30/06/2017 BBC News at Six

The council leader of Kensington and Chelsea,

where the Grenfell Tower fire happened, resigns.

After a stormy council meeting last night when the public

and press were banned, the leader says he should quit.

As council leader, I have to accept my share of responsibility

New documents obtained by the BBC reveal officials chose cheaper,

And the head of the organisation which manages the tower block

A coroner rules it's impossible to say whether lifeguards could have

saved five friends who drowned at Camber Sands.

Nurseries in England say they don't have the money to provide

the free childcare promised by the government.

Why British medical students are heading to Eastern Europe

And Chris Froome prepares to defend his title,

as cyclists head to the starting line for this year's Tour de France.

And coming up on Sportsday later in the hour on BBC News.

Three days before the defence of his title, Murray puts

in the practice at Wimbledon as he tries to shake

Good evening, and welcome to the BBC News at Six.

In the last half hour the leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council,

the borough where the Grenfell Tower fire happened, has resigned.

Nicholas Paget-Brown said he had to accept responsibility

for his role in the response to the fire, and in particular

for the decision to ban the public and press from a council

The BBC has also obtained documents that show that cheaper,

less fire-resistant cladding was chosen for the tower block.

80 people are believed to have died in the fire,

and there is no suggestion a deliberate decision

Kensington and Chelsea Council says safety would not have been

compromised in order to manage budgets.

Our home affairs correspondent Tom Symonds has more.

Where you pressured by Number 10 to resign? The pressure simply got too

great. The leader of the Council, criticised for failing to cope with

the crisis in his backyard, couldn't hold on. Last week, his council

offices were invaded. Last night he couldn't even hold a council

meeting. It was the last straw. In particular my decision to accept

legal advice but I should not compromise the public enquiry by

having an open discussion in public yesterday, has itself become a

political story. It cannot be right that this should have become the

focus of attention, when so many are dead or still unaccounted for. His

housing chief has also gone. Investigations by the BBC and the

Times newspaper into decisions made when the council refurbished

Grenfell Tower added to the pressure. The big change, the

addition of aluminium cladding to improve the look of the building.

We've been investigating that refurbishment and whether it played

a part in the tragedy. This development in North London includes

cladding made, not from aluminium, but Zink. Documents passed to the

BBC revealed that the think panels were originally proposed for

Grenfell. The architects designs show this clearly, residents were

told there would be zinc. But there was pressure to reduce costs. By

2015 they would give an to the original tender and told to sit

aluminium panel, which is cheaper. The saving more than ?293,000. Did

the change make a difference to fire safety? This panel is similar to the

ones eventually used. It's an aluminium sandwich with a plastic

filling which isn't fire resistant. The original zinc panels were

marketed as capable of being able to resist fire. Both panels have the

same safety rating and a European testing. On current evidence, it's

not clear the change would have made a difference. However, even the fact

there was pressure to cut costs has infuriated those affected by the

fire. Those affected and the wider community are utterly sick of this

lack of value ascribed to human beings who pay their council tax,

who paid these people's wages. Meanwhile, cladding from 149 tower

blocks has now failed government tests. The process has been

criticised as pointless because only the cladding is being tested and not

installation. Pointless? No, says the testing body. It is critical to

do the screening tests, just to see whether there is a risk or not, to

see whether the buildings have this flammable cladding or not. Many of

them do and the question now is what can we do about it, and are there

other risks or materials we need to consider. There is an immediate

crisis to deal with, and ongoing police investigation, a public

enquiry, again today described as too narrow. Grenfell Tower casts a

long shadow. Our correspondent Frankie

McCamley is outside The council leader has resigned, the

head of the management company has stepped aside as well. What

residents saying? This isn't a very surprising announcement. Kensington

and Chelsea Borough Council have been coming under increasing

pressure to step aside and let a new team takeover. Not only has Nicholas

Paget-Brown, the council leader, stepped aside, in the past few

minutes we've also had the announcement is Deputy has also

decided to step down. This follows on from the chief Executive who

managed Grenfell Tower saying he wants to step aside to help with the

investigation and ongoing enquiries. There is mixed reaction here. I've

been here for the last few weeks, speaking to people who lived in the

tower and the surrounding area. They say that some happy with this

decision, they say they want a new team to come in and take control of

the situation, finally, they say. Others say this is a PR stunt and

they worry nothing is going to change from this.

A coroner has concluded that it's not possible

to establish whether seven men, who drowned off Camber Sands

in East Sussex last summer, might have survived if lifeguards

Five friends died in one incident just a month after two other men

Duncan Kennedy is in Hastings, where the inquests have been taking place.

