Infected blood victims facing ‘new layer of pain’ over compensation

Government failings over the compensation offered to victims of the infected blood scandal has left them facing a “new and different layer of psychological pain”, a damning report has concluded.

A report into the compensation of victims and others affected by the scandal found that they have been ignored, branding the British state’s apology meaningless unless they are given greater involvement.

Sir Brian Langstaff, chairman of the official inquiry into the infected blood scandal, said: “Decisions have been made behind closed doors leading to obvious injustices.”

Publishing a report into failings in the government’s compensation for victims, Sir Brian said: “The government has known for years that compensation for thousands of people was inevitable and had identified many of those who should have had it.

“But only 460 have received compensation so far and many, many more have not even been allowed to begin the process.”

He called for the compensation scheme to be sped up, with greater access offered to those affected by the scandal.

The latest report of the inquiry concluded:

Campaign group Tainted Blood has estimated that at least 100 people have died while waiting for compensation since the main report was published last year.

In a devastating piece of evidence, which Sir Brian concluded was “fully justified”, the infected blood inquiry was told how victims have faced “a new and different layer of psychological pain”.

Andrew Evans, from the campaign group Tainted Blood and who was infected with HIV and hepatitis C through contaminated blood products during treatment for haemophilia as a child, repeated the testimony of another who said it had been “another layer I have had to endure, adapt to and fight every day to not let it take over my life”.

They said: “I have spent more than 30 years fighting trauma, exclusion and the constant struggle to keep my life together.

“I have fought every day to keep the darkest thoughts from consuming me. What has happened since the compensation scheme was announced has pushed that fight to its absolute limit and now I am utterly exhausted… the anguish is beyond words.”

Mr Evans said victims have felt “nothing but despair” and have “lost all hope of ever fetting justice”.

Victims described being “left feeling age and illness catching up with us” while waiting for compensation, adding that “there is no rest, there is no peace”.

Others said it “feels as if we are waiting to die, in limbo, unable to make any progress in our lives and fearing as our health declines we may not ever get the compensation awards we deserve”.

And, speaking to The Independent, Jackie Wrixton said that she hoped the report would force the government to “pull their finger out” and speed up the compensation, given the high rate of deaths among those infected.

The 63-year-old was diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2010 after four decades of ill health, after receiving a blood transfusion following childbirth in 1983.

“The euphoria we had a year ago has dissipated and now we’re having to demonstrate,” she said. “The recommendations are really powerful but they just don’t seem to have the teeth we need to get the government to act.

“We have all of the platitude but none of the action. They say they’re working at pace, it’s just pulled and drawn out at every opportunity by every MP, but we are dying at pace. We are still not getting the coverage we need to get the public to understand what’s happening.”

Of the tens of thousands the inquiry believed were infected, and the many more affected by the scandal, just 460 have so far received compensation – totalling £326m. Some 616 have received an offer of compensation, the latest figures show, while 2,043 have been asked to start compensation claims.

The report set out a series of recommendations to speed up compensation and improve fairness, which included llowing infected and affected people to apply for compensation, rather than having to wait to be asked.

The recommendations also called for faster progression of compensation for the more seriously ill, who are older or who have not received compensation faster.

And Sir Briain called for an end to the injustice of people infected with HIV before 1982 being excluded from compensation and for the IBCA to drop unrealistic evidence requirements for those who suffered severe psychological harm.

Rishi Sunak last May promised the government “will pay comprehensive compensation to those infected and affected by this scandal… whatever it costs”.

But, having set out little detail of how the compensation scheme would work, the former PM called a general election two days later. The report found that the snap general election meant the establishment of the compensation scheme was rushed to meet an August deadline.

The infected blood inquiry had recommended that there should be two panels advising the chair and board of the compensation scheme, one of medical experts and one of lawyers. But the government appointed an expert group which the inquiry deemed did not contain “the full range of expertise recommended”, with no psychological expertise, no clinician specialising in bleeding disorders and no transfusion specialist.

The inquiry also criticised the group for being unable to meet with infected and affected people.

