Thread!

You would think we'd be on track to freedom, given @matthewpennycookmp.bsky.social, the Ministry of Housing himself, is our local MP. Yet, six years later, we're still unsafe, hostages in our own home, and paying escalating costs while the "professionals" can't even measure a building correctly.

Most people think the cladding crisis is over. It's not. 6 years after Grenfell, we're still trapped in flammable buildings, paying the price while freeholders profit. This is what it actually costs to live in the "post-Grenfell" world: 🧵

Our new paper uses regulatory theory and systems thinking to explore fresh, practical interventions that could transform the culture of compliance and improve tenants’ housing experiences in the English Private Rented Sector. 📄 Read it here: housingevidence.ac.uk/publications...

Kit Malthouse to Lammy "can he not see his inaction & cowardice is making this country irrelevant? Can he also not see the personal risk to him, given our intl obligations, that he may end up at the Hague because of his inaction?" Lammy tells Malthouse his language is unbecoming

It is very hard to see how the UK government can sign this statement, which makes it absolutely clear that it recognises that Israel is committing - as a matter of state policy - deliberate and systematic war crimes, without at a minimum cutting all military cooperation with Israel.

Reporters in Gaza from AFP are now unable to work due to them literally being starved to death by the Israeli government, but apparently these people opposing the genocide are the real terrorists 👇

“The ultimate democratization of education may reside not in its universal availability but in its deinstitutionalization. If this comes to pass, we may find that the fabric of our lives is Canvas.” Uh oh. But look - at least Instructure is being open about its imperial ambitions!

Absolutely dystopian juxtaposition from the Guardian front page. Difficult to understand how anyone of decency and conscience can defend this government at this point. Just sheer moral degeneracy to arm a state that does this and arrest people for objecting. Wtf are we doing as a country?

The right-wing press is going mad over votes at 16 ("a naked attempt to twist democracy in Labour’s favour", an "election-rigging move"...) Oddly, they said the same 100 years ago when the voting age for women fell from 30 to 21. Let's revisit the Mail's campaign to"Stop the Flapper Vote Folly"...

When the 12yo was in mainstream primary school, a new, unsympathetic non-inclusive headteacher who arrived in Year 6, repeatedly tried to change his educational provision. The fact that the EHCP was a legal document that agreed what support he should receive was vital in protecting him. #r4today

The closing of Abrdn’s Fair Finance Trust is grim news. I had funding from them into shared ownership and found them all staff great to work with. Big loss to difficult social policy research funding landscape. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The government's tenancy reforms make it easier to fight rent hikes through a tribunal. But @rentersreformco.bsky.social finds the tribunal is awarding landlords an average rent increase of £240/month! Tenants will still be at risk of being priced out of their homes www.mirror.co.uk/news/politic...

Surveillance Capitalism Kyoto style. A Security Robot.

The Centre for Lifelong Learning truly put into action ‘university of the public good’. My conversations with students when I taught there shaped the way I think about higher education and research. A huge loss for the university and the city.

I am starting to look for a PhD student in (comparative) political economy, historical or computational sociology starting in October (4 years, 65%) at @freieuniversitaet.bsky.social. Check out the announcement here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Conditions at 26 Federal Plaza according to a Dominican man who was held there for 3 days. ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comments about conditions there.

This Senate proposal advanced by Sen Cruz would cancel new and existing State laws on any aspect of tech use including civil rights, consumer protection, privacy, fraud, safety for kids, accessibility, and more. In short, we’d lose the few laws we have that ensure responsible AI use. #killthebill

Sounds like a platform to which other data can be appended in the future to demonstrate our credibility and worth. With permission gov.uk already links to credit files for ID purposes. How will this all shape up in 5/10/20 years.

Becky Tunstall’s report looks like a grim but compelling exposition of the state of the nation. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Interested in supporting housing scholarship? Not too onerous Trustee roles going at HSCT. www.linkedin.com/posts/alex-m...