Duncan, a terrible tragedy at one of the country's

And probably unprecedented as well, Fiona. The fact seven men could die

in two incidents on one beach in the space of one month is believed to

have been unique in this country. There were verdicts of death by

misadventure today. The coroner said he didn't think lifeguards on Camber

Sands would have made a difference, but the men's families have reacted

angrily to that. They all say they believe lifeguards would have made a

difference, and they say nobody should have to go through what

they've been through. It's the beach where generations of families have

made their summer holidays. Three kilometres long, Camber Sands is

normally a place where happy memories are created. But for Kobi

Saththiyanathan, his brother Ken, Nitharsan Ravi, Inthushan

Sriskantharasa and Gurushanth Srithavarajah, it became a place of

danger and death. Tonight at the end of their inquest, the families spoke

of their anger and frustration at their loss, and included Gurushanth

Srithavarajah's Sister. It was five boys playing on the beach. They

didn't make any effort to find the rest of the boys, they weren't found

until 8:30pm. They were in the water for six hours! They didn't make any

effort to find those boys. My brother was in the water for six

hours. The families say that the council was wrong to suggest people

from ethnic minorities couldn't swim at Camber Sands. I don't know if

your family comes to the beach. That's why we are fighting. To

change something, not for us, because my son isn't coming back.

He's never coming back. Thank you. The father of the two brothers said

families had to hear their children blamed for their own deaths. This

was the moment it became clear the men had drowned. The council said it

had put in lifeguards before, as the RNLI had urged them to, in part

because it didn't have the money. Tonight the council was asked why he

had never apologised to the families. The council has made it

clear they send condolences to the families. It is a tragic event, we

don't wish to see that happen again on any of our beaches. The coroner

has taken away a lot of information from this and will be raising it has

a national level. A month earlier Mohit Dupar and Gustavo Silva Da

Cruz also drowned. For the family off all the men who died in one

appalling sequence of tragedies, there's anguish and bewilderment at

how this can happen in such a relaxed and familiar setting.

The main programme to treat sex offenders in England and Wales

for the last quarter of a century until very recently didn't reduce

re-offending and if anything made it worse, according

Our home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford is outside

the Ministry of Justice for us now, so this has been a colossal waste

Fiona, it looks like that, yes. To give you an idea of the scale, some

2500 prisoners in England and Wales went through this Core Sex Offender

Treatment Programme between 2002 and 2012. Researchers found that those

who had been through the course were more likely to reoffend than those

who hadn't done the cause. Those who hadn't done the course, 8% of them

reoffended, those who had, 10% of them reoffended. Researchers think

this might have been because they were discussing their offending in

group sessions and somehow by discussing their crimes, it made

them seem more normal and possibly more likely to reoffend. This study

has been sitting on ministers desks for several months and quietly

they've been changing the sex offender treatment courses in the

background, so that they now no longer involve the discussing of

offending in group sessions. It looks as if they've changed the

training and the courses prisoners do before making public the fact

that what they've been doing for 25 years hasn't worked and may have

made things worse. Thank you. The parents of 10-month-old

Charlie Gard have been told they will be able to spend more time

with their terminally ill baby. Chris Gard and Connie Yates had been

expecting their son's life support to be turned off today after losing

a high profile legal battle. But Great Ormond Street Hospital has

since disclosed they are looking at plans for the baby's care

to enable the family We are saving a smaller percentage

of our income than at any time since records began in 1963,

according to the Office In the first three months

of the year, people saved 1.7% of their disposable income -

down from 3.3% in Economists say savings are down

because prices are rising, and there's also been an increase

in tax payments. Nurseries in England say local

councils are failing to provide enough money to fund the additional

free childcare for three and four-year-olds promised

by the government. From September, children will be

eligible for 30 hours of free nursery education if both parents

are in work. But the National Day Nurseries

Association say most nurseries can't Our education correspondent

Gillian Hargreaves reports. From September, all three

and four-year-olds in England You know the routine, dropping of

the kids. The constant juggling of childcare for working parents. Which

is why the government's four of 30 hours of free childcare for three

and four-year-olds in England looked so good.

But this nursery says it can't afford to provide more free hours,

because the money they get from the government won't cover their bills.

Every nursery is totally different, so the shortfall is huge. The

government says it is spending ?1 billion on this. That is enough

money to make it work. The government say it's free childcare,

it's only free if we are prepared to foot the bill and pay for it.

