Author: Morgan

Ed Miliband has announced that the government is to speed up its plans to permanently ban fracking in the UK, in order to counter the Reform party’s promises to bring back the controversial practice.

The energy secretary said he would put forward legislation as part of the North Sea transition plan which is to be published this autumn. This means that in order to allow fracking, a future government would have to repeal the legislation with a parliamentary vote.

This would be very difficult, as it means the government would have to gain the votes of MPs whose constituencies sit on shale gas. Miliband used his speech at the Labour conference to say the party will send campaigners to nearly 200 constituencies to “send the frackers packing”.

A permanent ban on fracking had been a key pledge in Labour’s election manifesto and had been reaffirmed by Miliband earlier this year, but Wednesday’s announcement laid out how the government would bring in the legislation.

Miliband said he would legislate to ban fracking “at the earliest opportunity” to protect the 187 constituencies that sit above shale gas areas from drilling.

There is a moratorium on the controversial energy extraction method, which involves drilling deep into the earth then shooting at high speed a mixture of sand, water and chemicals to dislodge shale gas.

Reform UK supports fracking across Britain, but it is unpopular as it causes earthquakes. The last time fracking was tried in the UK, at Preston New Road in Lancashire, it resulted in nearly 200 earthquakes in less than a year.

There have already been fractures in Reform over the fracking issue, with Lancashire council, which is under Reform control, saying it would not welcome drilling in the area. The party’s leader, Nigel Farage, and deputy, Richard Tice, have both backed the fracking and said it would bring down bills, a claim widely debunked by experts.

The Liz Truss government collapsed in 2022 after Miliband, then shadow energy secretary, forced a vote to ban fracking during an opposition day debate. Truss attempted to whip her MPs to vote for fracking, and many rebelled, causing chaos.

Tice and Farage have tried to draw comparisons with the success of fracking in the US, but the high population density in the UK and different geology means that there is a greater chance of disruption and earthquakes, and it is harder to extract gas because the shale resource in the UK is heavily faulted and compartmentalised.

Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.

Net support for digital ID cards fell from 35% in the early summer to -14% at the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common.

The findings suggest that the proposal has suffered considerably from its association with an unpopular government. In June, 53% of voters surveyed said they were in favour of digital ID cards for all Britons, while 19% were opposed.

Starmer set out plans to roll out a national digital ID scheme on Friday, saying it presented an “enormous opportunity” for the UK that would “make it tougher to work illegally in this country”.

Just 31% of people surveyed after Starmer’s announcement over the weekend said they were supportive of the scheme, with 45% saying they were opposed. Of those, 32% said they were strongly opposed. More than 2.6 million people have signed a petition against introduction of the IDs.

Advocates of a national digital ID scheme are frustrated at the way the policy has been presented and believe that now it may never be implemented.

More in Common’s polling suggests public dissatisfaction with the government is behind the collapse in support. It found that 58% of those who thought Starmer was doing a bad job as prime minister opposed digital IDs, while only 20% supported them. On the other hand, of those who thought Starmer was doing a good job, 71% were supportive of digital IDs and 14% were opposed.

The figures demonstrate how the prime minister faces an uphill battle to win public support for his policies and leadership. His personal approval ratings have fallen to a record low, with a recent survey suggesting he was now the most unpopular prime minister on record.

The poll by Ipsos on Saturday found that 13% of voters were satisfied Starmer, with 79% dissatisfied – a net rating of -66. This was the lowest satisfaction rating recorded by the pollster for any prime minister going back to 1977, worse than previous lows recorded by Rishi Sunak months before the 2024 general election and John Major in August 1994.

Luke Tryl, the executive director for More in Common, said: “Digital ID is not unpopular in principle. Earlier this summer, we found a majority support the policy. Yet in perhaps the clearest sign of the government’s low standing it now seems to be suffering from a reverse Midas touch: once the government announced the plans, support dropped.