The inquiry’s report on Wednesday highlighted that people set to benefit from the compensation scheme should have had a central role in its decision-making and operation.

But the day after it was announced, it was revealed the IBCA had been established with no direct involvement from those affected.

The report highlighted that the government has apologised on behalf of the British state for the infected blood treatment disaster. “That apology will only be meaningful if the government demonstrates it is willing to listen to people, sooner rather than later, and to act when it has made a mistake,” it found.

It added: “Truly involving people infected and affected in how the state recognises their losses would start to turn the page on the past.”

The tragedy and triumph of Superman’s Margot Kidder

Before she died in 2018 at the age of 69, Superman actor Margot Kidder told her friends her final wish. If they ever find her body, keep her death a secret. Wrap her in a bedsheet, take her to the forest outside her home in the mountains of Livingston, Montana, and leave her for the wolves. Kidder loved those wolves, regularly feeding them from her back porch. Kidder’s friends, understandably, didn’t abide by her request. But there would have been something oddly fitting about this fate – Hollywood’s wildest movie star, at least for a few years in the Seventies, vanishing into the mysterious recesses of the Montana woods, never to be seen again.

Kidder went back and forth on her own stardom. “After Superman came out, I found it very difficult and hard to deal with,” she said in 1997, of the Lois Lane role that briefly propelled her to international renown. “There is a sense of having to put on this phoney face when you go out in public. I wasn’t very good at it, and it filled me with anxiety and panic. I had to hide the manic depression, for one thing. I just felt inadequate for the job.”

But it always made sense why Kidder was asked to do that job, why Hollywood felt they could harness her undeniable presence on camera and use it to sell romcoms and horror movies. Kidder’s charisma – along with those sharp, beguiling features and whip-crack of a line delivery – is visible from the off in Black Christmas, which turned 50 in 2024. Along with Brian De Palma’s trippy 1972 psycho-thriller Sisters, the Canadian slasher film made Kidder’s name, announcing her as an actor of unusual verve and bite, whose glamour was always a little chaotic, her spikiness a little sad.

Kidder isn’t the star of Black Christmas, which revolves around a sorority house menaced by a murderous prank caller. That spot is reserved for Olivia Hussey, playing the sorority’s pretty, haunted naif. Kidder, on the other hand, is its trainwreck Barb, a traumatised alcoholic with a messy sex life and a guilt complex, who reacts to deviant phone calls from a killer with swagger and outrage: come and get it if you think you’re tough enough, she more or less barks back at him. Black Christmas doesn’t judge Barb, or punish her for her apparent sins. She’s its most human component. But that effect is also down to Kidder’s performance, which feels startlingly alive and rich in empathy.

Black Christmas was part of a short-lived run of hits for Kidder, which included the Robert Redford drama The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) and the goofy haunted house blockbuster The Amityville Horror (1979). Superman came in 1978, her smart, sassy and hopelessly romantic Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane serving as the blueprint for the many actors who played that role in the aftermath, from Teri Hatcher and Amy Adams to, this week, Rachel Brosnahan in James Gunn’s divisive franchise reboot. Lois’s initial sit-down with Christopher Reeve’s Superman – who flies onto her apartment balcony for an interview – is full of blushing, pining and frazzled pauses. It’s one of those great Seventies movie star performances, perfectly matched by Reeves’ effervescent wholesomeness. Of course, Kidder was propelled to the A-list.

The problem, though, was that Kidder was a bit too offbeat and interesting for all of that. When she moved to Los Angeles from her native Canada in 1970, she lived in a somewhat notorious Malibu beach house that played host to the likes of a young De Palma, Steven Spielberg, Susan Sarandon and Martin Scorsese. Powders were snorted, sex was rampant and the next big ideas in filmmaking were formed. (Famously lily-white Spielberg, it should be said, reportedly only ever took part in the last one.) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s seminal 1998 tome on Seventies Hollywood, made this all out to be somewhat sordid, which Kidder disputed. “It was drugs and sex, yes, but it was sweet,” she said. “We were just a bunch of kids who had no money and wanted to change the world.”

