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The Queen will not attend the COP26 meeting in Glasgow next week; she had resumed light duties after having spent a night in hospital for ‘preliminary medical checks’. The Queen would address COP26 by means of a recorded video. ‘The recycling thing is a red herring,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told a press conference attended by schoolchildren. ‘You can only recycle plastic a couple of times, really. What you’ve got to do is stop the production of plastic.’ The protestors calling themselves Insulate Britain blocked main roads into London and approaches to the M25. Amazon Web Services was awarded a contract to provide a high-security cloud system for GCHQ, MI5 and MI6. The government took over administration of Slough, which had spent £54 million on a council headquarters where the wifi did not work properly. Ikea is buying the large Oxford Street store that belonged to Topshop for £378 million.
The freeze in salary progression for public sector workers, imposed last November, was lifted by Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his Budget. He said the UK economy was recovering from the pandemic ‘more strongly than rivals’. The national living wage would rise from £8.91 per hour to £9.50, from April. The universal credit taper rate will be adjusted so that workers can keep more of their income. England’s city regions will receive £6.9 billion to spend on train, tram, bus and cycle projects. Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, called it ‘an important first step towards a London-style public transport system for Greater Manchester’. Some £1.8 billion was earmarked for building 160,000 houses on brownfield sites in England. NHS England would get £5.9 billion to deal with the backlog of people waiting for tests.
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