Telecoms giant BT cuts another 5,000 jobs as broadband customers leave

Telecoms giant BT has announced a significant reduction in its workforce alongside a notable loss of broadband customers to rivals, as it navigates a “competitive” market.

The company reported a decline of 242,000 Openreach broadband customers during the second quarter of 2025.

This downturn was attributed to intense competition and a softening in the wider broadband market, according to statements made to investors.

Simultaneously, BT has pressed ahead with a major overhaul, involving substantial cost-cutting and a renewed focus on its UK operations and emerging business sectors.

That has resulted in a 6 per cent reduction in its total workforce during the first half of the year, bringing the headcount down by approximately 5,000, from 116,000 to 111,000 people since the financial year began.

The job reductions form part of nearly £250m worth of annual cost savings made over the period, bringing the total to £1.2bn over the first 18 months of its cost-cutting programme.

BT is hoping to make savings worth £3bn a year overall.

Group revenues declined by 3 per cent to £9.8bn over the six months to 30 September, compared with the prior year.

This was driven by declines in its legacy landline service as well as a weaker mobile phone market, a result of more people holding onto their current device.

Its pre-tax profit slid by 11 per cent year on year to £862m.

Chief executive Allison Kirkby said: “BT is delivering on its strategy in competitive markets.

“Since the start of the year, we’ve driven customer growth across consumer broadband, mobile and TV and we’re stabilising our UK-focused business division.

“Outside the UK, we’ve completed strategic exits and we’re reshaping our international unit.

“BT’s transformation is delivering ahead of plan, as our UK focus and radical simplification and modernisation are helping to offset declines from our international and legacy businesses and higher labour-related costs since the start of this tax year.”

Labour’s immigration crackdown could cost the UK £4.4bn

Labour’s immigration crackdown could leave the UK £4.4bn worse off, the Home Office’s own assessment of Sir Keir Starmer’s sweeping reforms has admitted.

The prime minister unveiled plans in May to slash immigration, including a move to make it harder for foreign students to stay in Britain, saying that settlement in this coutry was a “privilege that must be earned, not a right”.

The headline policies in the white paper included cutting the length of time that international graduate students are allowed to stay in the UK after finishing their studies. The English language requirement for those on the skilled worker visa – which allows a person to come or stay in the UK with an approved employer – will also be raised next year.

In a blow to businesses, the immigration skills charge – a fee paid by UK employers sponsoring overseas workers – will also be hiked by a third.

Now a Home Office assessment looking at the impact of these policy changes has predicted the UK will likely be £1.2bn worse off over the next five years – with the possibility that the negative financial hit could be as much as £4.4bn. The best case scenario is that the UK makes £0.8bn through the changes, it says.

The assessment, published last week, says this is broadly caused by the loss in university tuition fees due to the tightening of the graduate visa route, as well as changes to the amount of money brought in by visa fees. There will also be an indirect estimated fall in income tax as a result of fewer people staying on to work, it says.

Experts have warned that politicians are failing to consider the wider impact when making promises to clamp down on migration.

Jamie Arrowsmith, direction of Universities UK International, told The Independent that the assessment demonstrates the “real-world consequences for growth and prosperity for communities across the UK”.

He added: “This is particularly concerning for universities. Our analysis shows that any benefit from an uplift in tuition fees in England will be wiped out by other policy changes – and this latest government assessment does not include the cumulative impact of forthcoming changes, including the proposed introduction of an international student levy and tighter rules on visa compliance.

“While we recognise the government’s priority to manage immigration, it’s important that we do not further undermine the UK’s ability to compete for global talent.”

Sunder Katwala, director of the British Future thinktank, said: “There’s too little serious discussion about the real costs and benefits of immigration. Instead, politicians compete to promise the lowest migration numbers, without considering the wider impacts.

“More people coming to the UK to work or study can put pressure on housing and services, but they also contribute through taxes, university fees and NHS surcharges. Our debate should engage far more honestly with both these pressures and these gains.”

Net migration to the UK is now falling, after a record high in 2023. Figures show 431,000 people were added to the UK population in 2024, compared to 860,000 a year earlier.

Announcing sweeping changes to the immigration rules earlier this year, Sir Keir claimed the number of people entering the country was causing “incalculable damage” – prompting fury from unions, charities and his own MPs.

Sir Keir said the UK risked becoming “an island of strangers”, a phrase he later said he deeply regretted. MPs criticised the language at the time, likening it to remarks made by British politician Enoch Powell in his infamous Rivers of Blood speech.