“If the government is to rebuild support for digital ID it will have to start with making a clearer use case. The risk is that, in the face of organised opposition, a policy that had the potential to be popular now becomes another millstone for the government.”

Peter Hyman, a former adviser to Starmer and Tony Blair, told a Labour party conference event in Liverpool that the plans would be “dead in the water” within six months because ministers had failed to make a convincing case for them.

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Hyman said the scheme’s opponents were “motoring” ahead and that Downing Street should enlist social media influencers to “nail down all the objections” and respond to proliferating conspiracy theories to rescue the policy.

Ministers have said digital ID cards will be used to prove a person’s right to live and work in the UK and will be compulsory for anyone who wants employment. The government is concerned that the relative ease of finding illegal work in the UK’s shadow economy is one of the factors encouraging people to make illegal and dangerous journeys across the Channel.

The photo IDs will be stored on smartphones in a similar way to digital bank cards and will contain information on the holder’]s name, residency status, date of birth and nationality. They will not be required to access healthcare or welfare payments.

Senior ministers told the Guardian the aim was for the ID cards to be rolled out before the next election and initially used to prove people’s right to work, before being expanded to store health and benefits data to streamline access to public services and tackle fraud.

Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, told a conference fringe event that for her “it’s always been a no-brainer, if one of the results of having an ID card is to clamp down on the ability of people to cheat the system”. The plan has been opposed by Reform UK, while the Conservatives have called it a “gimmick”.

Taiwan has become the world’s biggest importer of Russian naphtha, a petroleum derivative used to make chemicals needed for the semiconductor industry, despite the fact that it has joined other sanctions against Russia and considers itself an ally of Ukraine.

In the first half of 2025, Taiwan imported $1.3bn worth of Russian naphtha, and average monthly imports reached a level nearly six times higher than the 2022 average, according to a report published on Wednesday. Compared to the first half of 2024, Taiwan’s naphtha imports this year increased by 44%.

Taiwan has elsewhere been reiterating its support for Ukraine in the war with Russia. On Sunday, Taiwan’s foreign minister, Lin Chia-lung, signed a pact in Poland to provide support for children in Ukraine affected by Russia’s invasion.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Taiwan joined international sanctions against Moscow. It has also imposed export controls to prevent the island’s hi-tech equipment from being used by Russia’s military.

But Moscow’s ability to continue with the war is funded in part by energy exports, with billions of dollars coming from Taiwan.

Since February 2022, Taiwan has imported 6.8m tonnes of Russian naphtha, worth $4.9bn, which is equal to 20% of Russia’s total exports of the petroleum product.

The US president, Donald Trump, has urged countries to stop buying Russian oil.

The findings come from a report published on Wednesday by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finnish thinktank, in collaboration with a consortium of European, Russian and Taiwanese NGOs.

Naphtha is a crude oil product that is used to make chemicals required for manufacturing semiconductors, electronic components that are the backbone of Taiwan’s economy and which are vital for global industry.

Despite joining other sanctions against Russia, Taiwan, which is overwhelmingly reliant on imports for its energy needs, has not imposed restrictions on purchases of Russian fossil fuels.

Joseph Webster, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said that revenue from Taiwan’s purchases of Russian naphtha “are not immaterial to the Kremlin’s revenues.”.

Taiwan imports about 97% of its energy, a fact that experts have highlighted as a key vulnerability in the event of a conflict with China. It is a self-governing democracy but China claims it as part of its territory and has not ruled out the use of force to annex the island.

Many analysts have drawn comparisons between Russia’s designs on Ukraine and China’s plans for Taiwan. The conflict is closely watched in Taiwan and has spurred an interest in civil defence training programmes. There is a concern that China’s support for Russia during the war in Ukraine could be reciprocated by Moscow in the event of a Chinese conflict with Taiwan.

But some analysts said that Taiwan’s purchases of Russian oil should not be over-interpreted. “This looks like opportunism by Taiwan’s petrochemical industry,” said John Lough, the head of foreign policy at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre. Lough said that even if the money from Taiwan helped to fill the Kremlin’s coffers, “it’s a stretch to think that [Russia] will be willing or able to provide military support to China in the event of increased Chinese pressure on Taiwan”.

