150 Royal Engineers will be sent to help reinforce Poland's border with Belarus. The border is an entry point to the EU, and there have been tensions there in recent weeks. A small reconnaissance team of engineers had already gone to the area to assess the situation. The engineers are not combat troops but ‘guys with diggers’ who would be dispatched ‘within days or weeks’. They will be building or making fences, roads, or checkpoint observation posts, or putting in infrastructure to help the Poles and potentially other Baltic states to secure their border. The UK defence secretary said, ‘I'm particularly worried for the women and children and the vulnerable people who are being trafficked by the Belarusians into this game they seem to be playing. It's a horrendous thing to do to force migrants to be a tool in a game to try to destabilise their neighbours’.

The number of children in care, which has risen 36% in a decade, is putting ‘unprecedented pressure’ on local authorities' budgets. The Government provides councils with £4.8bn for ‘vital front-line services’, including children's care. Funding a child in residential care costs £4,000+ per week. In 2015, 69,000 children were in care: by March 2020, the figure was 80,080. The rise is explained by, among other things, foster carers not keeping up with increased demands. With local authorities spending more time on this growing need, they are unable to do more early family intervention rather than taking children into care. A trial scheme across five counties is looking to address this challenge. The No Wrong Door programme, funded by the Department for Education and the local authority, brings therapists, police and social workers together within the home to work with families before they reach crisis. Since April, the number of children in care aged 12-17 has reduced by 5%.

Staff at 58 universities will strike between 1 and 3 December over two issues: pension cuts, and pay and working conditions. They are demanding a £2,500 pay increase to end ‘pay injustice’. More action is likely if demands are not met, causing further disruption for students in the run-up to Christmas. Staff pay has fallen by 20% after twelve years of below-inflation pay offers; one third of academic staff are on insecure contracts; the gender pay gap is 15%, and the most recent statistics reveal that of 22,810 UK professors, under a third were women and only 1% were Black. Staff are also experiencing a crisis of work-related stress with over half showing probable signs of depression. As well as the three-day walkout, staff at 64 other universities will take action short of striking by strictly working to contract and refusing any additional duties. This will go on indefinitely.

The number of deaths of people treated under the Mental Health Act in England rose during the coronavirus pandemic. The Care Quality Commission's findings come amid concerns over staff shortages in psychiatric units. 490 people died while detained under the act in the year to March 2021, 324 of them for non-Covid reasons. The average overall figure between 2012 and 2019 was 273. Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt warned that shortages of doctors and nurses were now compromising patient safety ‘in every part of the NHS’. Mr Hunt, who now chairs the Commons health and social care committee, said ‘We still put far too many people into secure accommodation when they haven't committed any crime, just because it's the only option left.’