What are the key problems in Rishi Sunak’s in-tray as MPs return to Westminster?
Rishi Sunak will be under increased pressure as MPs return to Westminster on Monday after their summer recess.
The prime minister has been accused of presiding over a “zombie parliament” – not just by Labour, as would be expected, but in a parting shot by Nadine Dorries, who has finally vacated her seat of Mid Bedfordshire – triggering another by-election in a safe Tory seat.
It comes as a new crisis has unfolded in England’s schools, with more than 100 being told they would either be forced to shut or partially close over fears about the type of concrete used in their buildings.
On top of that, Saturday saw the highest number of migrant Channel crossings so far this year.
The timing could not be worse for Mr Sunak, whose director of communications, Amber de Botton, resigned on Friday after less than a year in the role and with a general election looming around the corner.
The prime minister is under more pressure to make progress on his five pledges or else risk his backbenchers becoming increasingly agitated.
He faces pressure, too, from the opposition benches, with Labour accusing the government of being “unable to deliver its own agenda”.
The government’s Online Safety Bill had been “drastically watered down”, according to the opposition, who accused the prime minister of being “too weak” to pass the original legislation.
Labour says several pledges including reform of the Mental Health Act and of the audit system could be left out of the upcoming King’s Speech entirely.
Here, Sky News takes a look at the key problems in the prime minister’s in-tray.
Concrete crisis
After years of disruption caused by the COVID pandemic and more recently teacher strikes, parents are braced for yet more home-schooling after the Department for Education announced more than 100 schools would either have to close or partially close due to the use of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, known as RAAC.
Around 104 schools or “settings” will be disrupted on top of 50 that have already been affected this year.
The department said the vast majority of schools and colleges “will be unaffected” – but Labour criticised the move as a “staggering display of Tory incompetence”.
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Hunt promises ‘to keep children safe’
And in an interview on Sky News’ new politics show, Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt admitted more schools and other public buildings with structural problems could come to light as the government carries out its “exhaustive” programme into the problem.
“Obviously we might find new information in the weeks or months ahead and we will act on it, but in terms of the information we have today we have acted immediately, we will continue to act, we will continue to invest,” he said.
Record boat numbers
One of Mr Sunak’s five pledges – to stop migrant boat crossings in the Channel – is also under serious doubt after a summer of setbacks.
The prime minister has already had to contend with the fact that more than 100,000 people have made the crossing since records began in 2018 – a milestone he certainly does not want to be associated with.
A bad situation was made worse when the latest round of Home Office figures showed 872 people were detected crossing the Channel in small boats yesterday – the highest number on a single day so far this year.
The Saturday figure has taken the total to arrive so far this year to 20,973.
It prompted Labour to accuse Mr Sunak of having “badly broken his promise on small boats”.
Rising cost of living
The most consistent problem Mr Sunak has had to contend with is the cost of living crisis, where high inflation is eroding people’s pay packets.
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In full: Jeremy Hunt
Mr Sunak has pledged to halve inflation, which currently stands at 6.8%, by the end of the year – which some in his party feel has made him a hostage to fortune.
While the government has been buoyed by figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which showed the UK’s economy was 0.6% larger than pre-pandemic levels by the fourth quarter of 2021, there are no signs yet the pressure has eased up on people’s pockets.
Energy watchdog Ofgem has warned that while the energy price cap is going to fall in October, families are “absolutely going to struggle” with their bills this winter as its boss urged the government to bring back support for families.
A typical household paying by direct debit for gas and electricity will face an annual charge of £1,923 from October to December, a fall of about £150.
Despite that, millions of households could end up paying more because government support with bills – worth £66 a month – has now been withdrawn.
Reflecting the tough economic situation is the fact that junior doctors and consultants have agreed to go on strike for the first time in NHS over four days across September and October – coinciding with Mr Sunak’s first Tory conference as leader and prime minister.
Tata talks
Sky News revealed this week the government is in advanced talks with Britain’s biggest steel producer to hand over a £500m aid package aimed at securing the long-term future of steelmaking in South Wales.
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‘We can compete with China’
Whitehall officials and Tata Steel are close to agreeing a deal that would commit more than £1bn to the future of its Port Talbot steelworks – but which could ultimately result in thousands of job losses.
Under the plans currently envisaged, the government would commit approximately £500m of public funding to the company, while Tata Steel’s Indian parent would sign off £700m of capital expenditure over a multi-year period.