Webster said: “While Moscow and Beijing seek to absorb Ukraine and Taiwan, respectively, the two authoritarian powers are applying different approaches along different timelines. Moscow’s illegal invasion was a desperate attempt to halt Ukraine’s western orientation, but Beijing is much more patient and believes time is on its side.”

Hsin Hsuan Sun, a director at the Environmental Rights Foundation and co-author of the report, said: “Taiwan cannot afford to ignore the risks created by its growing dependence on Russian fossil fuel”. Sun said that the reliance “undermines Taiwan’s credibility with democratic allies”.

Good morning. Keir Starmer recorded about 10 broadcast interviews yesterday afternoon, after his conference speech, on the basis that they would all be broadcast this morning. They are playing out now. As you would expect, they are very repetitive – a lot of the questions and the answers are the same – but there are still plenty of new lines in them.

One of his most audacious answers came when he was speaking to Christopher Hope, political editor of GB News, Reform UK’s favourite TV channel. Hope asked if the government would stop the small boats, and Starmer said that the returns agreement that he negotiated with France would make a difference. But then he went on to claim that they were “Farage boats, in many senses” because after Brexit the Dublin convention returns agreement that used to be in place no longer applied.

Here is Starmer’s answer in full.

The returns agreement with France is important because we need to establish that if you come by boat, you will be returned to France.

I accept the numbers [returned so far under the agreement] are low. We had to prove the concept and prove that it could work. We’ve now done that. But now we need to ramp that up.

I would gently point out to Nigel Farage and others that before we left the EU, we had a returns agreement with every country in the EU. And he told the country it will make no difference if we left. Well, he was wrong about that. These are Farage boats, in many senses, that are coming across the channel.

Starmer does not seem to have used this line in other interviews and it is not clear yet whether this is the start of a sustained government attempt to rebrand these as “Farage boats”, or whether Starmer was just trying to wind up Hope, who often asks questions that reflect the views of his Farage-loving viewers.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, made a similar argument in his party conference speech. John Rentoul, the Independent commentator who is broadly sympathetic to Labour, said this morning Davey and Starmer were both wrong to argue that being out of the Dublin convention made much difference to small boat arrival numbers.

Surprised by PM repeating Ed Davey’s bogus analysis: boats are nothing to do with Brexit; & the Dublin convention never worked

But in fact the Dublin convention probably isn’t the key issue. Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at the Migration Observatory, a migration thinktank, argued recently that Brexit is making the small boat problem worse because the UK no longer has access to an EU fingerprint database, and that means asylum seekers can come to the UK knowing they won’t automatically be thrown out because they have applied in another European country. He said:

There’s also increasing evidence of a Brexit effect [in explaining why migrants want to leave France and come to the UK]. We speak with asylum seekers now, and often they’ve claimed asylum in the EU country, sometimes been refused, but they understand that because the UK is no longer a part of the EU, and no longer party to the EU’s fingerprint database for asylum seekers, if they can get to the UK, they have another bite of the cherry and another chance to secure asylum status and remain in Europe.

There are plenty more lines in the Starmer interviews. I will post them shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: The conference starts, and the main speakers are Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, at 10.30am, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, at 10.40am, Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary who is winding up the conference as incoming chair of Labour’s national executive committee, at 11.15am.

11.30am: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, and Lucy Powell, the former Commons leader, take part in a deputy leadership hustings.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm BST at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.

If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.

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Good morning. Are you feeling the Blitz spirit?

The defining message of Keir Starmer’s conference speech pitches Labour at war for the soul of the country, engaged in a battle every bit as momentous as rebuilding Britain after the second world war. The assembled Labour ministers, staff and paid-up members of the public alternately clapped and waved their union jacks.

It followed a week of rallying cries to the Labour base, in which Starmer decried the “division and decline” under the “snake oil merchant” Nigel Farage.