Kidder was political and opinionated, and lived smack-dab at the centre of the sexual bohemia of the era. She had flings with De Palma, Richard Pryor and the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. And when Hollywood came calling, she rebuffed the squarer conventions imposed on her. The makers of The Amityville Horror were hungry for publicity stunts and asked her to tell the press the set was haunted – she called it “hogwash” and refused. When Superman’s director Richard Donner was fired from the film’s sequel, she publicly admonished its producers, and was allegedly punished for it – that’s why, it’s long been speculated, Lois is barely a presence in the franchise’s third instalment.

She also posed for Playboy, but only on the assurance that she could write an accompanying essay, which is quite literally all about how looking at pictures in Playboy as a teenage girl entirely destroyed her self-esteem. “Fourteen is a nervous age for a girl,” she wrote. “You want to be perfect and no one will tell you how. Your self-confidence is frail as glass, easily shattered. Playboy used to smash mine regularly.”

At the turn of the Eighties, high-profile work dropped off. It coincided with a number of health struggles, Kidder having received a diagnosis of schizophrenia in her twenties, followed by years of a repetitive cycle: a new round of medication, then a round of destructive self-medication, then back again. “None of us ever thought of Margy as mentally ill,” her friend Jennifer Salt said in 1997. “She was bright, courageous, a brilliant actress with extraordinary energy and intelligence … [but] it’s hard to know where the illness leaves off and the greatness begins.”

Kidder’s personal struggles were largely kept out of the spotlight until the early Nineties, when injuries from a car accident left her unable to work and ultimately in debt. Tabloids mocked her when she was photographed selling jewellery in New York to make ends meet. In 1996, a manic episode left the then-47-year-old wandering the streets of Los Angeles for several days, and she was found in a stranger’s garden. A year later, she was upfront about her personal difficulties.

“What’s it like to be the most famous crazy person in the world? It’s a dubious honour,” she joked to The Los Angeles Times in 1997. In 2001, while receiving a Courage in Mental Health award from the California Women’s Mental Health Policy Council, she also thanked the homeless people who kept her safe during the worst days of her crisis. “I was, in common terms, cuckoo,” she said. “But they had compassion and understanding. They knew that my confusion did not negate my humanity. What people need when they’re crazy is not to feel separated from the rest of humanity, but to have that hand reach out with love, and say, ‘OK, this is who you are right now. That’s fine. I’m here for you’.”

Kidder continued to work, often in horror movies or on television, and would happily poke fun at her less-than-glittering acting career. “I’ll [make] practically anything – I’m the biggest whore on the block,” she joked in 2008. “Unless it’s something sexist or cruel, I just love to work. I’ve done all sorts of things, but you just haven’t seen them because they’re often very bad and shown at four in the morning.”

She also pivoted more substantially to political activism in the mid-Noughties, working with a womens’ protest group in Montana initially called Bushes Against Bush (“We couldn’t go public with that name, so we became Montana Women For,” she’d say). Later, she would campaign for leftist Democrat Bernie Sanders and protest against the construction of oil pipelines. A memoir never happened, but she often teased it. “I’m going to call it I Slept With Everyone on Television,” she said in 2009. “I was in the airport in Minneapolis, and I thought, ‘S*** – what you have to do is have something that catches the eye of people going from Minneapolis to New York that looks like a good, easy read on a plane.’ So that title would sell out right away.”

Little is known of Kidder’s final months. Friends said she harboured addicts in her Livingston home, in a last act of charity and empathy. Or, as her daughter Maggie suggested in a statement, because of her own addictions in the end. Her manager said she died in her sleep, but a coroner later ruled she died from a “self-inflicted drug and alcohol overdose”. “It’s a big relief that the truth is out there,” Maggie said. “It’s important to be open and honest so there’s not a cloud of shame in dealing with this.”

It made sense. Kidder had, after all, never herself been one for shame – quick to a self-deprecating joke, a plea for compassion and a worthy fight. And even when asked to play doomed slasher movie characters – fated to be introduced and then speedily killed by a gruesome predator – she could always find the tiny cracks of humanity.

As Trump pledges more weapons for Ukraine – how reliant is Kyiv on US military assistance?