Port Talbot employs about 4,000 people – roughly half of Tata Steel’s overall UK workforce of approximately 8,000.
Industry sources close to the discussions said the company had indicated that over the long term, as many as 3,000 of its British-based staff were likely to lose their jobs.
Mr Hunt was challenged about the package by Trevor Phillips on Sunday, who asked whether the government was propping up an industry the government knows can’t compete with China.
Mr Hunt hit back by arguing the UK “can certainly compete with China”.
He said: “We are the world’s second-largest colleagues offshore wind producer and when it comes to high-end manufacturing, as opposed to the very low-cost manufacturing, we have four of the world’s top 10 universities, amazing research and development happening here.
“And we have a British economy that is a global leader when it comes to life sciences, technology or arts manufacturing.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, is facing antitrust proceedings that could limit its ability to develop AI amid a field of competitors.
First filed in 2021, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges that Meta’s strategy of absorbing firms — rather than competing with them — violates antitrust laws. If the court rules against Meta, it could be forced to spin out its various messenger services and social media sites into independent companies.
The loss of its stable of social media companies could harm Facebook’s competitiveness not only in the social media industry but also in its ability to train and develop its proprietary Llama AI models with data from those sites.
The trial could take anywhere from a couple of months to a year, but the outcome will have lasting consequences on Meta’s standing in the AI race.
Meta’s antitrust case and its effect on AI
The FTC first opened its complaint against Meta in 2020 when the firm was still operating as Facebook. The agency’s amended complaint a year later alleges that Meta (then Facebook) used an illegal “buy-or-bury” scheme on more creative competitors after its “failed attempts to develop innovative mobile features for its network.” This resulted in a monopoly of the “friends and family” social media market.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had the chance to address these allegations on April 14, the first day of the official FTC v. Meta trial. He testified that only 20% of user content on Facebook and some 10% on Instagram was generated by users’ friends. The nature of social media has changed, Zuckerberg claimed.
“People just kept on engaging with more and more stuff that wasn’t what their friends were doing,” he said — meaning that the nature of Meta’s social media holdings was sufficiently diverse.
At the time of the FTC’s initial complaint, Meta called the allegations “revisionist history,” a claim it repeated on April 13 when it stated the agency was “ignoring reality.” The company has argued that the purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp have benefited users and that competition has appeared in the form of YouTube and TikTok.
If the District of Columbia Circuit Court rules against Meta, the global social media giant will be forced to unwind these services into independent firms. Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at eMarketer, told the Los Angeles Times that such a ruling could cost Meta its competitive edge in the social media market.
“Instagram really is its biggest growth driver, in the sense that it has been picking up the slack for Facebook for a long time, especially on the user front when it comes to young people,” said Enberg. “Facebook hasn’t been where the cool college kids hang out for a long time.”
Such a ruling would also affect the pool of data from which Meta can draw to train its AI models. In July 2024, Meta halted the rollout of AI models in the European Union, citing “regulatory uncertainty.”
The pause came after privacy advocacy group None of Your Business filed complaints in 11 European countries against Meta’s use of public data from its platforms to train its AI models. The Irish Data Protection Commission subsequently ordered a pause on the practice until it could conduct a review.
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On April 14, Meta got the go-ahead to use public data — i.e., posts and comments from adult users across all of its platforms — to train the model. If these firms dissolved into separate companies, with their own organizational structures and data protection policies and practices, Meta would be cut off from an ocean of data and human communication with which its AI could be improved.
Andrew Rossow, a cyberspace attorney with Minc Law and CEO of AR Media Consulting, told Cointelegraph that in such an event, “companies would most likely control their own user data, and Meta would be restricted from using it unless new data-sharing agreements were negotiated, which would be subject to regulatory scrutiny and user/consumer privacy laws.”
However, Rossow noted that it wouldn’t be a total loss for Meta. Zuckerberg’s firm would retain the wealth of data from Facebook and Messenger. It could continue to use “opt-in” data from consumers who allow their posts to be used for AI training, and it could also employ synthetic data sets as well as third-party and open data.
Meta, the AI race and data protections
The race to unseat OpenAI and its ChatGPT model from AI dominance has grown more competitive in the last year as DeepSeek joined the fray and Meta launched the fourth iteration of its open-source Llama model.
In addition to training new models, major AI development firms are investing billions in new data centers to accommodate new iterations. In January 2025, Meta announced the construction of a 2-gigawatt data center with more than 1.3 million Nvidia AI graphics processing units.
Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads, “This will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people […] To power this, Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”
His announcement followed the $500-billion Stargate project, which would see massive investment in AI development led by OpenAI and SoftBank, with Microsoft and Oracle as equity partners.
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Amid this competition, AI firms are looking for broader and more varied sources of data to train their AI models — and have turned to dubious practices in order to get the data they need. In order to stay competitive with OpenAI when developing its Llama 3 model, Meta harvested thousands of pirated books from the site LibGen. According to court documents in a case pending against Meta, Llama developers harvested data from pirated books because licensing them from sources like Scribd seemed “unreasonably expensive.”
Time was another perceived motivator for using pirated works. “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data,” one engineer wrote about services through which they could purchase book licenses.
The practice is not limited to Meta. OpenAI has also been accused of mining data from pirated work hosted on LibGen.
Rossow suggested that, “to ensure lasting impact — beyond short-term profit,” Meta would do well to “prioritize investment in advanced data collection, rigorous auditing and the implementation of privacy-preserving and encryption-based technologies.”
By focusing on transparency and responsible practices, “Meta can continue to genuinely advance AI capabilities, rebuild and nurture long-term user trust, and adapt to evolving legal and ethical standards, regardless of changes to its platform portfolio.”
What a ruling for the FTC would mean
Litigation is now hitting tech firms from all sides as they face allegations of privacy violations, copyright law infringement and stifling competition. Major cases like those facing Google, Amazon and Meta that have yet to play out will decide how and whether these firms can proceed as they have, defining the guardrails for AI development as well.
Rossow said that the current antitrust case against Meta could decide how courts interpret antitrust law for tech firms, spanning tech mergers, data usage and market competition. It would also signal that courts are “willing to break up tech conglomerates” when issues of smothering competition are involved, while at the same time, “taking current precedent a step further in harmonizing it with the laws of cyberspace.”
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Politics
NHS must change policy on allowing trans people on single-sex wards, head of equalities watchdog says
The NHS must change its policy of allowing transgender people to be on single-sex wards aligned with their gender identity following the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a “woman”, the head of Britain’s equalities watchdog said.
On Wednesday, judges at the UK’s highest court unanimously ruled that the definition of a “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to “a biological woman and biological sex”.
Baroness Kishwer Falkner, chair of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said the ruling was “enormously consequential” and ensured clarity.
Politics latest: Supreme Court ruling should ‘draw a line’ under debate
She vowed to pursue organisations that do not update their policies, saying they should be “taking care” to look at the “very readable judgment”.
On single-sex hospital wards, Baroness Falkner told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the NHS will “have to change” their 2019 policy, which says transgender patients are entitled to be accommodated on single-sex wards matching how they identify.
She said the court ruling means there is now “no confusion” and the NHS “can start to implement the new legal reasoning and produce their exceptions forthwith”.
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Gender ruling – How it happened
Women’s sport and changing rooms
The baroness also said trans women can no longer take part in women’s sport, while single-sex places, such as changing rooms, “must be based on biological sex”.
However, she said there is no law against organisations providing a “third space”, such as unisex toilets, and suggested trans rights organisations “should be using their powers of advocacy to ask for those third spaces”.
In 2021, Baroness Falkner came under criticism from trans and other LGBTIQ+ organisations after she said women had the right to question transgender identity without fear of abuse, stigmatisation or loss of employment.
Some EHRC staff resigned in protest of the body’s “descent into transphobia”, while others defended her, saying she was depoliticising the organisation. Her four-year term was extended for a further 12 months in November by the Labour government.
Public bodies must look at equality laws
Health minister Karin Smyth said public bodies have been told to look at how equality laws are implemented following the ruling.
She told Anna Jones on Sky News Breakfast: “Obviously, public bodies have been asked to look at their own guidance.
“And we will do that very, very carefully.”
She said the court’s ruling was “very clear” about women’s rights being defined by sex, which she said “will give clarity to companies”.
But she warned against public bodies making statements “that may alarm people”, telling them to take their time to look at their guidance.
The ruling marked the culmination of a long battle between campaign group For Women Scotland and the Scottish government after the group brought a case arguing sex-based protections should only apply to people born female.
Read more:
Feminists ‘feel braver about speaking out’
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‘This ruling doesn’t affect trans people in the slightest’
Not a triumph of one group over another
Judge Lord Hodge said the ruling should not be read as “a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another”.