Yet earlier this week, as I walked around Liverpool’s Albert Docks the atmosphere at Labour’s 2025 conference felt subdued. Despite the prime minister’s bombastic call to arms, there was a striking absence of energy among conference attenders, few of whom even appeared to be grassroot activists at all, so dominant were the lobbyists, parliamentary apparatchiks and thinktankers.

I spent the conference speaking with the members who remain. Some were energised by Starmer’s message; others sounded disillusioned or exhausted. But can Labour really win again without them? We’ll explore that in today’s newsletter, after the headlines.

Five big stories

1. Gaza | Donald Trump has given Hamas an ultimatum of “three or four days” to respond to his proposed peace and reconstruction plan in Gaza, warning the militant group would “pay in hell” if it rejects the deal, as the Israeli offensive continued, inflicting further civilian casualties.

2. US politics | The US government shut down on Wednesday, after congressional Democrats refused to support a Republican plan to extend funding for federal departments unless they won a series of concessions centered on healthcare.

3. Afghanistan | Afghans are living under a near-complete communications blackout after Taliban authorities cut internet and mobile phone services for a second day as part of an unprecedented country-wide crackdown. The administration offered no immediate explanation for the blackout, although in recent weeks it has voiced concern about pornography online.

4. UK news | Police have responded to online speculation after a gang-rape in Banbury by saying that there is no evidence linking the crime to migrant accommodation. The force said that “any assumptions being made are unfounded and unhelpful”.

5. Inequality | Scientists have linked the impact of living in an unequal society to structural changes in the brains of children – regardless of individual wealth – for the first time. The findings suggest “inequality creates a toxic social environment” that “literally shapes how young minds develop”, researchers said.

In depth: ‘We will fight you with everything we have’

During his conference speech, Starmer sounded most passionate – almost inspiring, if you can believe it – when defending the country’s diversity. “If you incite racist violence and hatred, that is not expressing concern: it’s criminal. This party is proud of our flags, yet if they are painted alongside graffiti, telling a Chinese takeaway owner to ‘go home’, that’s not pride; that’s racism,” he told activists, to loud applause.

“If you say or imply that people cannot be British because of the colour of their skin, if you say they should be deported … mark my words we will fight you with everything we have,” he added. It was a message many in Liverpool have longed to hear from their leader.

The speech was, overall, a success, according to the Guardian’s snap analysis by Andrew Sparrow. Later, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar noted that Starmer’s steeliness and determination will give him much-needed breathing room. The BBC and The Times struck a similar note.

Thinktanks on the left joined in on the applause. The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said Starmer “set out the start of a big progressive vision”. British Future, which is focusing on community cohesion, praised the speech for “defending the principle of asylum as well as secure borders, challenging racism while addressing”. The New Economics Foundation, a leftwing thinktank, welcomed the prime minister’s focus on the “importance of a ‘muscular state’ with adequate public investment”.

Starmer, it seems, has finally found his voice. But will enough people rally to his battle cry?

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The architect of Valhalla

Before we dive too deeply into what went down at conference, let’s first lay out just how bad things are for Labour. On Monday morning, legendary pollster John Curtice delivered a sobering presentation at an event on Labour’s current polling predicament. The room watched in silence as he laid out the scale of the crisis: Labour has suffered the sharpest fall in support for a newly elected government in history. A poll released that morning found Keir Starmer to be the least popular prime minister in the history of their polling. It was pretty grim stuff.

So what should Labour do? Curtice’s big warning was that “you can’t just focus on Reform if you’re going to recover from the situation that you’re in”. Labour, he stressed, was bleeding votes not only to Reform, but also to the Liberal Democrats and to the Greens, now led by eco-populist Zack Polanski.

The real drivers of discontent, Curtice said, were not immigration but frustration with the economy and the NHS, the very issues that had brought Labour into power in 2024. And most crucially, he argued that the government needed a powerful, unifying vision.