Former Labour education secretary Alan Johnson later warned that Sir Keir’s migration crackdown could risk closing universities. He said the government would be making a “very big mistake” if ministers thought they could solve concerns about migration by targeting international students.

According to the Home Office impact assessment, between 11,000 and 15,000 students per year will not come to the UK due to the visa changes – which will cut the length of time a graduate can stay in the UK after completion of their studies from two years to 18 months. These changes will come into force in 2027. Graduate visa applications are also predicted to fall by 16,000 per year by 2030. A record number of 172,000 graduate visas were issued in 2024.

The paper says a rapid increase in sponsored study visas – visas sponsored by education providers for international students – at lower-ranked education institutions has contributed to record levels of net migration. This has been driven by a rapid increase in international students applying for master’s degrees in the UK, officials found.

Internal Home Office data quoted in the paper suggests that UK visas for universities globally ranked between 601 and 1,200 increased by 49 per cent between 2021 and 2023. Visas for the top 100 universities fell by 7 per cent in this time.

The number of graduates who stay on in the UK after their studies has also increased, prompting Labour’s crackdown on students.

While officials acknowledge the significant impact on universities due to the changes, they are uncertain how businesses will adapt their recruitment. They said that there may be additional benefits to the economy over the longer-term from incentivising training for British workers.

Under the plans, routes for talented foreign workers – the High Potential Individual (HPI) route and the Global Talent route – will be expanded. The HPI route, which expanded this month, allows graduates from a select group of top universities abroad to come to the UK for two years. The Global Talent route allows exceptional workers in academia, arts, culture and technology to stay in the UK for up to five years. Changes to this route are expected in 2026.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We make no apologies for bringing net migration down as we promised, and creating a system which protects British workers and wages while attracting only the best international talent to benefit our economy in the long-term.

“This is why we’ve set out a comprehensive plan to restore order to our broken immigration system”.

Blair think tank warns Reeves to reverse any tax rises before election

Rachel Reeves has been warned that she must slash taxes again before the next election if she breaks her key manifesto pledge and hikes them in the Budget.

Sir Tony Blair’s think tank also said that any tax hikes such as raising VAT or income tax must be done in tandem with pro-business policies to break Britain’s “tax-and-spend doom loop”.

The warning comes after the chancellor put the country on notice that manifesto-busting sweeping tax rises are coming later this month, saying during an unprecedented pre-Budget address that “we will all have to contribute”.

The Tony Blair Institute has now called for any major tax rises to be temporary, warning Labour should move to “targeted tax cuts” before the next election “once growth strengthens and public service reforms deliver results”.

The group also called for the chancellor to bring businesses who had been “bruised” by last year’s Budget “back onside” with measures that move beyond “the caution of the government’s first year in office”.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) said any tax-raising measures must be paired with pro-business reforms that hard-wire growth into every major policy decision, making the UK a better place to invest, work and build.

It warns: “If the chancellor opts for a larger revenue-raising step – particularly a manifesto-breaching increase in income tax or value-added tax (VAT) – she should make clear that it is temporary and conditional: a short-term measure to stabilise the public finances, not a permanent shift in direction.”

It added that, as growth returns and public-sector reforms take effect, the priority should be to reverse these rises – “turning short-term discipline into the foundation for recovery and pre-election tax cuts”.

In its paper, the TBI said that planned changes to migration policy and employment rights risk damaging the UK’s flexible jobs market.

It urged ministers to retain the five-year route to permanent settlement for the skilled worker visa, instead of requiring migrants to spend a decade in the UK before being able to apply.

It also recommends expanding access and reducing the cost of the global talent visa, introducing a new “tech excellence” visa for engineers, founders and researchers, and creating a permanent key worker visa for shortage professions, such as construction and care.

Tom Smith, director of economic policy at the Tony Blair Institute, added: “The chancellor acknowledges she has tough choices to make. She cannot satisfy the markets, the party, business and voters all at once. The only way to do so over time is to put Britain back on the path to growth – and that means a new bargain between government and business.

“A credible Budget can’t just raise taxes – it must raise Britain’s sights. The government needs to show fiscal discipline, but also the confidence to back business.”

It comes as the CBI warned in a new report against “death by a thousand taxes” and said that “every decision” the chancellor takes had to help stimulate economic growth.