To the relief of officials in Kyiv, Donald Trump announced this week that the US would resume weapons shipments to Ukraine – just days after those exports were halted by the Pentagon.

The US president told reporters on Monday evening that he would send more weapons to Ukraine – a direct reversal of the order given by his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“We have to, they have to be able to defend themselves,” he said. “They’re getting hit very hard. Now they’re getting hit very hard. We’re going to have to send more weapons, defensive weapons, primarily, but they’re getting hit very, very hard.”

His comments came before Russia launched its largest-ever aerial attack on Ukraine, involving 728 drones and 13 missiles overnight and into Wednesday morning.

“This is a telling attack – and it comes precisely at a time when so many efforts have been made to achieve peace, to establish a ceasefire, and yet only Russia continues to rebuff them all,” Volodymyr Zelensky said on Wednesday morning.

Last week after weapons shipments were stopped, the Ukrainian president spoke with Trump about the importance of US support.

Below The Independent looks at how much support the US has provided to Ukraine’s war effort, why the Pentagon decided to pause shipments and what could happen from here.

Since just after the war began in February 2022, the US has provided billions of pounds worth of support to Ukraine. It is the largest single nation supporter in financial terms of Ukraine’s war effort.

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a think tank based in Germany, estimates that the US has provided €114.6 billion-worth (£98.7 billion) of support to Ukraine, including €3.4bn (£2.9bn) in humanitarian support, €46.6bn (£40.1bn) in financial assistance, and €64.6bn (£55.6bn) in military allocations.

In comparison, the country that has provided the next largest amount of assistance in terms of monetary value is the UK, at €19.3 billion (£16.6bn), while Germany comes in third at €15.9 (£13.7bn), according to the Kiel tracker.

Critical weaponry provided by the US includes three Patriot air defence batteries and munitions, advanced surface-to-air missile systems, a variety of air defence systems and anti-aircraft missiles, guns and ammunition.

The US has also sent 31 Abrams tanks and 45 T-72B tanks, 20 Mi-17 helicopters, and hundreds of other armoured personnel carriers.

Last week, the Pentagon suspended some shipments of military equipment to Ukraine for the second time since Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Those shipments included Patriot missiles, artillery shells and other weapons as part of what Pentagon officials described as a pause of arms shipments globally while the US takes stock of its own caches of weaponry.

Those weapons, including Hellfire missiles and guided multiple launch rocket systems, have been critical to Ukraine’s defence forces.

However, this was reversed by Trump just days after it was announced by his Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth with reports suggesting the President was left “blindsided” by the decision. Sources told CNN that the White House had not been briefed by Hegseth prior to the announcement.

Asked who authorised the pause on Tuesday, Trump told reporters: “I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?”

In March, the president paused all military aid to Ukraine after a fiery clash with Zelensky in the White House the week prior.

The pause also came as Russia ramped up its attacks on targets across the country.

The Russian army targeted Ukraine with a record 728 drones overnight, almost all of which were destroyed by Ukraine’s air defence units.

On Saturday, Russia targeted Kyiv with a seven-hour aerial bombardment that killed one person and injured at least 26 others.

That strategy has coincided with a concerted Russian effort to break through parts of the roughly 1,000km front line, where Ukrainian troops are under severe pressure.

Reaction from experts has been mixed following the US president’s u-turn on support for Ukraine.

Maksym Skrypchenko, president of research group the Transatlantic Dialogue Centre, said Ukraine can no longer count on the US to provide weapons as America turns its focus to the Middle East.

“It’s not the ideal strategy we would like to see,” Mr Skrypchenko told The New York Times.

John E Herbst, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Centre and a former US ambassador to Ukraine, said the future of the conflict would be influenced by the next steps taken by the US on weapons sales to Ukraine.

“In the call with Zelensky, Trump once again acknowledged the brutal pounding that Putin is inflicting on Ukraine with his enhanced bombing,” Mr Herbst wrote in an analysis.

“It is now time for the United States to sell Ukraine more air defence and other weapons that would underscore for Putin that he will fail in his efforts to take more Ukrainian land.”

