‘Worrying’ levels of screen time means young people losing confidence to socialise in person, minister warns – UK politics live

Culture secretary Lisa Nandy says ‘majority of young people spend all, or almost all, of their free time alone in their bedrooms, online’

Rachel Reeves will need to raise taxes to close a government spending gap that is on course to reach more than £40bn after a slowdown in economic growth and higher-than-expected inflation, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), a thinktank. Phillip Inman has the story.

Good morning. Keir Starmer is out on a visit today and he will be doing broadcast interviews. It may be the only time we hear from him this week, and there is no shortage of topics that journalists will want to ask him about. By the end of the day we may get new, or newish, lines on Gaza, the “one in, one out” returns deal with France, tax rises and the black hole in the government’s finances (priced at more than £40bn, according to a report from a well-respected thinktank today), Ukraine, the case for and against disclosing suspects’ immigration status and the demonstration planned for this weekend against the decision to proscribe Palestine Action.

Growing up today is hard for young people. As they navigate their way through the online world, too often they find themselves isolated at home and disconnected from their communities.

As a government, we have a duty to act on this worrying trend. Today’s investment is about offering a better alternative: transformative, real-world opportunities that will have an impact in communities across the country, so young people can discover something new, find their spark and develop the confidence and life skills that no algorithm can teach.

It keeps me awake at night. We when we were first elected into government last year, one of the first things that I did was to appoint a group of young people to oversee the first national youth strategy in several decades. I was astonished to find that we didn’t have one.

What we found through that process is that the majority of young people – and it does appear to be a majority – spend all, or almost all, of their free time alone in their bedrooms, online, and are losing their confidence to connect to people in the real world.