Andy Burnham’s high streets announcement today (see 1.37pm) focused on vape and betting shops, but it also included proposals to get councils to improve the appearance of high streets. It has emerged that Oswestry in Shropshire and Keynsham near Bristol are two of the models.

In its news release, the government says:

The government will also work with councils to improve the appearance of high streets and help restore pride in local town centres. In too many places, poor-quality shopfronts, garish neon signs, and oversized logos have prompted complaints from local people and contributed to high streets feeling less welcoming, at a time when the rise of online shopping has already put increasing pressure on town centres.

To help turn this around, the government will set clearer expectations for the design and appearance of high street shopfronts. Working with the Planning Advisory Service, it will identify the best examples of attractive, thriving town centres from across the country and provide councils with practical guidance on improving the look and feel of local high streets.

Over the next six months, councils will be supported to improve local high streets, drawing on successful examples such as Cross Street in Oswestry and Keynsham High Street.

There is a report on shop front improvements on Keynsham High Street here. And here is a Historic England report on the revival of Cross Street in Oswestry.

Polling is pretty good for Andy Burnham at the moment (see 11.23am), and Lord Ashcroft has released a new polling report that confirms that voters are reasonably positive about the new government.

It suggests 38% of people think Burnham’s government will be different from Keir Starmer’s “in a good way” and only 6% think the opposite.

Probation officers have voted overwhelmingly in favour of potential strike action over excessive workloads – a problem they expect to get worse when the next prisoner early release scheme starts in the autumn.

Napo, the probation union, said there was a 91% vote in favour in the ballot.

Ben Cockburn, the Napo national chair, said:

This ballot wasn’t about members being too busy. It was professionals warning they cannot protect the public properly when there are not enough people to do the work.

Probation staff make decisions every day with life-changing consequences for the people we work with, victims and the public. If excessive workloads prevent those decisions being made properly, the consequences can be devastating.

The government cannot keep treating probation as the place where the consequences of failures elsewhere in the criminal justice system are dumped. If you overload probation, you increase risk. It really is that simple.

The strike ballot was not directly related to the early release scheme. The union is demanding various measures to reduce workload, summarised as seven key demands. But it has called for more offenders to be exempt from the early release scheme, saying that is necessary to “ensure public protection is achievable”.

In a news release last week, Napo said:

It is not clear if the prime minister or the lord chancellor have a clue about how ill-equipped the probation service is take on this additional work. For example, there are huge numbers of vacancies in victim liaison roles, so we are not sure how the extra victim contact scheme work will be done.

Plans to release thousands of domestic abuse perpetrators and stalkers early from prison does not boost victim protection. It means that more people, largely women, will be killed or harmed.

There’s no additional funding to retain probation staff, especially experienced ones, despite endemic staffing problems in many key roles across England and Wales.

Whilst it is welcome that the prime minister has intervened to review the policy, more now needs to be done to ensure the probation service can safely manage people in the community.

Commenting on the strike ballot, a Ministry of Justice spokesperson said:

Our probation staff do a vital job, working tirelessly to cut crime and keep the public safe. That is why we secured the biggest probation pay increase in over a decade in April and are working to cut down workloads by recruiting 1,300 probation officers this year and investing in technology that can drive down admin workloads.

While this ballot is only indicative, we are disappointed with the outcome and will continue to engage with Napo and other recognised trade unions.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has publicly reprimanded his home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, for calling Ben Wallace a traitor.

Yusuf spent much of yesterday afternoon attacking Wallace, the former Tory defence secretary, on X, accusing him of “treachery” and suggesting he should be prosecuted for treason.

He was responding after Wallace posted his own messages criticising the plans Yusuf announced yesterday to deport foreign offenders.

While Farage is happy to criticise former Tory ministers for their record in government, Wallace, a former soldier, was widely respected as defence secretary, and Yusuf’s online rants were particularly extreme and inflammatory.

Asked about what Yusuf said, Farage told the Sun’s political editor, Jack Elsom, in an interview that calling Wallace a traitor was “too strong a word” and he would give Yusuf “a ticking off”.

