“We’ve got to work out how to convince people that there is a real, massive climate problem”
Lord Adair Turner

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In March 2021, a police officer murdered Sarah Everard after kidnapping her from a London street. Later that year, the former Met officer David Carrick was arrested for serial rape. He admitted to 71 offences of sexual violence over a 17-year period. The Casey Review in 2023 found the Met hadn’t tackled “institutional racism, sexism and homophobia”.

And here at the Bureau, we were uncovering case after case of police officers abusing their partners, up and down the country. It revealed a police culture of closed ranks, collusion and cover ups that kept victims – even women who were themselves officers – from getting justice.

We now know that while all this was happening, the police watchdog was also drastically cutting the number of independent corruption investigations it conducted. In five years, independent investigations by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) have dropped by 70%. The number has declined year on year since 2020.

An IOPC spokesperson told us that investigations were becoming increasingly complex and that there had been real-term cuts to its budget.

And that’s the nub of it. Since it was set up in 2018, the IOPC’s budget of about £70m has been effectively slashed by about a third.

“The police complaints system is broken,” said Kevin Blowe, the campaigns and media coordinator at the police monitoring charity Netpol. “It is neither genuinely independent nor powerful enough, by design, to provide genuine accountability. That’s why police corruption isn’t going away any time soon.”

This story could have easily flown under the radar, but our Enablers team is trained to join the dots to uncover corruption and the systems that no longer work for us.

The Bureau’s independence means we can hold institutions like the IOPC accountable and ensure we shine a light on its failings. If you’d like to help us stay on this story, then please become a member today.

I had a great message from a reader this week. Anthony Collette said he used our reporting on QR code scams to warn a group of more than 100 cybersecurity experts about the danger. “My immense gratitude for your fantastic investigative journalism,” Anthony wrote. “The world is changing fast, and you help us keep up!”

As soon as Reform took control of 10 councils in local elections last May, seven of those authorities promptly abandoned their promises to protect the climate. Lincolnshire didn’t have any major climate pledges to scrap, but Reform leaders there “declared war” on green energy. A councillor in Kent, Chris Hespe, inaccurately claimed that climate change wasn’t “settled science”.

Outright climate denial now permeates local debate. When Rachael Hatchett, a Green councillor in Derbyshire, spoke up in a debate about solar farms last year, she was heckled by another councillor shouting: “There is no climate change!”

Across the UK, more than 300 councils have declared a “climate emergency” and many of those are backed up with ambitious net zero targets. This puts serious money towards reducing emissions.

Reform’s reversal of those policies is a real threat to the environment and the local areas where we live. It’s a risk that could grow, as local elections approach in May and Reform is leading the polls, all while still making climate denialism part of their pitch.

It’s a page from Donald Trump’s playbook, but the politics of it isn’t entirely clear to me on this side of the pond. Three quarters of people in the UK believe climate change is caused by human activity. In doing so, they’re aligned with the science – a study of more than 88,000 climate-related studies found that 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree on this point.

There has been reporting on fossil fuel companies donating to Reform, so that may be the main factor. But if you’ve got a more nuanced take, please let me know.

One reader, who lives in Nigel Farage’s constituency of Clacton, in Essex, has already been in touch to confide that it frightens him to see Reform gaining power when communities in the area already face risks from crumbling cliffs and floods.

Some Reform politicians say their policy U-turns are simply about cutting costs. Alan Graves, the Reform UK leader in Derbyshire, said: “We do not deny that the climate is changing … The council continues to support practical, affordable measures that cut waste, improve efficiency, and reduce costs for residents.”

But Lord Adair Turner, co-chair of the Energy Transitions Commission, said the shift in the conversation is a major setback for tackling climate change. “We’ve got to work out how to convince people that there is a real, massive climate problem and that we do have the solutions now, which are available at relatively low cost,” he said.

If you see local election campaigning around this issue, please get in touch. We would love to see photos of flyers from your local campaigns so we can see how parties are treating this issue.

Reform has climbed in the opinion polls fast, but that doesn’t mean its policies have always had the scrutiny they deserve. We’re going to keep looking at how Reform treats climate change – but if there are other areas you think we should be digging into, just email me back.

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

In the world of Wikipedia editing, you can either be a "white hat" editor or a "black hat" editor.

Black hat editing involves changing information on Wikipedia without anyone noticing, usually using fake identities. It’s a service sometimes used by those willing to spend money to protect their image.

Volunteer editors are great at disrupting such influence operations – but the demand for ‘Wikilaundering’ has never been higher. And one British PR firm has turned it into an exclusive service.

Read more here. 

“Some stories come together quickly and easily,” Niamh McIntyre said after her latest investigation into how AI is used in the weapons industry. “Others less so.”

That story, she said, was “by far the hardest one I’ve ever worked on”.

Niamh has been looking into global companies selling AI to the US Army – in particular, the kind of tech that ends up in the planes that scouted the skies before the raid on Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. She figured out that those surveillance planes needed specific AI to interpret foreign languages in any country the US might be planning to attack.

To teach the AI systems, an Australian company called Appen hired gig workers that could speak those languages – essentially setting up underpaid workers to help the US attack their own homelands.

Take Somalia, for instance. Niamh travelled to Kenya, where many Somalis live in refugee camps. The people training the language systems had no idea what their work was being used for.

This kind of reporting is incredibly arduous, complicated and costly. At one point Niamh became dangerously unwell and we had to cut her reporting trip short. We were grateful to get some help with the trip from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, but it’s really only thanks to our supporters that we can do this kind of work.