England at risk of Women’s Euro 2025 elimination against Netherlands

England face a crunch test against the Netherlands at Euro 2025 with the Lionesses at risk of an early elimination should they fall to a second consecutive defeat in Zurich.

A 2-1 defeat to France on Saturday means holders England will be out if they lose to the Netherlands and France avoid defeat to tournament debutants Wales later this evening.

Sarina Wiegman has urged her players to not focus on the consequences of defeat as the England head coach faces her native country the Netherlands, who she led to Euros glory in 2017.

England’s players are also embracing the pressure of what is effectively a knockout game for the Lionesses while an improved performance will be required if they are to beat a talented Dutch side.

Of course, Wales could potentially keep the Lionesses in the Euros should they beat France. Or, there is a nightmare situation where both England and Wales are out before playing each other on Sunday.

Follow all the latest build-up to England v Netherlands, below

‘We were on a flight to Mexico when the news came through: our surrogate was in early labour’

This past January, we were in the air, mid-flight, when our baby boy Sunny was born via surrogate in Mexico. It hadn’t crossed our minds that he’d arrive six weeks premature. It was a very stressful 24 hours. Our surrogate Aurora had signs of pre-eclampsia, and her condition had remained stable up until about four hours before we landed in Mexico City. But for the safety of both her and our baby, the medical team decided to deliver Sunny by emergency C-section. We were able to access wifi on the plane, so we received real-time updates, almost by the second, as everything unfolded.

Once we finally arrived at the hospital and saw Sunny, the flood of emotions hit us all at once; relief, exhaustion, fear, and overwhelming love. Seeing Aurora safe, and tiny Sunny so full of life, was indescribable. Sunny had to spend his first few days in the ICU. As Sunny was born early and all the legal paperwork had been filed based on his due date, we were stuck in Mexico waiting for the legalities to be finalised for a few months longer than we had anticipated. We were desperate to see friends and family, but we also appreciated that this was a precious time together, free from the usual distractions.

It has been such a journey to get to this point. I’d tried everything to have a baby over the six years since I met Duncan in 2019. I was 40 then – we’d been advised my ovarian reserve was too low to conceive naturally. After two unsuccessful IVF attempts using my eggs, we decided to use donor eggs. There’s lots of grief involved in facing the realisation that donor eggs were going to be our only option. But soon we had 12 good-quality embryos using my partner’s sperm. We prepared for embryo transfer expecting it to be a success. By that point, I was 41 and we had three frozen embryo transfers in our hometown, Manchester, but none resulted in a live pregnancy. Then we paused it and had tests.

I am quite a spiritual person – I’m a yoga and meditation teacher. I started to wonder whether I was just not destined to have a baby. It helped me to talk about it and share what I was going through on my Instagram. While every loss has to be felt, it was our choice to continue, and we moved on.

I was diagnosed with a septate uterus, a congenital uterine malformation, which meant it was difficult to get pregnant. I had successful surgery to correct it. We started preparing for the fourth embryo transfer of donor eggs. Why wouldn’t it happen now? Yet we still didn’t have a positive outcome. It was a real low point. I felt we’d done everything to try to make it work: nutrition plans, acupuncture, reflexology. On the fifth and sixth transfers, the doctors introduced steroids. I still didn’t get pregnant.

Then we just stopped. We had thrown everything at the final three transfers and it had taken its toll mentally, physically and financially. The one thing Duncan and I decided was that we wanted to continue trying for a baby. We explored what other paths there were to parenthood. We admire people who choose to adopt but we felt it just wasn’t right for us.

Surrogacy was something we had never considered – it seemed so removed from anything we’d ever do. With the My Surrogacy Journey (MSJ) agency, we went down the UK surrogacy path. We didn’t know how long the wait would be because in the UK surrogates aren’t paid – it’s an altruistic gift – and there is a shortage of them.

