Businesses should be using more robots instead of hiring low-paid migrants, the shadow home secretary has said. The Conservative MP Chris Philp says other countries "use a lot more automation" for tasks such as picking fruit and vegetables "rather than simply importing a lot of low-wage migrant labour". Speaking on BBC Breakfast, he called for more investment in technology to reduce the UK's net migration figures. Philp said: "To give an example, in Australia and New Zealand, they are rolling out robotic and automated fruit- and vegetable-picking equipment, in South Korea they use nine times the number of robots in manufacturing processes compared to us, in America they use a lot more modular construction which is much faster and much more efficient. "There's a lot of things British industry can do to grow without needing to import large numbers of low-wage migrants." At an impromptu press conference on Wednesday, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, said her party had got it wrong on immigration. She promised a review of "every policy, treaty and part of our legal framework" including the role of the European convention on human rights (ECHR) and the Human Rights Act. Get the day's headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning She said her party still believed in a "deterrent" to irregular migration but did not commit to restoring the Rwanda scheme scrapped by Labour, even though Philp called for it to be reinstated two weeks ago. He said on Thursday that Labour had "cancelled the Rwanda scheme before it even started". Philp was asked about reports that under the Conservatives, ministers had been examining using a giant wave machine to deter Channel crossings. He told the BBC: "I don't recall ever having seriously looked at that idea.

Dozens of cross-party MPs and peers have joined a campaign for an "immediate stop" to the use of live facial recognition surveillance by police and private companies. The former cabinet minister David Davis, the Liberal Democrats leader, Sir Ed Davey, the Green MP Caroline Lucas and the former shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti are among 65 members of the House of Commons and House of Lords to call for a halt to the technology's use. The campaign is spearheaded by the privacy advocate Big Brother Watch and is also backed by 31 groups including Liberty, Amnesty International and the Race Equality Foundation. Police have deployed live facial recognition at large-scale public events, including King Charles's coronation. The statement said: "We hold differing views about live facial recognition surveillance, ranging from serious concerns about its incompatibility with human rights, to the potential for discriminatory impact, the lack of safeguards, the lack of an evidence base, an unproven case of necessity or proportionality, the lack of a sufficient legal basis, the lack of parliamentary consideration, and the lack of a democratic mandate. "We call on UK police and private companies to immediately stop using live facial recognition for public surveillance." The statement comes after the policing minister, Chris Philp, announced government plans to make UK passport photos searchable by police. Philp said he planned to integrate data from the police national database (PND), the Passport Office and other national databases to help police find a match with the "click of one button". Civil liberty campaigners said the plans would be an "Orwellian nightmare" that amounted to a "gross violation of British privacy principles". Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, last month predicted that facial recognition technology would transform criminal investigations as much as DNA testing had done. The director of Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, said: "The UK's reckless approach to face surveillance makes us a total outlier in the democratic world, especially against the backdrop of the EU's proposed ban.

Senior officials at the Home Office secretly lobbied the UK's independent privacy regulator to act "favourably" towards a private firm keen to roll out controversial facial recognition technology across the country, according to internal government emails seen by the Observer. Correspondence reveals that the Home Office wrote to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) warning that policing minister, Chris Philp, would "write to your commissioner" if the regulator's investigation into Facewatch – whose facial recognition cameras have provoked huge opposition after being installed in shops – was not positive towards the firm. An official from the Home Office's data and identity directorate warned the ICO: "If you are about to do something imminently in Facewatch's favour then I should be able to head that off [Philp's intervention], otherwise we will just have to let it take its course." The apparent threat came two days after a closed-door meeting on 8 March between Philp, senior Home Office officials and Facewatch. Facewatch uses cameras to check faces against a watch list and, despite widespread concern over the technology, it has already been introduced in hundreds of high street shops and supermarkets.

The Bank of England has again intervened to ensure there isn't a fire sale of UK government bonds by pension funds. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has published a report saying the government will have to find £60bn of spending cuts over four years to pay for the recent mini-budget. The International Monetary Fund has restated its criticism of said mini-budget indicating that the unfunded cuts will ramp up inflation. With all this going on, you might have thought that Kwasi Kwarteng and his Treasury gang might have been feeling a bit chastened. After all, it's not every chancellor who gets to screw up their first budget on such a grand scale.

UK "safety tech" companies saw a revenue increase of 21% over the past year to reach £381m, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors of the UK tech industry, according to a government-backed sectoral analysis. Conducted by Perspective Economics on behalf of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the UK safety tech sector: 2022 analysis found that the number of companies delivering safety tech products and services grew by 17% to 117, with jobs in the sector increasing by 30% to total 2,850. Of the 117 safety tech companies identified by the analysis, 57% are based outside London and the South East, with hotspots in Leeds and Edinburgh, and emerging centres of activity in Greater Manchester, Oxford, Bristol and Belfast. "There are encouraging signs of newly registered startups, particularly in the domains of tackling disinformation and developing new approaches to content moderation and video and image analysis at scale," said the analysis. "Existing firms specialising in communication and semantics are also moving into the safety tech domain. "As a result of considerable growth within UK safety tech, there has been sustained interest from the investment community.

In the global AI investment, innovation and implementation stakes, the UK lies in a creditable third place. Trailing the US and second-placed China, it holds a slight lead over Canada and South Korea, according to the Global AI Index published in December 2020 by Tortoise Media. The moral of Aesop's most famous fable involving a tortoise may be'more haste, less speed', but Westminster is seeking to hare ahead in this race over the coming decade. Its national AI strategy, published in September 2021, is a 10-year plan to make the country an "AI superpower". But what does that mean exactly?