Burnham faced questions from Kemi Badenoch and other MPs amid speculation over budget

In the news release to mark the first anniversary of his election as the Green party’s leader, Zack Polanski highlighted what he described as 10 achievements during his first year in charge. For the record, this is how he sees his record.

-Won the Greens’ first ever parliamentary byelection in Gorton and Denton

-More than tripled the party membership from 68,500 to over 230,000

Zack Polanski in Holborn and St Pancras sounds like a done deal from the hints the party is dropping over the past 24 hours. Needs the formality of local party sign-off.

Our budget for day-to-day spending next year will be lower in real terms than this year. Our capital budget will fall in real terms every year until the end of the decade.

John Healey should equalise the tax break on pension savings to stop inequalities from widening

Private pensions are a privilege for the lucky few and a curse for everyone else. Sold as a saviour for what would otherwise be a ruinous old age, they have become pernicious financial vehicles that allow an older generation to hoodwink younger generations, who also seek security in their latter years.

To make matters worse, saving by the better off is enhanced by state subsidies, widening the divide between rich and poor in retirement while driving a wedge between the generations.

Chaos of Capita-run scheme has left some people waiting up to a year for payments and in financial hardship

Retired civil servants have been failed by the decision to outsource their pension scheme, the government has admitted, and the maladministration meant some were left waiting up to a year for payments.

Multiple members of the civil service pension scheme, run by the private company Capita since December, have come forward to say they are unable to afford rent and have been forced to use food banks after being left without an income.

Almost half of working-age adults in the UK do not save into a pension. Four readers explain why they fear for the future

“I am 35 and have essentially nothing saved for my future, which is a huge concern.” Sarah* works in library services in Oxford – full-time at one library and part-time at another. She has saved £5,000 into her pension.

After finishing her PhD in 2020, she said she had “good intentions of contributing to pension schemes. But because I then had a succession of part-time jobs, I never started. I never thought, this is a job I’ll be doing for long enough.”

Reform UK leader to quit as MP but stand again, saying the people of Clacton ‘should be the judges of my actions’

Q: Do you think the parliamentary commissioner for standards should investigate Nigel Farage’s gifts from George Cottrell?

Badenoch said that was a matter for the commissioner.

[Farage is] hinting at press regulation. For all of the criticism and the attacks, and I would even say abuse that I’ve got from the press, I’ve never once recommended curbing our free press. I think this is one of the amazing things about this country.

I would be very worried about a Reform government using government power to control the press. I don’t think that that would be right.

Liz Kendall also wants Ofcom to report to parliament every year on how effectively social media firms are keeping under-16s off their platforms

Starmer acknowledges some teenagers will get round these restrictons. But that does not make the rules pointless, he says.

Will it mean that no child ever looks at social media again? No.

But look, this might shock you, but it doesn’t shock parents of teenagers; they get around other laws too.

Some technology companies want us to think that social media is unchangeable, part of an almost natural order.

But we have to resist that kind of learned helplessness. We have agency, we can change it, and we will.

Government confirms Jarvis’s move from role as security minister to replace John Healey

Ryan Henderson, assistant chief constable for the Police Service of Northern Ireland, is about to hold a press conference about last night’s rioting.

Andy Burnham is facing criticism after saying that he thinks the Waspi women should be entitled to “some” compensation.

I’ll stick by the Waspi women because they deserve some recompense for the unfairness.

One government figure decried Burnham’s intervention as “pathetic”, adding: “He can’t say no to anyone.”

An ally of Sir Keir Starmer likened Burnham’s economic agenda to that of hard-left former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and argued that the mayor’s intervention would harm his chances of manoeuvring the prime minister out of Downing Street.

Andy Burnham’s continued support for Waspi women is both welcome and hugely refreshing. While some politicians have broken their promises, it takes real courage to speak out and say what millions of people across the country and hundreds of MPs from all parties already know - that 1950s-born women deserve justice.

Andy has always recognised the unfair way in which state pension equalisation was introduced.

As mayor of Greater Manchester, he supported Waspi women in the city-region with early access to concessionary travel, providing some recompense to them within affordability limits.

One plan would see young workers offered early access to a slice of future pensions. It’s not perfect, but we need bold ideas

While we wait with nail-biting anxiety for the voters of Makerfield to decide the fate of the country, the prospect of renewal at the top provides a fertile time for breeding ideas and confronting great problems. Alan Milburn’s searing analysis of the first generation ever to do worse financially than their parents did at their age opens the door to people with solutions to this crisis. Now is the time to bring them out.

Among the thinktanks, voluntary sector and business organisations coming forward with ideas, this week the Social Market Foundation (SMF) is offering an inventive plan to help ease the growing inequality between those young people gifted some wealth and the majority who have none. We are now in the time of the “great wealth transfer”, with an estimated £5.5tn to be passed down by the baby boomer generation in the UK over the next three decades. My lucky generation had everything for free. Ordinary salaries bought homes easily and property values rocketed to make homeowners wealthy beyond all expectations, even as the UK has gotten relatively poorer compared to other European and North American countries.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

Auto-enrolment has made retirement more secure for many. But some groups, including women, need more support

Recommendations from the government-backed Pensions Commission are not due until next year. But its interim warning that at least 15 million Britons are not saving enough for retirement already signals the scale of the challenge. The trend towards increasing longevity means that the issue of retirement incomes is unavoidable. At some point during the next decade, a threshold is expected to be reached whereby there are three pensioners for every 10 working-age adults.