Unfortunately, that would mean lowering standards which are not

prepared to do. When a national day nurseries Association asked 128

local authorities in England how much they will pay nurseries for

subsidised from September... Just over two months to go before

free childcare is extended in England, it now looks like the

government is in direct conflict with day nurseries. There's a risk

that parents might find they've been promised something that they won't

be able to take of. People come to this nursery because they want to

come to this nursery. If they can't get the funding through the nursery

is going to be very frustrating. My concern is that fabulous nurseries

like this may struggle. It's a shame the government timetable to support

those nurseries that need the extra money. The government has invested

extra cash and says there's plenty to go around but nurseries say the

investment is less than the price of a second stamp. If neither backs

down its mums and dads caught in the stand-off.

The leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council,

where the Grenfell Tower fire happened, has just resigned.

Coming up... I'm live in Dusseldorf ahead of the start of the 2017 Tour

de France. Can Chris Froome win a fourth yellow jersey?

Coming up on Sportsday in the next 15 minutes on BBC News...

It's must-win for the British and Irish Lions in New Zealand,

as the All-Blacks look to clinch the series in tomorrow's

Thousands of British students are heading to Eastern Europe

to train to be doctors and dentists after failing to get places

Research done by BBC News suggests there's been an increase

in the numbers of students going to places like

That's partly because of the limited places at medical schools here.

There are 8,200 places available each year in the UK to study

medicine, but there are about 20,000 applicants.

And this at a time when we're facing a shortage of doctors.

Our Health Editor, Hugh Pym, reports from Varna in Bulgaria.

They're so keen to study medicine, they've come a long way

These British students are at the University

of Varna in Bulgaria, because it was difficult

One of them is Zara, a mature student who is a mother of four.

She's frustrated she was turned down by a British medical school

They were thinking it's going to be like, I'm

going to leave in the middle or something like that.

So I thought, like, there's no need to waste my time here in the UK,

and try to convince them or impress them with my grades

They do need to learn Bulgarian to talk to patients.

This man from West London explains that competition

for places at British medical schools is intense.

So to pursue his dream of becoming a neurosurgeon,

We have Ph.D students and Master's students

who are applying for the same places as you are applying to.

And we have a lot of people get rejected, a lot of good

There are 250 British medical and dental students in Varna,

Living costs are cheaper, and tuition fees lower than in England.

But I asked the university vice-rector how she could be sure

British students were up to doing medicine if they haven't got

Those who are brought to the University are highly

motivated young British people who are very much willing

And we pass them through our system for medicine.

They need to sit for entry exams in biology and chemistry.

There's nothing new about British students wanting

What we've discovered is that there has been a noticeable

increase in the numbers going to medical schools

in Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Croatia,

They're being promoted around the UK at events like this.

An agent charging a fee helps with the application process,

and says those without A grades at A-level can still get in.

Some universities might be actually a bit more, a little flexible,

and might go for something lower like a C or something like that.

But, these people they need to go through some exams.

But you could get a place, could you, with Bs and Cs?

Doctors qualifying at an EU medical school are automatically

But the regulator the General Medical Council says things might

change after Brexit, with extra tests imposed.

At a time when doctors are badly needed, these students say they'll

do whatever it takes to work in the NHS.

Hundreds of people have attended the funeral of one of the victims

Coronation Street stars joined mourners in Stockport

at the funeral of Martyn Hett, who was a huge fan of the soap.

Martyn Hett loved to make an entrance.

At 29, he'd planned his own funeral, with two white horses

His family took a moment for private grief, before

a very public celebration for the extrovert blogger.

We have received messages from all around the world

from people who followed Martyn, just waiting for his

Martyn loved being in the limelight, and the centre of attention.

He will be loving every minute of this fantastic

Hello, and welcome to the ten o'clock news, with me, Martyn Hett.

I absolutely adore Coronation Street...

Martyn's family played this film, including a tribute

to his love of Corrie, and his favourite character.

Some of the cast were there to celebrate their superfan,

I love you, and I'm so happy that we got a chance to meet.

And I know that you're shining down on us from heaven.

Me and my group of friends and everyone at Radio One

were always commenting on how funny, how sharp and how hilarious Martyn

The service was beamed to the crowd outside.

The impact of the Manchester attack still felt here.

Martyn was really the complete opposite of the person

He just swallowed it all up, all that hate and anger,

and his star is shining bright for us all to see.

Martyn's mum said she wanted him to make a diva exit, and so he did.

Applauded by his family, his friends, his audience.

Mourners lined the streets of Merseyside to pay their final

respects to 15-year-old Megan Hurley, who also died

in the Manchester Arena attack. Her family asked for privacy

at today's service, where the bells of St Nicholas Church in Halewood

rang 22 times for the victims of the bombing.