“What Keir Starmer did last year was say, ‘Hello, I am your nice, friendly local plumber. I believe you’ve got quite a lot of leaks in your policy pipes. So I’m going to come along and bung it up for you,’” Curtice said. “[But] the public aren’t looking to politicians to be their local friendly plumber – they’re looking to their politicians to be the architect of Valhalla. They want a new house, not the old house repaired, and it’s the sense of: what does the new house that this country would occupy look like?”

Earlier, when Curtice was asked if there was any glimmer of hope in the data, he was silent, sparking nervous laughter across the room. “The honest answer to that is no.”

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What do members want to hear?

My gut feeling, that true members were hard to find, is borne out by the data. Labour has lost almost 200,000 members in the past five years, according to the party’s latest annual accounts. Membership now stands at about 309,000, down from a peak of more than half a million.

This decline matters because the fight against Reform cannot be won through rhetoric alone. It requires people willing to take the argument into their local communities: to deliver leaflets, knock on doors and persuade neighbours of Labour’s vision for the country.

As I wandered through the conference halls on Sunday and Monday, speaking to those activists present to get a sense of what they hoped to hear in Keir Starmer’s big speech, the same topics came up again and again: the removal of the two-child benefit cap, tougher sanctions on Israel, and greater investment in local communities.

Those demands were largely unanswered in Starmer’s speech, though the Guardian’s reporting suggests the government is looking into removing the two-child benefit cap and exploring options of a new tapered system.

Still, members and local councillors welcomed the direct attack the prime minister launched against Reform. For many, clearly stating what Labour is opposed to felt like the first step toward defining what it actually stands for.

Tansaim Hussain-Gul, a Labour party member and trade union activist, knows Labour has a big battle ahead of it in Wales, where she’s based. Polls currently show Reform as set to off-set Welsh Labour at next May’s local elections.

“I am glad they’re on the attack because it means we can give back as good as we can get,” Hussain-Gul said. “We know we’ve got a fight, we’ve got a threat there, but the best way forward is making sure we show the positives, the changes that we have done as a Labour government over the last couple of years in Wales and show our members what the consequences will be if Reform do get in.”

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Where are the young people?

The lack of younger activists this year was also notable. The data shows youth membership has plummeted from 100,000 to 30,000.

Starmer’s speech attempted to send a strong message to those who can’t remember a world without social media, promising to scrap Tony Blair’s aim to get 50% of young people in university, replacing it with a new mission where two-thirds of children get a degree or gold-standard apprenticeship.

Again, he sounded more heartfelt when discussing how he was put on a pedestal for attending university, while his siblings were looked down on for taking a professional trade. But it is unclear whether the promise of more apprenticeships will be enough to mobilise young people.

Before the speech, I spoke to 25-year-old Jack Ballingham, who was slumped on the floor alongside others taking a break. He talked to me about the impact of losing so many young members. “You need fresh perspectives in the movement because if you don’t have that, you get stuck in the same old ideas. I think young people are really at the sharp end of a lot of problems in society and know what the solution should be, but they’re not really being listened to.”

When I asked if he felt reinvigorated by being at conference, he said: “This year the conference has been,” he paused. “It feels quite unusual. There’s not as many people, and the people that are here seem to be more obvious corporate types rather than activist members and delegates. It’s supposed to be a big democratic exercise for the party, but it feels a bit more like a policy convention for policymakers who want to try and get a bit of influence.”

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What lessons can Labour learn from defeating the BNP?

Reform is not the first populist right insurgency Labour has had to deal with. In 2010, the British National Party posed a serious challenge to formerly staunch Labour constituencies such as Barking, where its leader, Nick Griffin, stood for parliament.

Labour lost nationally, but in Barking it held the seat with an increased majority and wiped the BNP off the local council altogether. The story of how Labour saw off the far right has since hardened into folklore; one that, amusingly, many now claim to have witnessed first-hand.