Asked if he would tell Yusuf to delete the “traitor” tweet, Farage said:

I’ll speak to him today. But, yeah, it’s over the top.

The row started yesterday morning when Wallace posted a message about the Reform UK plans saying:

If memory serves me right the top foreign nationalities in UK prisons are Irish, Polish, Romanian, Albanian and Baltics. Total number of foreign offenders always hovered around 10-11k. Reform have to answer a.) how they will force those countries to take these offenders. For decades they have refused to. b.) if they wont and then deport them but they are released how will that sit with their victims? and the Irish offenders will find it easy to return.

In his first response, Yusuf said:

Incredible that this moron was Defence Secretary.

Our policy today is in direct response to your government’s failures.

If their home countries won’t take back, their citizens that are languishing in our jails, we are renting spaces in countries like El Salvador to put them.

They will serve their full jail terms there, and will be banned from ever coming back to Britain.

They may well include some of the thousands of Afghans you imported, including those who had not been vetted properly and including Taliban fighters (!).

You know, the ones you took a super injunction out to keep secret from the British people?

That’s why I call you a traitor to Britain. You fit the dictionary definition @BenWallace70

Wallace replied saying:

oh look a lesson from a man who never put a uniform on..just worked at bank. A man who is literally making policy and facts up. A man who cant even get his own party to pick him as an MP ( tell us why please?). When Reform stop taking £5m bungs and start being honest with people then people might take you seriously. No one is saying dont send prisoners back when you can but dont lie to the public you can do it with a magic wand. You guys are getting desperate. After all you recruited Suella!

Last night Yusuf replied:

Notably you did not rebut a single allegation I made against you @BenWallace70

. 1) you imported thousands of Afghans to Britain without proper vetting, at a cost of billions to the British taxpayer.

2) some were literal Taliban fighters, others were kicked out of the Afghan army for sexual misconduct. You flew them to Britain in secret.

3) you took out a superinjunction to keep the British people in the dark.

PS: you want to talk about banks? You have made vast sums by hawking yourself out to private banks - where you then viciously attack NATO allies.

Your actions constitute treachery, and many serving in the military use that word to describe you.

Our Boriswave Inquiry will shine a bright disinfecting light on all of the above, and I will not hesitate to declassify the things you did to betray the British people.

That’s why you’re lashing out. Tick tock

And Yusuf then posted a poll asking if Wallace should be prosecuted for treason.

Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary who is now Reform UK’s education spokesperson, has also criticised Wallace on X – but without calling him a traitor.

Yusuf’s outburst is particularly awkward for Farage because, following the murder of Ann Widdecombe, Farage has been speaking a lot about the way extreme language puts politicians at risk of violence. Yusuf himself also held a whole press conference on this topic only three weeks ago. On that occasion, he defended calling opponents “traitors” (a term he uses a lot), claiming it was justified if an MP was proposing something not in the interests of voters.

But “traitor” is also the sort of term regularly deployed by people who use or threaten violence.

Wallace told the Sun Yusuf should apologise. He said:

Traitor is a very loaded word. Traditionally, treason and traitor comes with a death sentence, historically.

In its overnight news release, the government said its council planning measures (see 1.37pm) would help high streets “hollowed out by the unchecked spread of vape stores, betting shops, and rogue businesses”.

But the Betting and Gaming Council says the number of betting shops is going down, not up. And it rejects the implication that betting shops are similar to rogue businesses.

In a response to the government, it said:

We support tough action against criminal operators and agree local people should have a proper say over their high streets. But the suggestion that betting shops are spreading unchecked is simply wrong.

Betting shop numbers have fallen by over a third since 2019. Around 3,000 shops have closed and over 15,000 jobs have already been lost.

It is wrong to lump highly regulated, licensed betting shops together with rogue or criminal businesses. Betting shops still support 37,500 jobs, bring vital footfall to neighbouring businesses and, for many customers, are valued community hubs.