The decision to reconvene this expert group was a good one. The automatic enrolment system it proposed has been a success, with around 90% of eligible employees signing up since 2012, along with their employers. But millions of low-paid workers, as well as the vast majority of self-employed people, face an uncertain future unless they too are helped to plan and save. One suggestion, made by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) as part of its own pensions review, was that HM Revenue and Customs could oversee a system whereby self-employed taxpayers would be enabled to make pension contributions at the same time as paying their tax bill.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

The once inexorable rise in retiree living standards since the second world war has broken down. Can we keep the dream alive for future generations?

When you think of retirement, what comes to mind? Perhaps it is images of older people enjoying a well-deserved period of leisure and comfort in the final stretch of their lives. Cruise ships, garden centres, golf clubs and bungalows by the sea. The truth is that this image is now, in large part, the artefact of a bygone age. A long and comfortable retirement starting at 60 or 65 is beginning to look like a collective social experience whose moment has passed. The political and economic forces it relied upon appear to have run their course – and it’s time to start thinking about what comes next.

Retirement in Britain has a surprisingly short history, underpinned by dramatic improvements in older people’s quality of life over the past 50 years. Large public and private bureaucracies first started to enrol long-serving employees into pension schemes from the mid-19th century. In 1909, Britain introduced an old age pension funded by the state and targeting the poorest, who could claim it from the age of 70. But it was only after the second world war that a period of leisured old age become an ordinary expectation for most British workers.

Helen McCarthy is a historian and the author of Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood

This article was amended on 2 May 2026. An earlier version said that in 1909 Britain was the “first country to introduce an old age pension, funded by the state and targeting the poorest”. In fact, Denmark introduced a state-funded pension targeting the poorest in 1891.

State pension was ‘built for a different era’, says former PM’s organisation amid pressure on government finances

Labour has been urged by Tony Blair’s thinktank to scrap the pensions triple lock amid mounting pressure on government finances.

With the Iran war threatening to derail public spending plans, the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) said the “unaffordable” manifesto pledge to maintain the triple lock should be torn up as part of a wider overhaul of the state pension.

Farage was given £5m by the Thai-based billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before announcing he would stand in the 2024 general election

• Exclusive: Farage was given undisclosed £5m by crypto billionaire in 2024

Here is the running order for PMQs.

Nigel Farage was given £5m by the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne shortly before announcing he would stand in the 2024 British general election, Anna Isaac reports.

PM also criticises business figures and opponents of changes, many of which come into force on Monday

• Workers, pensioners and children: all better off. Ignore the critics – we really are standing up for working people

Keir Starmer has used a series of new workers rights that come into force on Monday to attack the Green party, saying a vote for Labour’s rivals puts such progress on sick pay, parental leave and zero-hours contracts at risk.

The prime minister also took a swipe at business figures and opponents of what he described as the biggest strengthening of workers’ rights in a generation, dismissing “vested interests” who had warned against them.

Post your questions below to get insight from the Guardian’s politics live blogger on the future of Labour and the role of the political reporter

Q: Do you agree with the Tories about wanting more oil and gas drilling from the North Sea?

Davey says Kemi Badenoch claims she can get an extra £2.5bn in tax revenue by allowing more exploration in the North Sea. He says she is “just lying”. He says everyone knows that that is not realistic.

More than one in eight of all those born between 1997 and 2012 don’t believe retirement will even be an option

Mehjabin, 23, is a supply teacher who lives with her parents in London. She does not know whether she will ever be able to stop working.

She works for a teaching agency, and for a full week she could typically earn about £650. However, sometimes she only gets two or three days a week.

It’s a grim time to be in your 20s, no doubt, but don’t blame it all on older people: being chopped up into ever smaller rivalries only serves the market

Intergenerational relations, or lack of them, is a subject I’ve been thinking about, on and off, since the financial crisis. I’ve read up on it, too – things such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ report on intergenerational earnings mobility, which is wonky but full of fascinating information which needs some parsing. (Example: “While the educational attainment of ethnic minorities growing up in families eligible for free school meals is often higher than that of their white majority peers, their earnings outcomes show no such advantage.” Why not?) Another good source of data is the Office for Budgetary Responsibility’s (OBR) report on intergenerational fairness – which, interestingly, is about the bluntest statement of fiscal unfairness that you can find. The OBR makes the point that “a current new-born baby would make an average net discounted contribution to the exchequer of £68,400 over its life-time, whilst future generations would have to contribute £159,700”. In plain English, people’s lifetime contribution to the state is going to double. That number is from 2011, and will definitely have got worse. In 2019, the House of Lords published a report on “Tackling intergenerational unfairness”, which doesn’t even bother pretending that the problem doesn’t exist. Mind you, not everyone agrees. A 2023 report from Imperial College Business School argues “there is more solidarity between generations than the ‘Millennials versus Boomers’ narrative would suggest”.

So this is definitely a question you can address through data – though there is a risk that you can use numbers to cherrypick your way to a conclusion you already held in advance. The other way of thinking about it is through lived experience. Not necessarily just your own. I often find myself thinking about the range of experiences and expectations in my own family, going no further than one generation back and one generation forward. I’m on the cusp between boomers and generation X. My children, both in their 20s, are firmly in generation Z. My parents were born in the 20s, in the west of Ireland and in South Africa. Between us, it’s a wildly different set of life stories, and chucking it into the capacious carpet bag labelled “generational differences” seems to me to be a violent oversimplification.

Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick has announced party’s plans to cut welfare spending

Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, is giving his speech now.

He has announced, or confirmed, three measures to cut welfare spending.

The number claiming disability benefits for an attention disorder has more than doubled since Covid. We all know a significant number of these claims are spurious …

We will stop those with mild anxiety, depression, and similar conditions from claiming disability benefits and instead encourage them into the dignity of work.

We will end the abuse of the Motability scheme, where expensive cars are handed out for conditions like tennis elbow, and paid for by working people who can’t afford them themselves.