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Margaret Hodge is rightly at the centre of this tale, as the MP who beat Griffin. In a recent post on Substack, Fraser Nelson, the former editor of the Spectator, noted her warning that labelling Reform “racist” could push disillusioned voters closer to Nigel Farage, and that engaging with their concerns was essential. Others, like Morgan McSweeney, are cast as masterminds, credited with ensuring the council delivered on basic service; and doing very simply what a council should do as key to fighting off the far right.

As someone who grew up in Barking, a former child refugee who gained citizenship and turned 18 the month before casting my first vote in 2010, some of this myth-making makes me chuckle. It is true that Hodge threw herself into conversations her peers had once avoided. But what often gets forgotten is the sheer scale of mobilisation it took to oppose the BNP: there were 150,000 letters sent, 22,000 doors knocked, 9,000 voter contacts, 20,000 questionnaires delivered.

And beyond Labour, up to 1,000 anti-fascist activists campaigned relentlessly. The Hope Not Hate campaign temporarily moved its base of operations to a warehouse in neighbouring Dagenham. Other organisations such as Love Music, Hate Racism would come to our schools and offer a vision of Britain worth dancing and fighting for.

It was a deeply politicising moment. We felt our home was under threat and rallied to defend it. It is that same fighting spirit that the Labour leadership has adopted at this conference, but I did not see that same energy among the base. If Labour is serious about meeting the threat from Reform, it will not only need a vision worth fighting for, but also a core of diverse people of all ages, races and religions who passionately want to be part of that fight.

What else we’ve been reading

• Yesterday, Jared Kushner completed a leveraged buyout of video games behemoth Electronic Arts and heard his father-in-law praise the Gaza “peace plan” he has allegedly worked on with Tony Blair. Marina Hyde says maybe we’ve misjudged this guy. No, just kidding. Archie

• The world’s biggest sporting event arrives in LA in 2028, under the shadow of a turbulent second Trump presidency. Our US colleagues spell out what’s at stake, and why, for Trump and city politicians alike, the Olympics’ success or failure could mean mutually assured destruction. Aamna

• Pjotr Sauer has a good piece about the Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, and his tentative attempts to mend fences with the west – without blowing his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Archie

• Putting on a convincing Irish accent is an art. As Helen Mirren recently learned, getting it wrong can spark virality for all the wrong reasons, and invite brutal criticism. Aamna

• My own objection to the dystopian creation of Tilly Norwood, the nonexistent AI “actor” allegedly being touted as the next Scarlett Johansson, is what a pathetic white bread name they picked. “She” is also, Stuart Heritage points out, the average movie executive’s “platonic ideal of what an actor should be”. Archie

Sport

Football | Victor Osimhen’s first-half penalty sent Galatasaray on their way to a 1-0 Champions League win at home after a limp performance from Liverpool. Separately José Mourinho’s return to Stamford Bridge ended in defeat as an own goal gave Chelsea a 1-0 win against Benfica in the Champions League.

Athletics | The coach who guided Laura Muir to Olympic and world championship medals has been banned for three years for serious misconduct, which included driving at speed with an athlete in his car following a disagreement before abandoning them at the roadside.

Tennis | Carlos Alcaraz won his seventh title from nine consecutive finals at the Tokyo Open, beating Taylor Fritz 6-4, 6-4. His 92% win rate this year is among the strongest of the last decade.

The front pages

“‘Decency or division’: Britain faces an era-defining choice, says PM,” is the splash on the Guardian on Wednesday.

“The day Labour dragged politics into the gutter,” says the Daily Mail. “I can clean up the almighty mess as next PM,” writes the Express. “Starmer musters flag-waving Labour for ‘patriotic’ battle against Reform,” is the lead story at the FT, while the Metro has “PM: ‘Snake oil’ Farage wants Britain to fail,” and the Mirror: “Pride over prejudice.”

“‘I won’t surrender our flag’” says the Telegraph, as the i opts for: “Two-child benefit cap will be lifted in Reeves Budget,” and the Star: “Keir’s snakes and leaders.”

