A week today, Rachel Reeves presents the spending review; how the budget is divided between government departments between 2026 and 2029 – the bulk of this parliament. 

It’s a foundational moment for this government – and a key to determining the success of this administration.

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So, what’s going to happen?

The chancellor did boost spending significantly in her first year, and this year there was a modest rise.

However, the uplift to day-to-day spending in the years ahead is more modest – and pared back further in March’s spring statement because of adverse financial conditions.

Plus, where will the £113bn of capital – project – spending go?

So, we’ve done a novel experiment.

We’ve taken Treasury documents, ministerial statements and reports from the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

We put them all into AI – into the deep research function of ChatGPT – and asked it to write the spending review, calculate the winners and losers and work out what goes where, and why.

It comes with a health warning. We’re using experimental technology that is sometimes wrong, and while ChatGPT can access up-to-date data from across the web, it’s only trained on information up to October 2023.

There are no answers because discussions are still going on. Think of it like a polling projection – clues about the big picture as things move underneath.

But, critically, the story it tells tallies with the narrative I’m hearing from inside government too.

The winners? Defence, health and transport, with Angela Rayner’s housing department up as well.

Everywhere else is down, compared with this year’s spending settlement.

The Home Office, justice, culture, and business – facing real terms squeezes from here on in.

The aid budget from the Foreign Office, slashed – the Ministry of Defence the beneficiary. You heard about that this week.

Health – a Labour priority. I heard from sources a settlement of around 3%. This AI model puts it just above.

Transport – a surprise winner. Rachel Reeves thinks this is where her capital budget should go. Projects in the north to help hold voters who live there.

But, could this spell trouble?

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Education – down overall. Now this government will protect the schools budget. It will say ‘per pupil’ funding is up. But adult education is at risk. Is this where they find the savings?

So much else – Home Office down, but is that because asylum costs are going down.

Energy – they’re haggling over solar panels versus home insulation.

Justice should get what it wants, I am told. This isn’t about exact percentages. But you can see across lots of departments – things are tight.

Even though Rachel Reeves has already set the budgets for last year and this, and only needs to decide spending allocations from 2026 onwards, the graphs the Treasury will produce next week compare what will be spent to the last set of Tory plans.

This means their graphs will include the big spending increases they made last year – and flatter them more.

They’ll say that’s fair enough, others will disagree. But in the end, will it be enough for public services?

“We’ve got two,” explains Emer Szczygiel, emergency department head of nursing at King George Hospital, as she walks inside a pastel coloured room. 

“If I had my time back again, we would probably have four, five, or six because these have helped us so much in the department with the really difficult patients.”

On one wall, there’s floral wallpaper. It is scored through with a graffiti scrawl. The words must have been scratched out with fingernails.

There are no other implements in here.

Patients being held in this secure room would have been searched to make sure they are not carrying anything they can use to harm themselves – or others.

There is a plastic bed secured to the wall. No bedding though, as this room is “ligature light”, meaning nothing in here could be used for self harm.

On the ceiling, there is CCTV that feeds into a control room on another part of the Ilford hospital’s sprawling grounds.

“So this is one of two rooms that when we were undergoing our works, we recognised, about three years ago, mental health was causing us more of an issue, so we’ve had two rooms purpose built,” Emer says.

“They’re as compliant as we can get them with a mental health room – they’re ligature light, as opposed to ligature free. They’re under 24-hour CCTV surveillance.”

There are two doors, both heavily reinforced. One can be used by staff to make an emergency escape if they are under any threat.

What is unusual about these rooms is that they are built right inside a busy accident and emergency department.

The doors are just feet away from a nurse’s station, where medical staff are trying to deal with acute ED (emergency department) attendances.

The number of mental health patients in a crisis attending A&E has reached crisis levels.

Some will be experiencing psychotic episodes and are potentially violent, presenting a threat to themselves, other patients, clinical staff and security teams deployed to de-escalate the situation.

Like physically-ill patients, they require the most urgent care but are now facing some of the longest waits on record.