We were settling in for a 12-month wait for a UK surrogate, although it now takes about two years. Eight months later, I found out that somebody I’d known years ago but lost touch with was contemplating becoming a surrogate with MSJ. After doing all the medical tests, Kay stepped in to help us. We went into the situation with a really positive mindset. We did three frozen embryo transfers with our UK surrogate but after two failed attempts, we had the embryos tested to check they were viable. Two of them were not of a decent enough quality to see things through to a pregnancy.

We did one final transfer with Kay and had a false positive pregnancy test. I was 44. It was really hard. In all the time we’d been trying, Duncan and I had never had any good news. I cried because I was so happy – then we found out it wasn’t a pregnancy after all. To come back from that took a lot of strength. Everything felt heavy, like I was wading through mud.

I know it’s very common for things to fall apart for couples going through infertility, but our fertility challenges strengthened our relationship. We felt united – we were totally aligned with what we wanted the outcome to be.

We’d used all the 12 embryos. We were at a crossroads. Do we start from scratch again in the UK? Or do we consider a new path that was presented to us in Mexico City? MSJ will always find a solution. I know there is a lot of controversy online around the ethics of surrogacy in Mexico, where surrogates are paid £12,000, so it was really important that we felt we were doing the right thing morally and didn’t feel that we were exploiting anybody.

We were matched with Aurora, our surrogate, who we first met on an online video call. She had already been highly screened to make sure she was in it for the right reasons; this was not just a cold, transactional process. We knew from her profile that she was local to Mexico City and already had a good job with a regular income, which obviously filled us with confidence.

Next, we flew to Mexico City to meet various members of the MSJ team, the medical team and the legal team. We met Aurora for coffee with the MSJ team; she is a good person with a good heart. It was then that we all decided to go ahead together. In the meantime, we were scrutinised by MSJ, socio-economic tests, DBS background checks, psychological assessments, and counselling. We had to go through way more scrutiny for Mexico than we ever needed to for surrogacy in the UK.

No one can walk in your shoes. We haven’t got an insurmountable amount of money with which we could keep on doing this. The waiting lists for a UK surrogate are long and we couldn’t afford surrogacy in the US where it costs about £250,000. This was our last chance saloon. We created more frozen embryos using donor eggs – and with Aurora as our surrogate, we finally got a positive pregnancy test after six long years.

Just as we received the news we had longed for, our world was shaken. My sister Hannah suddenly died at the age of 32 – it was the same day as our six-week scan with Aurora. The joy of new life and the grief of losing my beautiful little sister collided in the most surreal and painful way.

Life is very different for me now. We are enjoying our time together in Mexico and creating a family for the three of us. We’d been waiting for this moment for more than six years, but we still weren’t ready when we jumped on that plane for his birth. But having Sunny in my arms is magical.

When you finally have a baby after such a challenging fertility journey as ours, it’s easy to think, “Is it OK for me to say I’m struggling?” or, “Oh my God, he’s been crying all night”. But I will experience motherhood just like any other mum. There will be moments when I’m overwhelmed. There is often a lot of negativity around surrogacy but our journey was filled with love, connection and joy. Aurora will always be part of Sunny’s life; we are close to all her family. And our child Sunny will grow up knowing he was born from a place of courage, compassion and community.

How Macmillan Cancer Support built a movement that reaches everyone

HS2 should be ‘largely completed’ by now – but it’s only 60% ready, boss admits

The construction of HS2’s physical structures should have been “largely completed” by now under the project’s initial timeline – but it is actually just over halfway there, the project’s chief executive has admitted.

HS2 Ltd chief executive Mark Wild blamed major delays in the execution of the project on “inefficiency of work” as a result of the decision to start construction work before the finalised design or consents were in place.

Giving evidence in front of the Commons Transport Select Committee, HS2 Ltd chief executive Mark Wild admitted: “The construction of the civil engineering should have been largely completed by now.

“The reality is we’re about 60 per cent complete.”

Asked about the causes for the delays, Mr Wild said: “It’s a very, very important lesson – the projects must not be mobilised and commenced if you haven’t got the design and consents, because the productivity of the teams, the hard working teams, is so leveraged if you’re waiting for the design.”

He said the failure to complete designs before construction began was a much bigger cause of delay than the high-speed goal of the new rail line.