The real threat to Britain’s hard-pressed high streets is more empty units and fewer local jobs, not businesses rooted in the communities they serve.

The Financial Times today has a good chart illustrating these figures.

The Local Government Association has welcomed the changes to council planning rules for England announced by Andy Burnham today to curb the spread of vape and betting shops.

Eamonn O’Brien, chair of the LGA, said:

It is positive that councils and communities will get a greater say on what shops and services are found on their high streets through these changes to the use class order which will require vape shops to acquire planning permission.

The LGA has consistently raised that some permitted development rights, which allow uses to change without planning permission, can hollow out high streets and reduce community and democratic oversight of planning decisions.

This is how the government explained the changes in its overnight press release.

As part of the PM’s plans to save Britain’s high streets, the government intends to revoke the Gambling Act’s outdated “aim to permit” rule, which currently restricts the ability of councils to refuse new betting shops and 24-hour slot machine shops even where there are strong local concerns.

The change would give communities and councils a stronger say over whether new betting shops are right for their area, helping stop them spreading unchecked across struggling high streets.

The government will also require planning permission for vape shops to finally give local people and councils a say over whether they open and to stop them opening near schools. The definition of a vape shop will also be tightened to stop businesses getting around the new rules by claiming to be a general convenience store or retailer.

Adult Gaming Centres (AGCs), which are adult-only venues offering up to 24-hour access to gambling machines such as slot and fruit machines, will also require planning permission under proposals due to come into effect at the start of next year.

Reform UK activists are being urged to think carefully before they post on social media because one of the biggest threats to the party comes from members doing “stupid” stuff.

In a report for Byline Times, Josiah Mortimer has written up the advice given to Reform activists in training videos. And some of it relates to social media.

One presentation says:

The fact is, the biggest threat to Reform is people in it and itself. It’s not the Tories, it’s not Labour, the establishment is going to throw everything at us. The biggest chance of things going wrong is stuff like infighting, stuff like people just saying and doing stupid stuff. That’s our biggest risk.

And activists are also told:

Treat every social media post like a press release, if this was sat on the desk of an anti Reform journalist, what are they going to do with it? Don’t drink and tweet. If there is any doubt, just don’t post it.

Reform UK has had a particular problem with members posting offensive material on social media. But, in truth, this has been an issue for all political parties. The former Tory PM David Cameron was one of the first prominent figures to recognise this, and ‘don’t drink and tweet’ is probably good advice for anyone in public life.

Reform UK has been approached for comment.

Peter Walker is a senior Guardian political correspondent.

The claim by a Reform UK council leader that there had been “a number” of complaints about LGBT books being promoted in libraries has been called into question after a local Labour MP found out there had not been any such complaints.

George Finch, the 19-year-old who has led Warwickshire county council since July 2025, announced a review of LGBT books and displays related to Pride events in the county’s libraries in June, saying that some of these included “contested gender ideology” and posed a “safeguarding risk” to children.

Finch said at the time that he would develop a new policy on the issue because of “a number” of complaints from local people about the content of children’s books.

However, Rachel Taylor, the Labour MP for North Warwickshire and Bedworth, said that a freedom of information request submitted by her office found that since March 2024 there had been no complaints to the council about inappropriate books for children in Warwickshire libraries.

Over the same period, there had been one separate complaint about a Pride-related display in a library, which was not upheld.

Taylor said:

This desperate attempt to manufacture outrage is almost laughable, but Reform UK’s attacks on LGBT+ people are no laughing matter.

Whether it’s Nigel Farage saying he doesn’t support same-sex marriage or Cllr Finch trying to ban LGBT+ books from display in our libraries, Reform have shown they are completely out of touch with modern Britain.

Finch’s office was contacted for comment.

Andy Burnham says he would like to get as much “political consensus” about prisoner releases as possible. (See 12.11pm.) Nick Timothy, the shadow justice secretary, has responded to Burnham’s long statement about this topic this morning (see 9.58am), and he does not sound minded to drop this as a party political issue.