In its Budget submission to the Treasury, the organisation, which represents thousands of businesses, said “hard choices must be made – without leaving the door ajar to further unwelcome tax changes in Spring”.

It added: “Death by a thousand taxes is not a credible way to deliver a thriving, prosperous economy.”

It said nothing should be considered “off-the-table”, “including unpopular moves in areas like personal tax, public spending, welfare provision and pension increases.

They also called for the government to fast-track critical infrastructure and to use technology to modernise the economy.

Rain Newton-Smith, the chief executive of the CBI, said: “Yearly tinkering to close an ever-increasing fiscal gap simply isn’t a viable approach to a challenge this big.

“We need to take tough decisions now or risk a downward spiral that sees us robbing Peter to pay Paul just to fund normal government expenditure and puts our growth prospects in peril.

“Short-term thinking leads to long-term decline, let’s not make that a political choice we live to regret. “

She added that sticking rigidly to manifesto commitments “may be politically laudable, but it’s only economically viable if material conditions remain unchanged. The fact is, they are not. Tax rises and spending cuts are unpopular, but the reality is that the chancellor faces little choice.”

Reeves warned on Tuesday that “each of us must do our bit” and warned there were “hard choices” ahead. She signalled she is ready to break Labour’s flagship manifesto commitment not to raise income tax, personal national insurance or VAT.

At the weekend, The Independent revealed that Ms Reeves faces a cabinet backlash if she breaks the pledge to voters.

The Treasury has been contacted for comment.

Trump rails against Mamdani over ‘angry’ acceptance speech

President Donald Trump has reacted to Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech after winning the New York City mayoral race, calling it “angry toward me” and “very dangerous.”

After winning Tuesday’s election, Mamdani said: “So hear me, President Trump, when I say this, to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.”

“It’s a very dangerous statement for him to make,” Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier. “He has to be a little bit respectful of Washington, because if he’s not, he doesn’t have a chance of succeeding.”

The president had threatened to contribute only the “very minimum” of federal funds to his hometown if Mamdani won City Hall.

Trump also hit back at his West Coast rival, California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, unveiling a new nickname for him.

“Maybe that should be his nickname, slimy. Slimy Newscum, right?” the president said at the America Business Forum in Miami Wednesday.

“You lost,” Newsom wrote on X in response.

Also Wednesday, Newsom and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber were named in a lawsuit brought by state Republicans, after voters approved Prop 50, allowing the state to redraw congressional district boundaries.

Meet my friend Zohran Mamdani – the new mayor of New York

I remember the first time Zohran Kwame Mamdani spoke seriously about entering electoral politics. It was 2019, and four of us were at dinner in Manhattan – his father, the scholar Mahmood Mamdani, along with a mutual friend, Zohran, and me.

The restaurant was quiet enough to allow for a conversation without performance. He didn’t ask what it would take to run for the position of mayor in New York; he already knew the mechanics. What he wanted was ideas – what kind of politics New York needed, what principles should guide someone young and unconnected to big donors or political families – and to understand whether it was still possible for electoral politics to be rooted in ordinary people.

When I asked him the most obvious question – “Do you want help raising money?” – he thought for a moment before answering. “Not from one big donor,” he said. “From many people.”

If he entered politics, he intended to build a base broad enough that no single donor could buy influence. It recalled Mahatma Gandhi’s belief that the means are the ends in motion: you cannot build a democratic politics through plutocratic shortcuts and expect it to serve democracy on the other side.

He worried that the Democratic Party had drifted away from ordinary people, that it had stopped standing alongside unions and started to court hedge-fund money. If he ran, he wanted to do it the other way round – door by door, block by block.

Throughout our dinner, his father listened without lecturing. Mahmood – a Gujarati Muslim from Uganda and one of the most respected writers on colonialism – seemed proud of the clarity his son had reached. He has spent his life studying how power draws boundaries, deciding who belongs and who is excluded. His son was now asking how to redraw those lines.

Six years later, New Yorkers elected Zohran mayor.

Commentators have been quick to credit sharp messaging, social-media fluency, smart alliances, a touch of charisma. All were factors, but not on their own sufficient.

His victory was predicated on more old-fashioned elements: honesty, principle, and grassroots organising. From the primary to election day, more than 100,000 volunteers – taxi drivers, students, tenants, aunties, vendors – knocked on over 3 million doors. They persuaded neighbours who had never met a candidate before. There was no algorithmic magic. It was manual.

This was politics the way it used to be: unglamorous, relational, and unavoidably slow.