Let me be clearer. I was former head of UK Foreign Office humanitarian affairs, incl policy on war crimes, genocide. I helped craft policy for international criminal court. I’m in no doubt these are war crimes. Disproportionate, indiscriminate, collective punishment by an occupying power.

👀 ICYMI 👀 To complement the 2025 UK Housing Review, @housingtoday.bsky.social published a series of articles curated by CIH and written by Review's sponsors. You can access all six articles here➡️https://buff.ly/25eeXdD More about the UK Housing Review here➡️ www.cih.org/ukhr2025

Russell Vought, acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has canceled plans to introduce new rules designed to limit the ability of US data brokers to sell Americans’ most sensitive data, credit history, and Social Security numbers.

Welcome to Gilead UK. Under Keir's Eye.

Crack team of aging cyber security amateurs emailing each other “Don’t give them your user name Pike1947!”

🏠 The Demand for Housing as an Investment. IIPP Professor @jryancollins.bsky.social policy report makes a series of policy recommendations on how to make the housing market more affordable and break the feedback cycle. 🔗 Read the report here: buff.ly/SOHIVP8

Brilliant exposé of the fallacies behind and risks created by deregulating home construction. Key point is that as current market functions impact is to boost landowner receipts not increase supply or cut prices.

"When training data reflects existing demographic disparities, those inequalities can be baked into the model itself. The result is then predictable: The same students who’ve historically been overlooked stay overlooked." Theorists like @ruha9.bsky.social and @safiyanoble.bsky.social are crucial.

The ever great @peteapps.bsky.social on Radio 4 now on the ongoing scandal of building safety post Grenfell. Catch up on BBC Sounds www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

I wish the international community - including our own leaders - would call out the blatant annexation of territory and continuing war crime of starving Gaza civilians with total blockade going on for 2 months now.

Utterly heartbreaking and shameful that the most common length of time a family has spent in temporary accommodation is 5+ years. Thousands of children denied a childhood. Huge test for the government is whether they can get families into real homes.

Love this. In his “I Agree” installation Dima Yarovinsky-Yahel took the content from terms of service statements for companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder and printed them out on A4 paper with a standard font size for legal contracts to demonstrate the length of these agreements.

The rise of #AI in financial services in #Africa facilitates unprecedented access to credit but also raises concerns re data privacy & potential biases. Lack of transparency in credit scoring & use of alternative data call for stronger regulatory oversight african.business/2025/04/tech...

This company is proposing to build an “operating system” for UK government online services. We have just been shown that we cannot trust authoritarian Chinese companies with our steel. It is obvious now that we cannot trust authoritarian American ones with our data and decisions. #PalantirOut

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

Why is the government and the news so indifferent to the meltdown happening in UK #HigherEd right now? Our universities are the envy of the world. Yet we are at risk of losing a generation of academics and damaging the sector beyond repair.

THREAD: Under a new law, thousands of prisoners in Louisiana have been cut off from ever getting a chance at parole. Why? Because an algorithm said so. 1/

Manuscript submitted today!

Every so often I’ll see someone say that ChatGPT has improved a bunch so I went there today just to see if it could answer a simple question about Connecticut law. It told me about six cases that answered my question. Not one of them was real.

The @thinkhouseinfo.bsky.social early career researcher's prize has launched! Submit papers by 25 Sept. Previous winners include @anyamartin.bsky.social @antbreach.bsky.social @jelliott94.bsky.social @rachelleearwaker.bsky.social @michael-s-marshall.bsky.social www.thinkhouse.org.uk/about/early-...

A fantastic opportunity in association with SafeDeposits Scotland Charitable Trust for a funded PhD at @lawstrath.bsky.social examining private renting evictions in Scotland More info and how to apply is at the link below. Applications open until 2nd May www.strath.ac.uk/studywithus/...

The Shared Owners' Network has been working to address specific issues with the Government, including: ✅ Resales ✅ Lease extensions ✅ Buybacks ✅ Valuations ✅ Subletting And more. 👉 Join to get email updates ➡️ tinyurl.com/SharedOwnersNetwork