Timothy says:

One week ago, the PM said he could not exclude anybody else from Labour’s early release scheme because:

“it’s not possible without the prison system reaching capacity and collapsing.”

We said more could be done, and he denied it, but today he has once again changed position and accepted our argument.

Instead of changing policy day-by-day he needs to present a proper plan and emergency legislation.

He needs to let parliament vote on who is and who is not excluded from this shambolic early release scheme.

Nothing matters more than the safety of our people. Andy Burnham needs to get a grip.

In his pooled TV interview, Andy Burnham also said he hoped that other parties would work with the government on devising a better prison early release scheme. He said:

I will talk to the other political parties about it because I believe it’s extremely important to build as much public and political consensus as we can around this difficult crisis within our prisons.

In his pooled TV interview, Andy Burnham repeated the point he made in his Facebook post earlier (see 9.58am), saying he was confident that more could be done to free up space in the prison system (which would allow the early release system to be changed so that PC Andrew Harper’s killers are excluded). Burnham said that since becoming PM he had been pushing the system “every single day” to go further.

Explaining how extra space could be found (see 9.19am), he particularly singled out the more than 2,000 prisoners on indeterminate IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentences. He said:

[The] plan will include issues like returning more foreign national offenders to their country of origin, and looking at the injustice of IPP sentences, which have led to young people, or young when they were imprisoned, being imprisoned indeterminately, and that clearly is unfair.

Burnham said that he would keep the family of PC Andrew Harper informed as the government developed a plan to keep his killers locked up. Burnham said:

My office was in touch with the family last night [see 10.04am], and I know the justice secretary is in regular touch as well.

So, we will keep close to the family through this whole process because we understand how difficult this process has been for them.

As Simon Hattenstone explained in a column yesterday, IPP sentences are one of the biggest scandals in the justice system.

IPP sentences were introduced by David Blunkett when he was home secretary. Ironically, Blunkett is one of Burnham’s chief mentors in politics; Burnham was his parliamentary private secretary. But Blunkett also now views IPP sentences as a mistake.

Andy Burnham has said that in an ideal world he would not want to see “a single prisoner” released early.

Speaking to reporters on a visit in Derbyshire, he also said that his decision to order the justice secretary to look again for a means of excluding the killers of PC Andrew Harper from the early release scheme coming into force in the autumn was evidence of how he has “never taken no for an answer”.

Burnham said:

I don’t want to see a single prisoner released early, and that’s the spirit that I’ve brought to the first three weeks that I’ve served as prime minister, and I’ve always worked like that.

I’ve never taken no for an answer, not in the past dealing with Hillsborough and other issues, and not now when I’m facing the situation that I’m looking at now. It’s always been my style, I won’t give up, and I believe there is more I can do.

It’s my job to speak up for the public on this issue. I take that duty very seriously indeed, and I’m confident that there’s more that can be done, and will be done to address public concern.

Most prime ministers act as leaders of a government explaining to the public what the government is doing. In this instance, Burnham is presenting himself as an insurgency PM, telling the government, on behalf of the public, what it should be doing. This is a hard act to pull off. But when leaders do it successfully, voters tend to approve.

Labour is now ahead of Reform UK in national polling. Several individual polls have already shown this, but the trend is now clear in poll trackers – datasets using all available published polling to show what is happening with voting intention.

At Westminster the most widely consulted tracker may be Politico’s, and today, for the first time since March last year, it is showing Labour ahead of Nigel Farage’s party. It has Labour on 25% and Reform UK on 24%.

Other trackers are showing the same thing. The Economist has Labour on 27% and Reform UK on 23%. (Different trackers used slightly different methodologies, but they are all trying to measure the same thing.) And PollCheck has Labour on 26% and Reform UK on 23%.

Yesterday we reported the calls for the Scottish Greens to withdraw the whip from their MSP Q Manivannan over their comment about rape being a “spectrum”. Manivannan, who is non-binary and who uses they/them pronouns, has now apologised for the comments, which were in a podcast made before they became an MSP.