His campaign didn’t dance around issues; it faced them. Housing was central. In America’s richest city, 150,000 children are homeless, and countless young people postpone having a family because they can’t afford rent. He talked about school segregation – an obscenity in a city that prides itself on diversity. He talked about public transit – because a family’s life can hinge on a bus timetable. He talked about small businesses – cafes, halal carts, bodegas – where the economy is a human encounter, not a statistic.

It spoke to his family values – and I had known the family for years. All of them – his Indian filmmaker mother Mira Nair, his father Mahmood, and Zohran himself, moved fluently between cultures. His parents met while Mira was making Mississippi Masala, her film about Ugandan Indians; their son grew up between Kampala, Delhi and New York. Pluralism wasn’t just an idea to him: he lived it.

He spent part of his childhood in Uganda while Mahmood was writing there, and learnt the beat of African music; he attended the progressive Bank Street School, where his first political act was helping to organise an anti-war event. His father had given him the middle name Kwame, after Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, a former president and revolutionary. It wasn’t a blueprint; it was a compass.

Later, at Bronx Science, he learnt what he calls the democracy of the subway – how a long bus ride cuts into the working day of people who need it most; who gets a school near home; where wealth sits; who gets stopped and frisked, and who gets waved through.

In Delhi, he experienced the easy traffic between faiths and cuisines in a household shaped by Nehruvian socialism. Slogans like “unity in diversity” and “simple living, high thinking” were part of everyday life. That was the material of his politics long before he found a label for it.

By 2019, he had already campaigned for Bernie Sanders, and democratic socialism made sense to him – not as fashion, but as a way to deliver the basics: rent security, good schools, buses that work.

I remember an email he sent me during those early campaign days. He could have written a simple thank-you; instead, he spoke candidly. Having looked up my work, he discovered that I oppose the decriminalisation of pimping and brothel-keeping.

“I know that this issue is very important to you,” he said, “and I want to be transparent about where I stand … While we do have differing views on this issue, I would still like to work with you on this campaign, on building a New York that works for the many, and on fighting fascism wherever we may find it – in India, America, or anywhere in between.”

In today’s political culture, where disagreement is treated as disqualification, this stood out. He was not triangulating or soothing; he was stating his position and keeping the door open. The message was simple: principled disagreement is not rupture. We can argue, and still work together. This is rare.

His political lineage isn’t a religious inheritance but a movement one – from labour organisers, tenant activists and democratic socialists. That background is reflected in how he moves through the city. The son of a Hindu Punjabi mother and a Muslim Gujarati father, married to a Syrian-American wife, he is as comfortable in a Jackson Heights kebab house as in a Manhattan cafe. When Donald Trump once mocked him for eating biryani with his fingers, Queens saw only familiarity.

And that ease matters. In a moment when majoritarian politics hardens across continents – India included – he embodies the alternative: an everyday, habitual inclusiveness that requires no announcement.

The question now is whether he can govern according to the same commitments on which he campaigned. The work ahead is material and measurable: stabilising rents; keeping schools diverse; protecting small businesses; improving buses; ensuring workers are paid enough to live in the city they serve; subsidising grocery stores for the poor; expanding childcare. It is not glamorous. It is democracy.

That is the point. Authoritarianism thrives when public life breaks down – when housing collapses, when transit fails, when neighbours retreat from one another. Democracy survives when people can live decent lives: housed, mobile, safe, and heard.

This is the mundane truth that strongmen never acknowledge: order is not achieved by fear, but by fairness.

Mamdani’s politics is not radical in its promises; it is radical in its method. It insists on accountability to the many rather than the few. It treats disagreement not as betrayal, but as ordinary. It takes positions rather than dodges them. It makes the case, knocks the door, and stays.

My thoughts return often to that Manhattan dinner: a young man, thinking carefully, refusing shortcuts. A father listening. A conversation about fascism, and about whether electoral politics could still be used as a tool against it.

He answered not with a theory, but with a method: not one big donor – many people.

He chose his side before he ever entered the ballot. The people have now chosen him.

If he governs as he campaigned – patiently, visibly, and in daylight – he may yet remind us of something we are in danger of forgetting: that democracy is protected by citizens being unwilling to give up on each other.

Enriching escapes: find your perfect luxury break

‘Vibe coding’ crowned Collins dictionary’s word of the year

“Vibe coding“, an innovative software development method that translates natural language into computer code using artificial intelligence, has been crowned Collins’ Word of the Year for 2025.

