have cared if I was.”

But Ian does care now.

A wish list, written on his hostel wall, reads: “Stop using all drugs, save up more cash, care 4 self better, start up business, go to gym, get routine, have camping holiday.”

To achieve this, he is going to need the kind of help that has eluded him all his life.

The Northern Lights have returned to the UK in spectacular style, visible across huge parts of the country.

This year, the famed aurora has made a couple of appearances as far south as the UK, producing stunning pictures as a result.

The phenomena is chiefly influenced by geomagnetic storms, of which the Met Office said there was a “severe” one due to reach Earth overnight on 10 October.

This brought sightings of the aurora all over the UK on Thursday night, with reports that it was visible across Britain, as far south as Sussex.

The Met Office had said that viewings were likely in Scotland and Northern Ireland and possible in the north of England and the Midlands.

However, thanks in part to relatively clear skies, they were visible for huge numbers of Britons well beyond this.

Met Office spokesperson Stephen Dixon said that further residual viewings could be possible over the weekend – but this is likely to be confined to the likes of Scotland.

Rain and cloud could also obscure further viewings over the weekend.

Near peak solar cycle

The auroras are most common over high polar latitudes but can sometimes spread south over parts of the UK.

The geomagnetic storms that chiefly influence them often originate from the sun, which works on a cycle of around 11 years with peak sunspot activity referred to as solar maximum.

Sunspots give the potential for Earth-directed releases of large bursts of energy, called coronal mass ejections (CME), which can lead to aurora visibility.

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Mr Dixon said: “We’re near the peak of that solar cycle so there have been more space weather events in recent months.

“International prediction centres, including the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre, are expecting solar maximum to be later this year or early next year.”

It will still be possible to see the Northern Lights once we pass solar maximum but there will be a decline in such activity.

The aurora displays occur when charged particles collide with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere around the magnetic polls.

As they smash into one another, they emit light at various wavelengths, creating the stunning sights.

Rebecca Adlington has welcomed the lifting of restrictions on baby loss certificates, saying her own has helped “bring home that [her baby] is part of the family”.

The Olympic swimmer lost her baby daughter, who she and her husband named Harper, at 20-weeks pregnant in October 2023.

It was Adlington’s second miscarriage in as many years, and she has since become an ambassador for baby loss counselling charity Petals.

Speaking on The UK Tonight with Sarah-Jane Mee, Adlington welcomed a recent change which means anyone who has suffered a miscarriage in the UK can apply for a baby loss certificate.

Until this week, the service was only available to parents who had experienced a loss since September 2018 but this restriction has now been lifted.

“We’ve got one, it’s actually framed,” Adlington said. “As soon as we found out about the certificates, we applied.

“It was something we absolutely wanted to have because we don’t have many things around the house that make her feel part of the family, and she is part of the family.

“It really kind of brings it home that she is part of the family. My kids know, they always say ‘Harper’s my sister’.”

While the certificates “are not going to take away the pain… they’re so fundamental to make [the loss] part of your life”, she continued.

“With miscarriage, there aren’t many things you can hold on to.”

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As the one-year anniversary of her miscarriage approaches, Adlington said she and her husband Andy Parsons are planning to check in with their counsellor.

“Both times, it was incredibly difficult to go through so I’m so, so grateful I had support,” she said. “I’ve had thousands of messages from people who didn’t have the best support or kept it to themselves.”

The change in rules surrounding the certificates coincides with baby loss awareness week.

All parents who have experienced a loss can now apply for one, for free, via a government website.