Finally, the Sun with “Nicole files for divorce after ‘3yrs apart’”.

Today in Focus

Starmer takes aim at Farage

The Labour leader entered conference with the polls against him and Reform UK snapping at his heels. He came out fighting – but was it enough to change his critics’ minds? Peter Walker discusses with Helen Pidd whether it was enough to change the minds of Starmer’s critics.

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

The Upside

A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad

At some point in their career everyone experiences feeling unfulfilled at work. But with confidence in the UK job market weakening, and competition for roles increasing, more people than ever are clinging to positions they would rather leave.

But, career coaches, workplace psychologists and Guardian readers tell Ammar Kalia, it doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re working at home, you could house-sit to change things up, says career coach Dina Grishin. Alison Gibbs, a business psychologist at Work Psychology Group, says that if you don’t get to spend much of your time on the bits of your role you do like, you could start “jobcrafting”, or persuading your superiors to direct your talents more in your preferred direction.

Don’t forget to treat yourself, too. “When you’ve finished a task you didn’t want to do, get up and do something you like,” career coach Jo Maughan says. “It could be making a cup of tea or chatting to a colleague, but it’s taking time to give yourself a reward that’s important.”

Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday

Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.

The discovery of a footprint is providing a glimmer of hope before the search for a preschooler on an outback homestead becomes a recovery operation.

Four-year-old August, known as Gus, disappeared from his family’s sheep station in the remote South Australian mid-north on Saturday afternoon.

Alone in searing temperatures and without food or water, authorities’ best-case scenario on Wednesday was that Gus had crawled into shelter and was waiting to be rescued from the property near Yunta, about 300km north of Adelaide.

In a significant development, a footprint was found on Tuesday night, buoying searchers.

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“We had a little bit of a breakthrough yesterday where we found a footprint about 500 metres away from the property,” Supt Mark Syrus told ABC Radio on Wednesday.

“It has been pretty windy, but it’s quite a prominent footprint,” he said.

“We can positively identify that it’s from a child and it’s a very similar boot pattern to what Gus was wearing when he went missing, so that’s a pretty significant find for us.”

However, police also prepared the family for the worst after five days of searching.

“This is a young boy without food, water, shelter for that period of time, so it is going to be pretty tough on that little lad,” Syrus said.

“We’re preparing the family for the fact that we may be moving from a search effort to a recovery.”

A specialist tracker with deep knowledge of the terrain was called in to help with the search.

Gus’s distraught family said on Tuesday they were “struggling to comprehend what has happened”.

“Gus’s absence is felt in all of us, and we miss him more than words can express,” Bill Harbison said on the family’s behalf.

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“Our hearts are aching and we are holding on to hope that he will be found and returned safely.”

The boy had been playing in the sand near the family homestead when he disappeared.

Despite a frantic hours-long search, no trace could be found.

Extensive ground searches involving State Emergency Service volunteers on trail bikes, all-terrain vehicles, dogs and a drone have been carried out, while helicopters, police divers and mounted officers have also been involved.

Police do not believe the disappearance is suspicious.

Gus has long, blond, curly hair. He was last seen wearing a grey sun hat, a cobalt blue T-shirt with a yellow minion on the front, light grey long pants and boots.

Three and a half years after war plunged Europe into an energy supply crisis, millions of households in Great Britain are braced for another winter of painful gas and electricity bills.

On Wednesday, the quarterly cap on charges will increase again. Despite a fall in wholesale gas prices, the ceiling for a typical annual dual-fuel bill will rise by 2% to £1,755 to help cover the costs of energy policies and network upgrades.

Bills are far lower than during the peak of the energy crisis when the government was forced to step in to subsidise costs. But they remain almost £600 a year higher than before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And while the cap has fallen, households have racked up growing debts.

The latest estimates from the industry regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, put the money owed to energy suppliers at a record high of £4.4bn as of June, an annual rise of more than £750m. In the same month, government figures revealed that a record proportion of British households were unable to pay their energy bills by direct debit because there was not enough money in their bank accounts.