As the BBC reports, they said:

I recognise that the words in the clip shared, without the full context of the conversation, have caused considerable upset.

For that I apologise. I will always stand with and for victims and survivors …

I would never seek to diminish or dismiss any survivor’s experience, or to make anyone feel that their pain was not heard or understood.

Andy Burnham did not want to be talking about prisons today. As Aletha Adu and Alexandra Topping report, the PM wants to highlight new powers to stop betting and vape shops taking over their high streets.

As with some of Burnham’s other early announcements, today’s initiative is an extension of one already in the pipeline. Here is the news release from last year when Keir Starmer’s government announced councils getting powers to “block gambling and vape shops on their high street”.

The opposition parties say today’s measures don’t go far enough.

This is from James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary.

Everyone can see what has happened to our high streets, with once-treasured shops being replaced by a smattering of rogue operators, many of which have links to organised crime and fraud.

Labour’s business rates hikes have hollowed out our high streets, driving out the shops people want and leaving empty units for whoever is left standing to fill. Conservatives would cut business rates for high street firms and back the small businesses that give a town centre its character.

This is from Max Wilkinson, the Lib Dem home affairs spokesperson.

Unless he beefs up powers to properly crack down on cowboy vape shops and dodgy operators, Burnham’s plan could go up in a puff of smoke.

Our high streets are in crisis, so rolling the dice and keeping his fingers crossed these minor changes are enough simply won’t win the hand. He should scrap the failed business rates system and urgently give sweeping new powers to councils so high streets can prosper and trading standards officers can permanently shut repeat offenders.

And this is from Robert Jenrick, the Reform UK Treasury spokesperson.

Until this government scraps the jobs tax, addresses sky-high business rates and provides real, fundamental support for high street businesses, this policy will only create even more empty shops on our high streets.

Preventing businesses from opening only works if the government and local councils make it attractive for the right kind of shops to open in their place. Labour is doing the opposite by making life harder for small, legitimate businesses to operate on our high streets.

UPDATE: And the Green party has made a similar point. A Green spokesperson said:

The hollowing out of so many of our high streets is the direct consequence of a failed economic model designed for wealth to collect in one direction.

We need our high streets back at the heart of our towns and communities and these measures look like more inadequate tinkering and reannouncements. We would support real powers given to councils to improve the types of shops on high streets, although more police powers aren’t what is needed, and would invariably make the situation worse by treating the symptom not the cause, and using up police resources.

If prime minister Burnham is serious about change, he needs to go further and allow councils to introduce rent controls for small businesses. Then small and independent shops won’t continue to be priced out by chains, vape and gambling shops.

Andy Burnham has written a post on his Facebook account about the prisoner early release scheme. Explaining why he has asked Alex Norris to come up with further plans, he says he is “increasingly confident” that the government will be able to revise the scheme so that PC Andrew Harper’s killers remain in jail.

He says:

I understand the depth of public concern about the potential early release of those involved with the killing of PC Andrew Harper - and I share it.

I fully appreciate the anguish of Andrew’s family and, more broadly, of all those victims and their families who may see those who caused them such harm not serve their full sentence.

It is incumbent on me as prime minister to do everything within my power to minimise that possibility. And I am determined to do so.

I have spent recent days considering in depth all of the issues involved and the range of advice I have received. I have been pushing for further progress. I have not accepted that it is impossible to do more.

As a result, I have asked the justice secretary to fast-track the development of a plan for presentation to parliament early next month to create more headroom within the prison system.

It will be based on a range of options including the three strands of further work I asked him to initiate last week: increasing the rate of removal of foreign national offenders from the prison estate to their country of origin; finding an early resolution to the long-running injustice of IPP sentences, which could allow for the release of lower-risk prisoners; and making greater use of the entire prison estate including using the female estate for male offenders.

I am increasingly confident that a more focused approach along these lines will allow us to reduce the number of people released early and, in the case of the most serious offenders like those convicted of the killing of PC Harper, prevent their early release altogether.

