Table of contents for 01/26/2026 in The Big Issue

POVERTY Millions of Brits have no savings to fall back on. A new £1 billion government fund aims to help By ISABELLA McRAEBIG ISSUE SENIOR REPORTER → When 10-year-old Sabrina’s bed was broken, her mother Sarah did not know what to do. As a single mother who lives with a debilitating chronic illness which means she is unable to work, she could not afford a new bed. “It’s made me feel useless,” Sarah said of her financial situation. “Once upon a time I was a civil servant. I had a good job. I had a house. But since my disabilities have come on, I can’t work and have a child, and it’s like all of a sudden I am not worth anything to society.” Millions of people across the UK…

→ Water covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface. Yet 97% of it is saline, and much of what remains is locked away in ice caps and glaciers. If all the planet’s water fitted into a single bucket, the fresh water available for human use would barely fill a tablespoon. Access to that fresh water depends not just on geography, but on pipes, treatment plants, regulation and political choices. When those systems falter, scarcity can hit quickly. In the UK, warnings about resilience in a privatised water system have been issued for decades, but action has lagged. This year, the chickens are coming home to roost. Several of England’s water companies are on the verge of collapse, burdened by huge debt mountains. The government has baulked at nationalisation, but…

→ The government has unveiled its ‘once-in-a-generation’ plan to reform England’s water system, promising tougher oversight and an end to failing infrastructure. But with record sewage pollution, soaring bills and repeated supply failures, experts fear the proposals amount to little more than “tinkering around the edges”. The white paper, A new vision for water, sets out powers for the new water regulator, including a chief engineer to bring “technical expertise”, new ‘MOT’ checks on water infrastructure, and a rollout of smart meters. There is no mention of nationalisation – in fact, the plan promises “stability [for] investors”. Nonetheless, environment secretary Emma Reynolds pledged “tough oversight” and “real accountability”. “Water companies will have nowhere to hide from poor performance, customers will get the service they deserve, and investors will see a…

We are all told the same story as children: that we grew from a single cell into a human being. We learn that all of our trillions of cells developed from the first union of egg and sperm, and that we each have one unique and unvarying genetic code. But scientists are beginning to challenge that story. The oft-taught equation of “one individual, one genome” fails to capture how complex the reality is. In fact, we all carry cells from other individuals within us. Hidden in our blood, our heart, our lungs, and even sometimes in our reproductive organs are human cells with a genome different from our own – cells that originated in another person. This phenomenon, which affects all species with a placenta, has been named microchimerism (after…

→ My daughter told me recently that a group of young men standing in a Norwich pub were saying they didn’t like immigrants. They rejoiced at their spirited, unifying call, and talked loudly about getting rid of immigrants. I just hope they don’t have to go to hospital because then they would find that immigrants, and the children of immigrants, dominate. Not as the patients but as the doctors, nurses, clinicians and clerical helpers. I just hope they don’t have to be fed in a Big Mac establishment, or a KFC, or go to a supermarket to buy food. I hope they don’t, at an uncivil hour, have to call out for some chicken wings or some milk, or booze, which would probably be delivered by an immigrant. I hope…

The first time the taps ran dry, Beth tells Big Issue, the water stayed off for six days. “That was November,” the mum of four says, when South East Water pipe failures left tens of thousands of homes across Sussex and Kent without water. “We had to bathe the baby in bottled water in the sink. I couldn’t take my meds for three days as I always need a loo nearby, and when you have to rely on filling up bottles from the rain in the hot tub… it was a nightmare.” In January, taps ran dry again, cutting supplies to an estimated 30,000 homes across the region. By Friday morning, around 7,000 properties were still without water. “It’s been on and off,” Beth, not her real name, told Big…

Johannes Radebe had a vibrant upbringing. As he looks back on his childhood in a South African township, the Strictly Come Dancing star says, “I was surrounded by love. I was never lacking in that regard. “Home felt comfortable, secure and safe, but the minute I stepped outside my mother’s door, I had to deal with a lot as a young child. I didn’t process it. I thought: ‘That’s just the way of life.’ Growing up in a township, it was safer but it was not safe.” Radebe speaks candidly about painful times in his life – homophobic bullying, his father’s alcoholism and death, and facing homelessness as a young man. Dance was an escape. He found joy, purpose and community in its sparkly world. Now one of the most…

ALAN’S BIG QUESTION What is the name of the paper merchants in the UK version of The Office? (Answer below) Crossword Cryptic clues Across Photographer arrived and in the morning hurried round (9)  Ready to put down (3)  Never-ending gesture provided by hairdresser (9,4)  Father, he’s unorthodox but new (5)  Moderately slowly and before in time (7)  Was once employed in Portuguese settlement? .... (6)  .... where ducks consume wine (6)  Island accountant of lesser rank (7)  Mentioned critique of light entertainment (5)  Gossip on grand scale spread about Frenchman (13)  Sister kept in order (3)  Propose that engineer should have praise (9) Down A hat but not quite a cloak (3)  Come together in an emergency (5)  He’s left hard cheese out to be got at (7)  Named a different frenzied woman (6)  Well-known, having made a record…

In 2019, attendees at a conference held by the non-profit Waterwise heard a stark warning from a man named Sir James Bevan, who at the time was the chief executive of the Environment Agency. Bevan had been looking at the business plans produced by water companies and noticed something they all had in common. In every business plan, there was a graph with two lines snaking across it. One line showed water demand in the region served by the companies. This line went up, as more homes and businesses crowded in. The other line showed the supply of water. Thanks to the effects of climate change, this line went down. Somewhere around 2040, the lines crossed over. “And that, ladies and gentlemen,” Bevan said, “is the jaws of death –…

When Jim Ambrose was born intersex, doctors operated on him as a baby to remove his testes. It’s a surgery he believes amounts to “genital mutilation” and “unconscious child abuse”. He was raised as a girl without ever being told the truth. Now in his late 40s, Ambrose has spent decades working through the trauma. The Secret of Me, a Channel 4 documentary film about his life, has been made by Grace Hughes-Hallett, best known for the award-winning documentary Three Identical Strangers (2018), which told the story of triplets adopted as babies by separate families who discovered each other by chance as adults. Ambrose, who has told his story many times but stepped back from activism and the public eye in recent years, only agreed to reopen old wounds “because…

I enjoyed selling the magazine with my MP → I’ve been doing Big Issue for a while and when I first moved to Ilkeston I wanted to get somebody to make a lot more people aware of how hard it was to sell the magazine and what we do to get the money. I asked the previous Conservative MP in Erewash to come and sell the magazine and all she kept on coming out with was excuse after excuse. Then two years ago I asked a Labour councillor and he said he’d come out but never did. I saw we had a new MP, Labour’s Adam Thompson, so I went through to him on his Facebook Messenger. He said he was keen to come out. He joined me on my…