Simon Francis, a coordinator at the End Fuel Poverty Coalition, said the figures should “ring alarm bells” in the Treasury because they showed the crisis was not over. “It is simply unsustainable for consumer energy debt to continue to grow unchecked,” he added.

Energy price cap chart

The risks for households struggling to pay their bills are clear. The coalition has warned of thousands of winter deaths linked to freezing homes as well as of vulnerable children living in cold, damp conditions and added pressures on the NHS from poorly heated housing.

As Britons struggle to pay monthly bills and shift outstanding debts some households have resorted to tampering with their gas and electricity to steal energy. Others are wearing gloves inside and limiting heating to just one room.

Lindsey*, 62, who lives in Cheshire, said her home needed to be warm because she had multiple health conditions, including asthma and depression. The situation has been made worse by a broken radiator and mould through lack of heating.

She said: “On days where I’m terrified of the cost of putting the heating on, I tend to lie on my sofa, curl up, pull the sides of my jumper up over my chin to stay as warm as possible. It’s quite lonely and I think that’s no good for my mental health.”

The mounting energy debts are pushing bills higher too. Earlier this year, Ofgem added an extra £50 a year to the price cap, which will be handed to energy suppliers to help them cover the cost of unpaid debts.

The regulator believes that it would prove cheaper for billpayers to help keep suppliers afloat than to foot the cost of bailing them out if they go bust, as a string of companies did in the depths of the energy crisis. “The current levels of energy debt are unsustainable,” an Ofgem spokesperson said. “And this is a challenge that requires action from everyone – the regulator, government and industry alike.”

The regulator’s data reveals that the number of billpayers in arrears began to stabilise last year but the total amount of debt continued to rise. The number of households in arrears is rising again this year.

The number on a repayment plan is well below the peak recorded in the middle of 2022 of almost 1.1m for electricity and 900,000 for gas. An estimated 876,000 households were repaying electricity debts in June and 714,000 were doing the same for gas.

But the number of households with no repayment plan in place has climbed to new highs: 1.13m for electricity and 926,000 for gas.

Chris Norbury, the chief executive of energy supplier E.ON, said: “If you look at our debt book it tells a story: fundamentally, there are three types of customer. There are people who have sadly fallen off the edge financially and energy debt there is ultimately a symptom of poverty.

“The second group of people that we see showing up in our debt book are people who have never struggled to pay their energy bill before, but they have started to through the energy crisis. Whenever these people engage with us we will always offer support.

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“Then, sadly, we see a growing cohort of customers who can pay, but for whatever reason won’t pay. Ultimately the customers in this category are costing everyone else more. It’s important that we target support for those who need it most.

“The UK is, in many ways, an outlier when it comes to targeted price protection for energy costs. Virtually every other market we operate in in Europe has some form of targeted price support.”

E.ON offered £82m in discounts to struggling customers last year and £72m of debt support the year before.

The scale of the debts along with this week’s price cap hike stand in stark contrast to Labour’s pre-election claim that it would cut energy bills by £300 a year by the end of the decade.

The government is under pressure to improve the energy efficiency of leaky homes and bring down bills in the longer term through market reforms.

Ofgem is also “working at pace” with the government and the industry on a proposed debt relief scheme, which is due to be finalised before the end of the year. The government has put forward plans to expand the £150 warm home discount to help around 6m households.

Gillian Cooper, a director at Citizens Advice, warned that expanding the scheme was welcome but “not enough to turn the tide”. “We’ve been clear that the government must explore options that give more support to people on low incomes with the highest energy costs,” Cooper said.

The charity is one of many organisations calling for targeted support for low-income households, which could include a social energy tariff at a discounted rate.

The spokesperson for Ofgem said: “We know allowing households to build up unsustainable debt isn’t the right thing to do, and it’s vital that people pay for the energy they use as increasing levels of debt drive up costs for everyone.”

*Name has been changed