He said the Equality Act 2010 “gives transgender people protection, not only against discrimination through the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, but also against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in substance in their acquired gender”.
Ms Smyth said those who identify as transgender “will feel concerned” after the ruling but said the Gender Recognition Act still stands and gives people who identify differently to the sex they were born in “the dignity and privacy of presenting differently”.
She said NHS policy of having same sex wards remains, but did not mention the 2019 transgender policy, and said the NHS has been looking at how to support both transgender men and women.
Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney said the Scottish government “accepts” the judgment and said the ruling “gives clarity”.
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‘Today’s ruling only stokes the culture war further’
Trina Budge, director of For Women Scotland, said it was a “victory for women’s rights” and said the case was “never about trans rights” as transgender people are “fully protected in law”.
“It means there’s absolute clarity in law regarding what a woman is. We know for sure now that we are referring to the biological sex class of women,” she told Sky News.
“And that when we see a women-only space, it means exactly that. Just women. No men. Not even if they have a gender recognition certificate.”
Transgender woman and Scottish Greens activist Ellie Gomersall said the ruling “represents yet another attack on the rights of trans people to live our lives in peace”.
Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman added: “This is a deeply concerning ruling for human rights and a huge blow to some of the most marginalised people in our society.”
LGBT charity Stonewall said there was “deep concern” around the consequences of the ruling.
As Polygon lays the groundwork for mainstream Web3 adoption in India by bringing blockchain access to over 450 million Reliance Jio users, it remains focused on balancing speed, scalability and affordability, without compromising on decentralization.
Polygon is working with Jio, a telecom giant owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, to find ways to infuse blockchain technology into its existing services. The duo is currently adding blockchain-based capabilities to the JioSphere web browser, which would have been expensive, cumbersome and time-consuming via traditional methods.
“We’re building at an insane pace, onboarding massive partners, and pushing blockchain into the mainstream, but with that growth comes the responsibility to make sure we’re doing it the right way,” Polygon’s co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, said while discussing Polygon’s India-focused initiatives with Cointelegraph.
Preserving decentralization while ensuring system scalability
“Scalability and decentralization don’t have to be either-or, and that’s exactly the balance we’re focused on at Polygon,” Nailwal said as he underscored the importance of keeping the core values of blockchain intact: security, transparency and decentralization.
At the same time, Nailwal revealed that Polygon is investing heavily in zero-knowledge technology to make scaling more seamless across the ecosystem. “The goal is to give developers and users the best of both worlds: faster, cheaper transactions without compromising trust or decentralization,” he added.
As a result of delivering the combination of low fees, fast transactions and decentralized security, Polygon is already powering some of the most active use cases in Web3, from stablecoin payments on Polygon PoS to real-world tokenization with major institutions:
“The key challenge is making blockchain as seamless and accessible as Web2 without compromising what makes it special. That’s why we’re all-in on ZK technology and Agglayer, which let us scale while keeping the ecosystem trustless and interoperable.”
Bringing blockchain tech to millions of users
According to Nailwal, a one-size-fits-all approach does not work when onboarding 450 million users from India’s diverse population. “We’ll be working closely with Jio to develop use cases that truly resonate with their users, and gradually onboard them onto the chain based on these real-world applications,” he added.
Nailwal said that developers never have to compromise on the fundamentals, as Polygon’s infrastructure can scale without sacrificing what makes blockchain powerful in the first place:
“What excites me most is that we’re moving beyond technical discussions about blockchain to solving real problems for real people. These are the use cases that will drive the next wave of adoption.”
“At the end of the day, it’s about more than just technology. We’re here to create a decentralized future that billions of people can actually use. And while that’s a massive challenge, it’s also what excites me the most,” Nailwal said.
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Real-world problem solving will drive the next wave of adoption
Rising threats driven by artificial intelligence tools, including deepfakes and other misinformation campaigns, are another use case blockchain technology can help solve. Nailwal said that the escalating threat of misinformation and growing consumer insistence on trusted sources will eventually result in an uptick of blockchain-based verification tools.
Additionally, Nailwal highlighted the growing relevance of Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based prediction market, in mainstream finance and reporting. “Polymarket’s success is exactly what we’ve been working toward,” he said, adding:
“Prediction markets are proving to be incredibly valuable tools for finance, risk assessment, journalism and even governance. They pull in insights from a wide range of sources, often making them more reliable than traditional polling.”
Nailwal is placing his full bet on blockchain’s immutable nature to transform economic forecasting, policy-making and journalism, among others.
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