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It’s home truths time

Tens of thousands of families will spend this Christmas in B&Bs and hostels.

Others will be in emergency accommodation or sleeping rough on the streets.

This is the legacy of the Conservatives’ failure to tackle the housing crisis.

Figures from Shelter show the number of homeless rose by 13,000 last year to 320,000.

Many of those are in work but have been driven out of their homes by punitive rents or welfare cuts. Others have been let down by a failure to build enough social housing.

It is a national scandal that rough sleeping has doubled since the Tories came to power in 2010. Ministers appear in denial about the scale of the problem and there is a desperate need to build more homes.

Action must be taken to stop landlords ramping up rents beyond the reach of those on modest incomes. While the Government fails to act, lives are being blighted.

Cash remedy

The NHS is nothing without the staff who work for it – yet thanks to the Tories, it is desperately short of nurses and midwives.

This is an emergency entirely of the Government’s own making. They were warned when they cut bursaries for student nursing in 2016 that it would make it harder to recruit staff.

Now the consequences are being seen. There are 42,000 vacancies but applications are down 33%. Drop-out rates are also rising as trainees struggle with mounting debts.

That is why hundreds of student nurses descended on Parliament yesterday to demand extra cash to tackle the staffing crisis.

They fear for the health of the NHS and the patients it is there to care for. If ministers want to show they are on the side of the angels, they would bring back the bursaries.

Royal flush?

Welsh coal merchant Keith Williams is chasing his inheritance after discovering he’s the son of Malaysian royalty.

He may not have designs on a throne but let’s hope he can end up living like a Sultan.