“It’s probably much more important than the effective speed”, the chief executive said. “I do agree, the speed, the trains per hour, the tonnage, has had a huge effect on the spec.

“I think when all said and done, the cost exceedence though has mostly been inefficiency of work, because we started too soon. I think that will be revealed as the most dominant effect.”

He also said the coronavirus pandemic and the rise in inflation caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had an impact.

Phase One of HS2 between London and Birmingham was initially planned to open by the end of 2026.

This was later pushed back to between 2029 and 2033, but transport secretary Heidi Alexander said last month there was “no route” to meeting that timeframe.

In 2013, HS2 was estimated to cost £37.5 billion – at 2009 prices – for the entire planned network, including the now-scrapped extensions from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds.

In June last year, HS2 Ltd assessed the cost for the line between London and Birmingham would be up to £66 billion.

Earlier this year, MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) warned that high-speed rail between London and Birmingham may never be delivered because the government and HS2 lack “the skills or capacities” to complete the project.

The powerful committee of MPs said the rail project should be studied as an example of “how not to run a major project”, with billions of pounds of taxpayer funds having already been wasted.

And, despite the northern leg of HS2 having been axed to cut costs, a move first revealed by The Independent, the PAC warned it has doubts about the government’s ability “to deliver even a curtailed scheme”.

In a damning report, the committee added that even if the slimmed down HS2 project is delivered, it will “bring very poor value for money”. One example the committee cited in the waste associated with HS2 was the building of a bat protection tunnel in Buckinghamshire costing more than £100m.

Shortly after joining HS2 Ltd as chief executive at the start of December 2024, Mr Wild said the project was “in a very serious situation that requires a fundamental reset”.

In October 2023, then-prime minister Rishi Sunak cancelled a plan to extend HS2 between the West Midlands and Manchester. The Independent revealed the PM’s plans weeks in advance, sparking fury among northern politicians and business chiefs.

And the planned leg to Leeds was axed in November 2021 after a review was carried out in 2020 because of escalating costs and delays.

London heatwave killed 263 people – with climate change to blame

An extra 263 people in London died during the recent heatwave, scientists have estimated, warning climate change has tripled the number of heat-related deaths across European cities.

Global warming, caused primarily by humans burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, made the searing heat that gripped much of Europe in late June and early July much more intense, researchers found.

The heatwaves were up to 4C hotter across cities compared to a world without climate change, the study from the World Weather Attribution group of researchers said.

The first rapid study to estimate the number of deaths linked to climate change in a heatwave found human-driven global warming was responsible for around 65 per cent of the deaths that occurred across 12 cities, including London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and Rome.

The study found around 1,500 of the 2,300 estimated heat deaths were the result of climate change – equating to a tripling of the number of deaths in the heatwave due to global warming.

Last week, temperatures reached up to 34C in London, and an amber heat health warning was issued by the UK Health Security Agency.

The researchers from Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) estimated there were 263 excess deaths in London due to the heatwave from 23 June to 2 July – 173 of these deaths were due to hotter temperatures because of climate change.

During these 10 days of warmth, a “heat dome” high pressure system over Europe trapped hot dry air and pushed up temperatures, as well as pulling hot air from North Africa, intensifying the heatwave.

The scientists behind the study warned heatwaves were “quietly devastating” and their research showed how dangerous climate change already was with just 1.3C of warming, particularly for older and more vulnerable people.

They also warned that their analysis focused on only 12 cities, providing only a snapshot of the deaths linked to climate change-driven high temperatures across Europe, which may have reached into the tens of thousands.

The researchers used weather data to assess the intensity of the heatwaves over their hottest five-day period in a world which has seen 1.3C of warming and compared it the cooler pre-industrial climate.

The analysis showed the heatwaves were around 1-4C higher than in a world which had not warned 1.3C due to climate change.

Climate change was responsible for an estimated, 317 excess deaths in Madrid and 235 in Paris, the study found.

Most of the deaths were in older age groups, the researchers said, highlighting the growing risk older people in Europe face from dying prematurely due to longer, hotter and more frequent heatwaves.