Councillors, mayors and police commissioners across England and Wales are facing voters this week. What’s at stake? Helen Pidd reports

This week voters in more than 100 local authorities in England and Wales are heading to the polls. And Labour are predicted to win big. Helen Pidd travelled to Accrington in Hyndburn, where the local authority has an equal number of Labour and Conservative councillors, to see what people there thought about the local elections.

What she found was a more complicated picture than predictions of a Labour landslide suggest. She found the Conservative council leader in a surprisingly confident mood – and the local Labour politicians unwilling to speak to her. She also met voters in the town who told her of their discontent with Labour over its approach to the conflict in Gaza and that it was the Green party who would be picking up their votes.

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Allowing 100% faith-based access would be divisive and likely penalise disadvantaged children, say campaigners

Faith schools in England will no longer have to offer up to half of their places to children who don’t belong to their religion, under changes to state school admissions rules announced by the government.

Currently, new faith schools can only fill a maximum of 50% of their places using faith-based admissions criteria, but the change announced by the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, will allow them to turn away other children.

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Figures obtained by Lib Dems show 500,000 people in England travelled to hospital without ambulance in 2023

Growing numbers of seriously ill people are making their own way to A&E in what has been called an “Uber ambulance crisis”, because 999 response times are too slow.

A&E doctors said that while they understood that people are acting out of “desperation” they are taking a serious risk with their health, especially if they are driving.

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Sudanese man being held in Croydon after arriving for routine sign-in believed to be first potential deportation under new law

An asylum seeker who turned up for a routine Home Office appointment on Monday was detained and told that he was being sent to Rwanda, a charity has said.

In what is believed to be the first potential deportation case since Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill received royal assent, the Sudanese man was held in Croydon, south London, the charity Soas Detainee Support told the Guardian. The man told charity workers he had arrived to sign in but was informed that he would be deported to east Africa.

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Daniel Graham, 38, and Adam Carruthers, 31, have been charged with criminal damage and are due to appear in court in May

Police have charged two men in their 30s over the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree last September.

Daniel Michael Graham, 38, and Adam Carruthers, 31, both from Cumbria, have been charged with criminal damage to the tree and to a neighbouring part of Hadrian’s Wall, which was affected when the tree fell.

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Campaigners say loss of £200m from active travel budget is illegal and resulted from Treasury pressure

Swingeing cuts to public spending on cycling and walking in England should be overturned as government expenditure was already insufficient to meet legally binding climate targets, the high court has been told.

Campaigners are challenging a decision in 2023 to cut more than £200m from Department for Transport’s active travel budget for the following two years.

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Researchers say issue ‘urgently needs scrutiny’ after rap and drill music used as evidence against 252 defendants over three years

Rap and drill music was used as prosecution evidence for serious charges including alleged gang-related murders against at least 252 defendants in England and Wales over a three-year period, a study has found.

The researchers at the University of Manchester, who found 68 cases involving rap evidence covering the 252 charged individuals, said the issue “urgently needs scrutiny” as there was no meaningful regulation nor even monitoring of how the criminal justice system used rap as criminal evidence.

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In letter ahead of vote, signatories say their relations with female colleagues have been damaged and threaten to quit club

The musicians Sting and Mark Knopfler have co-signed a letter with leading theatre producers and actors, warning that they will be obliged to resign their memberships of the men-only Garrick Club if members refuse to approve a decision to admit women in a vote next Tuesday.

The letter, seen by the Guardian, was also signed by the actor Stephen Fry, the West End and Broadway theatre producer Karl Sydow, and Matthew Byam Shaw, an executive producer on The Crown television series and co-founder of Playful West End theatre production company.

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Social housing provider Peabody wants to raze 1960s Lesnes estate used in Kubrick film but residents say homes could be refitted

Residents of a brutalist 1960s estate in south-east London featured by Stanley Kubrick in his dystopian film A Clockwork Orange are resisting plans to demolish their homes, warning it will result in homelessness, debt and carbon pollution.

Peabody, one of Britain’s biggest providers of social housing, is asking the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, for permission to raze the Lesnes estate in Thamesmead. The development was called “a town of tomorrow” by its Greater London Council architects before disrepair and unemployment blighted the area. Land values in the area have since increased with the arrival of the Elizabeth line railway in 2022, which has connected the area to the West End of London in 23 minutes.

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