On a fairly quiet Wednesday morning, the ED team is already managing five mental health patients.

One, a diminutive South Asian woman, is screaming hysterically.

She is clearly very agitated and becoming more distressed by the minute. Despite her size, she is surrounded by at least five security guards.

She has been here for 12 hours and wants to leave, but can’t as she’s being held under the Mental Capacity Act.

Her frustration boils over as she pushes against the chests of the security guards who encircle her.

“We see about 150 to 200 patients a day through this emergency department, but we’re getting on average about 15 to 20 mental health presentations to the department,” Emer explains.

“Some of these patients can be really difficult to manage and really complex.”

“If a patient’s in crisis and wants to harm themselves, there’s lots of things in this area that you can harm yourself with,” the nurse adds.

“It’s trying to balance that risk and make sure every emergency department in the country is deemed a place of safety. But there is a lot of risk that comes with emergency departments, because they’re not purposeful for mental health patients.”

In a small side room, Ajay Kumar and his wife are waiting patiently by their son’s bedside.

He’s experienced psychotic episodes since starting university in 2018 and his father says he can become unpredictable and violent.

Ajay says his son “is under a section three order – that means six months in hospital”.

“They sectioned him,” he tells us.

“He should be secure now, he shouldn’t go out in public. Last night he ran away [from hospital] and walked all the way home. It took him four and a half hours to come home.

“I mean, he got three and a half hours away. Even though he’s totally mental, he still finds his way home and he was so tired and the police were looking for him.”

Now they are all back in hospital and could be waiting “for days”, Ajay says.

“I don’t know how many. They’re not telling us anything.”

Matthew Trainer, chief executive of Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, is at pains to stress nobody is blaming the patients.

“We’ve seen, particularly over the last few years, a real increase in the number of people in mental health crisis coming into A&E for support,” he says.

“And I don’t know if this is because of the pandemic or wider economic pressures, but what we’re seeing every day is more and more people coming here as their first port of call.”

The hospital boss adds: “If you get someone who’s really distressed, someone who is perhaps experiencing psychosis etc, I’m seeing increasing numbers of complaints from other patients and their families about the environment they’ve had to wait in.

“And they’re not blaming the mental health patients for being here.

“But what they’re saying is being in a really busy accident & emergency with ambulances, with somebody highly distressed, and you’re sat there with an elderly relative or a sick child or whatever – it’s hard for everyone.

“There’s no blame in this. It’s something we’ve got to work together to try to fix.”

New Freedom of Information data gathered by the Royal College of Nursing shows that over the last five years, more than 1.3 million people in a mental health crisis presented to A&E departments.

That’s expected to be a significant underestimate however, as only around a quarter of English trusts handed over data.

For these patients, waits of 12 hours or more for a mental health bed have increased by more than 380%.

Over the last decade, the number of overnight beds in mental health units declined by almost 3,700. That’s around 17%.

The Department for Health and Social Care told Sky News: “We know people with mental health issues are not always getting the support or care they deserve and incidents like this are unacceptable.

“We are transforming mental health services – including investing £26m to support people in mental health crisis, hiring more staff, delivering more talking therapies, and getting waiting lists down through our Plan for Change.”

Claire Murdoch, NHS England’s national mental health director, also told Sky News: “While we know there is much more to do to deal with record demand including on waits, if a patient is deemed to need support in A&E, almost all emergency departments now have a psychiatric liaison team available 24/7 so people can get specialist mental health support alongside physical treatment.

“The NHS is working with local authorities to ensure that mental health patients are given support to leave hospital as soon as they are ready, so that space can be freed up across hospitals including A&Es.”

Patients in a mental health crisis and attending hospital are stuck between two failing systems.

A shortage of specialist beds means they are left untreated in a hospital not designed to help them.

And they are failed by a social care network overwhelmed by demand and unable to provide the early intervention care needed.

A new Home Office report has linked the UK’s balmy start to 2025 to a dramatic rise in the number of small boat crossings when compared to the same period last year.