Lexicographers at Collins Dictionary, who meticulously monitor their 24 billion-word Corpus drawing from diverse media and social platforms, selected the term after observing a significant surge in its usage since February.

This annual selection aims to reflect the ever-evolving landscape of our language.

The phrase was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a former director of AI at Tesla and a founding engineer at OpenAI, who described how AI could empower individuals to create new applications while being able to “forget that the code even exists”.

Also featuring on the prestigious list are “biohacking”, defined as the practice of altering one’s natural bodily processes to enhance health and longevity, and “clanker”, a pejorative term for computers, robots, or AI sources, popularised by Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

The word went viral on social media and is often used to express people’s frustrations with, and distrust of, AI chatbots and platforms.

Also a term of disapproval, the word “glaze” has gained traction this year, meaning to praise or flatter someone excessively or undeservedly.

Another is “aura farming” – described as the deliberate cultivation of a distinctive and charismatic persona – essentially the art of looking cool.

The term was previously popular with gamers but reached a much larger audience earlier this year following the widely shared “boat kid” video that started a dance trend popular with celebrities including American football player Travis Kelce.

The owners of the biggest global technology companies, informally known as tech bros, were dubbed the “broligarchy” after their high-profile attendance at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, with the word also earning a place on the list.

A rise in the use of the term “HENRY”, an acronym for “high earner, not rich yet” also sees it named by Collins.

And “coolcation”, a holiday in a place with a cool climate, along with “taskmasking”, the act of giving a false impression that one is being productive in the workplace, make it on to the list.

Micro-retirement, described as a break between periods of employment in order to pursue personal interests, also features.

Alex Beecroft, managing director of Collins, said: “The selection of vibe coding as Collins’ Word of the Year perfectly captures how language is evolving alongside technology.

“It signals a major shift in software development, where AI is making coding more accessible.

“The seamless integration of human creativity and machine intelligence demonstrates how natural language is fundamentally changing our interaction with computers.”

‘Child’s body’ in woods found to be ‘disturbing’ childlike sex doll

Police have confirmed that remains thought to have been a “child’s body” found near a Devon village was in fact a “childlike sex doll”.

Devon and Cornwall Police said that the find near the village of Awliscombe was “deeply disturbing”, and are searching for the owner of the “incredibly lifelike” doll.

Emergency services were called to several reports of a child’s body being found in a large black plastic bag on October 18.

Members of the public had partially opened the bag, and with a restricted view, officers believed the initial reports to be accurate, sparking a major investigation with nearby roads closed and forensic experts called in to assist.

Confusion followed however, when Devon and Cornwall Police said the next day that the remains “were not human”.

It has now been revealed that after moving the object to a sterile location to open the bag, it was discovered the suspected body was in fact “an incredibly lifelike, fully weighted childlike sex doll”.

Devon and Cornwall Police said in a statement: “This discovery is deeply alarming, and it is of great concern that someone had possession of a such a realistic, childlike doll and had dumped it in a location where it could be found by members of the public.”

It comes as such dolls were found being sold on online marketplaces such as Shein, which has been forced to ban all sex-doll products in response. It is not known where the doll recovered by police in Devon was purchased.

France’s consumer watchdog, known as DGCCRF, spotted the dolls on Shein and reported the matter to judicial authorities. The Paris prosecutor’s office said it received a complaint from the DGCCRF and referred the case to the National Office for Minors to investigate.

Shein said this week that it has now banned all sex-doll products, and temporarily removed its adult products category for review.

The company has also launched an investigation to determine how the listings bypassed its screening measures and said it strengthened its keyword blacklist to further prevent circumvention of product listing restrictions by sellers.

“While each seller is responsible for their own listings, Shein does not tolerate any breach of marketplace rules and policies,” it said in a statement.

“All seller accounts linked to illegal or non-compliant sex-doll products will be permanently banned. SHEIN will continue to cooperate fully with regulatory authorities in every jurisdiction, providing all requested seller, buyer, and product information. The company reaffirms its zero-tolerance stance toward child sexual exploitation, which it unequivocally condemns.”

Devon and Cornwall Police said its enquiries are ongoing to establish ownership on the doll and said it “will always do everything that we can to safeguard children and would welcome any steps taken to prevent these types of dolls from being produced, sold, owned, or circulated”.

If you have any information about this incident, you can contact the force via 101 quoting reference number 301 18/10/25.