In advance of the justice secretary’s proposals being presented to parliament, we will seek to engage other political parties in discussions with the aim of gaining the widest possible public and political consensus on the approach being taken.

Murderers have always been exempt and our actions have already ensured that rapists, serious child sex offenders and those convicted of grooming offences will never be released early.

And today I have shown a determination to go further. However, I recognise that, even with all these changes, there will be concerns from many victims about who will still be released early for other offences. I am doing all I can, but it is simply not possible to prevent all offenders from being released early without the prison system collapsing.

Here is Caroline Davies’s story on Andy Burnham ordering Alex Norris, the justice secretary, to revise the prisoner early release scheme again so that two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper are excluded from it.

Good morning. Andy Burnham has been prime minister for three weeks and one day, and arguably he is performing his first U-turn. It is in relation to the prisoner early release scheme and, in particular, finding a way of ensuring that two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper are not included.

Burnham has been looking at this for some time. Early last week he announced significant changes to the early release scheme that he inherited and that was due to come into force from September. Around 1,000 fewer prisoners were going to be included. But two of the three Harper killers (Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers) were not affected by the change, and remained eligible. The main perpetrator (Henry Long), who was driving the car that dragged Harper to his death, was not covered by the scheme anyway because his manslaughter sentence was longer than theirs.

In an article for the Daily Telegraph last week, Burnham implied that he had done as much as he could to toughen up the early release scheme. “I know I can look people in the eye and say to them there is nothing more I could have asked for without risking the prison system reaching capacity and collapsing within months.” At the Downing Street lobby briefing yesterday morning, the PM’s spokesperson also played down the prospect that there might be further tweaks to the system. The spokesperson said that No 10 could not simply adapt the scheme to exclude people convicted of the manslaughter of an emergency worker (one proposed solution), and he highlighted the risk of wider exemptions that could lead to the Prison Service running out of space.

But the spokesperson did not categorically rule out a rethink. And last night the government revealed, in a quote first reported in the Times, that Burnham has told Alex Norris, the justice secretary, to come up with further revisions to the prisoner early release scheme to keep Cole and Bowers in jail.

Angela Rayner, the housing secretary, has confirmed this. She has been giving interviews this morning and she told the Today programme:

The prime minister is determined to ensure that there is a solution to this, and I think he’s made that really clear. And he’s tasked the justice secretary to come to parliament in September with that solution. He’s looking at alternatives like the indefinite sentences, like women prisoners and speeding up foreign nationals being deported. So there is a lot of work that’s going on.

She was implying that, by extending early release to include prisoners on indefinite IPP (imprisonment for public protection) sentences or more women, or by speeding up the deportation of foreign offenders, the government could free up more space. This would allowing more manslaughter offenders like Cole and Bowers to be excluded from early release.

This is a U-turn in the sense that it is a shift from the position Burnham set out last week. Politicians normally get criticised for U-turns. But when the government is committed to a policy unacceptable to the public, ditching it swiftly is normally a wise move (at least, electorally), and that is what Burnham is up to here. This was the case that Rayner made in her Today interview. She said:

The prime minister is really clear. He will not just accept that the system says no. He understands the anger and the trauma that PC Harper’s family are going through, and other victims who are seeing this prison crisis unfold.

The risk for Burnham is that sometimes the system says no for a reason, and sometimes leaders just have to tell people they can’t get what they want. The prison system is in crisis because voters seem to like sending offenders to jail for longer and longer, but don’t seem to like the government building and funding more jails to house them all, and governments can’t deliver on both these wishes without the system eventually collapsing.

As Rajeev Syal reports, Burnham has been warned that, without an extensive prisoner release scheme now, he could end up having to approve another one just before the next election.

Burnham is doing a visit in Derbyshire this morning, and we will hear from him then because he will be doing some media.

Other than that, there is not much on the agenda. But I will be covering reaction to his announcement to give councils enhanced powers to stop betting and vape shops taking over their high streets.

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