However, analysis by the Sky News data team shows that there has also been a big rise in crossings on days when the weather has been poor.

A record 11,074 people arrived in small boats before May this year, a rise of almost 50% compared with the same period last year.

According to the Home Office figures, 60 of those days this year were classed as “red days” – where Channel crossings are more likely because of good weather – compared with just 27 last year.

In a new report released today, the Home Office says that the doubling of red days from January to April 2025, compared with the same period in 2024, “coincides with small boat arrivals being 46% higher” over that period.

Our analysis, using similar criteria to the Home Office, but not attempting to directly replicate their methodology, agrees that there have been an unusually high number of days this year when the weather makes for good sailing conditions.

But it also shows that there are significantly more people making the crossing when the weather is not ideal – a rise of 30% on last year, and more than double compared with the year before.

We’ve classified the weather as being favourable on a day when, for several consecutive hours early in the morning, wave height, wind speed, rain and atmospheric pressure were all at levels the Met Office says typically contribute to good conditions for sailing. There’s more detail on our methodology lower down this page.

There is a clear link between better weather and more people arriving in the UK on small boats.

An average of 190 people per day have arrived so far this year when the weather has been fair, compared with 60 on days with less consistently good conditions.

But if we look just at the days when the weather is not so good, we can also see a clear and consistent rise in the numbers over time.

That average of 60 arrivals per “low viability” day is a rise of more than 30% on last year, and more than double the 24 that arrived on each similar day in 2023.

There are a range of reasons why more people could be crossing on bad weather days.

Smuggler tactics are changing, and Home Office data shows severely overcrowded boats are becoming more common.

In the year to April 2022, just 2% of boats had 60 or more people on board, compared with 47% in the year to April 2025.

In other words, in the space of three years, the number of boats with more than 60 on board has gone from 1 in 50 to every second boat.

Dr Peter Walsh, senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at Oxford University, told Sky News that a rise in demand due to geopolitical issues, like the situation in Afghanistan, may be a factor, but that it is interesting that illegal entries to the EU are down while they have risen in the UK.

What is the Home Office doing?

The current government has placed a major emphasis on disrupting the smuggler gang supply chains to restrict the number of boats and engines making it to the French coast.

Part of the problem is that French authorities are unable to intercept boats once they are already in the water, which is believed to have been exacerbated by good weather.

The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has confirmed the French government is reviewing its policies after she pressed for a law change that would allow police in France to apprehend migrants in shallow waters.

The Home Office released figures on Thursday that revealed France is intercepting fewer Channel migrants than ever before, despite signing a £480m deal with the UK to stop the crossings.

How are we defining good and bad days?

The Home Office says that its assessments of the likelihood of small boat crossings are passed to it by the Met Office.

“A Red, Amber, Green (RAG) daily crossing assessment is produced of the likelihood of small boat crossing activity based on the forecasted wave height and other environmental and non-environmental factors; such as rates of precipitation, surf conditions on beaches, wind speed and direction, open-source forecasts, and recent trends.”

We’ve not tried to replicate that methodology directly. But we’ve looked at Met Office categorisations for wave height, wind speed, atmospheric pressure and rain, four factors that each contribute to fair conditions for sailing in a small boat.

They say a wind speed of 5m/s is a “gentle breeze”. They classify precipitation as at least 0.1mm of rain per hour. If the “significant wave height” – the height of the highest one third of waves – is below 0.5m, they say that’s “smooth”.

Standard pressure at sea level is 1,013hPa, and high pressure “tends to lead to settled weather conditions” . We’ve set the minimum pressure at 1,015hPa, on the high side of standard, and used the thresholds listed above for the other metrics.

We’ve categorised a “high viability” day as one in which all four of those conditions were met in the Dover Strait for at least four consecutive hours, between 2am and 6am UK time.

A “low viability” day is where there is no more than one hour during which all those conditions were met. And “medium” is when the conditions are met for 2-3 hours.

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.