People were encouraged to wear Megan's favourite colour,

Tennis, and Andy Murray will begin the defence of his Wimbledon title

against an unseeded player when the Championships

He pulled out of his last warm-up game today because of a hip problem,

but was practising on the grass at the All-England Club.

Murray is drawn in the same half as French Open champion

The British cyclist Chris Froome will attempt to defend his

title when the Tour de France begins tomorrow.

He's hoping to complete his third straight win and a fourth

But he faces stiff competition from some the world's leading cyclists.

The race begins in the German city of Dusseldorf,

and our Sports Correspondent Richard Conway is there.

Richard, an unusual place to start the Tour de France? Well, it is,

yes, the tour tries to take in as many countries as possible, Fira. We

are here in Dusseldorf for the start tomorrow. There is an individual

time trial. Yes, Chris Froome and Team Sky will be hoping to add to

what has been a golden era for British cycling. They want a fourth

yellow jersey for Chris Froome. However, I can tell you, the

forecast here tomorrow is for torrential rain. Conditions will be

difficult. That is perhaps increasing might include being given

the dark clouds which have followed Team Sky in recent months -- that is

perhaps in keeping with the. Clouds. Chris Froome becomes

the first Briton to retain Chris Froome knows what it takes

to win the Tour de France. Tomorrow, he starts his quest

for a fourth victory Media interest is always sky-high,

but this year, Froome's team roll off the start line the subject

of an ongoing doping investigation, and with questions looming

over their leader's credibility. I've been involved in this sport

a long time, and I've tried to do it absolutely the way that I've always

thought it should be done. And I'm proud of what we've

achieved in this sport, Evidence from Sir Dave Brailsford

and other Team Sky officials to MPs earlier this year revealed

an alarming lack of It all relates to a package alleged

to have contained a banned substance administered to Sir Bradley Wiggins

shortly before he went on to win Team Sky and Sir Bradley

deny any wrongdoing, but the issue has presented

the sport and the head of its world governing body

with a familiar problem. Certainly the reputational problems

that have been around that team in the last few months have

not been helpful. We were previously considered

pariahs of the anti-doping world, and now we've got one of the best

reputations in sport, I believe. The Tour, like its

cyclists, endures. Millions will watch on TV, and,

just as in Yorkshire in 2014, thousands will line the route

for the start, which this year takes For Chris Froome, he must now focus

on more than 2000 miles of racing that stand between him and road

cycling's greatest prize. This is the biggest challenge

I've faced in my career. I think the level of my rivals

on the course that we're racing on this year leads it to be a much

more open race. A possible fifth British Tour title

in six years await when the race The fight to fully

restore Team Sky's image? Richard Conway, BBC

News, Dusseldorf. How is it looking for the weekend?

Pretty good. We will start with a quick look back of June. We are into

the last few hours of June already. Not all of the stats in, but the Met

Office figures suggest it was a warm month across the board. It was the

hottest June day on the first since 1976. Not only was it a warm month,

it was a wet one, particularly in the north and north-east. The South

East of Scotland, Edinburgh and Leuchars in Fife, recorded their

wettest June on record. A wet and warm month. It has been cloudy and

wet in recent days. But the weekend is looking good, a lot of bright and

bright weather, particularly for England and Wales. But there is some

rain this evening and overnight, drifting south across in with Wales,

not too heavy or widespread, but some rain nonetheless. Most of it

has gone by dawn. Behind it is dry weather, cloudy conditions,

temperatures not dropping too far. Dipping into single figures in the

northern and western aisles. Rain in the South east doesn't last long,

then it brightens up. Patchy cloud and sunny spells, light winds, a

decent day for getting out and about. A different story for

Scotland and Northern Ireland, a breeze, cloud and rain. The rain

does not get to Aberdeenshire, where it will be warm. It will pick in the

south-eastern corner at 23-24d. Through Saturday evening, if you are

heading out there in mind that this weather front is slipping South,

bringing bring to the north-west. That continues to drift its way

southwards. By dawn on Sunday, wet weather in the south-east, but it

shouldn't last too long. It will clear out into the near continent,

then it's going to be another decent day for England and Wales. Decent

spells of sunshine with light winds. A bit more of a breeze, the western

side of Scotland, Vicar, with a bit of rain. Temperatures about 18 in

Belfast, 22 in the London area. The leader of Kensington and Chelsea

Council, where the Grenfell Tower I happened, has just resigned. He said

he had to take responsibility for the response to the fire. As council

leader, I to accept my share all the responsibility for these perceived

failings.