It took nearly half an hour for the first ambulances and firefighters to reach the stretch of blazing tents in the Kuwait peace camp in Rafah on Sunday night. The crowding and rubble that slowed the passage of emergency vehicles fuelled the spread of flames through the temporary homes of the displaced.

Zuhair, a 36-year-old lawyer, had been sitting on a road near his own tent, watching the news with friends as the last glimmers of twilight faded from the sky, when an explosion shook the area at about 8.45pm.

He raced towards the sound, terrified for his wife, children and friends. A vision of hell lay ahead, so gruesome he started shaking from shock. “I saw bodies everywhere. Children burning. I saw heads without bodies, the injured running around in pain, some alive but trapped inside burning tents.”

There had been no warning, and for many long minutes, there was no help.

He said people tried at first to drag the injured from tents with their bare hands, loading them on to donkey carts or cramming them into ordinary cars to seek help.

Sharif Warsh Agha, a driver, was among the crowds trying to help. He too shook as he stepped around bodies burned and mutilated by the initial explosion, and the fires that followed, trying to help the people he could.

“I heard a woman screaming for help for her sister. When I went into the tent, I found her seriously injured in the foot and her mother lying dead next to her,” he said. He did basic first aid, got her to the car, then someone called to say his young nephew – who has special needs – had lost his feet.

“I turned the car around to get my injured nephew but when we started moving someone was brought to me with an open chest wound. We put him in too,” he said.

Eventually nine people were loaded into the small car, which would normally take two people to hospital, with some in the boot.

He had been with his family in their tent, resting after the Maghrib twilight prayer, when a red flash and an explosion ripped the night apart. Black smoke and a deadly hail of shrapnel followed, then the sound of screaming.

He raced out to help the injured, not realising that his sister-in-law had been killed and nephew injured in their tent, which was just 70 metres from where the missiles hit. A sliver of shrapnel pierced her lungs and heart, killing her instantly. “She never did anyone harm,” he said.

Busy with his nephew, he didn’t count the dead, but believes he saw nearly 20 bodies, many of them women and children. “The Israeli army claims they were targeting militants, but it is not an excuse to strike an area full of tents and the displaced.”

The target was at the edge of rows of tents, set up by Kuwait earlier this year to shelter displaced people. The camp was outside a “humanitarian zone” along the coast that Israel had announced in early May, as it launched the operation into Rafah.

But it was not in an area of Rafah covered by specific evacuation orders that the Israeli military issued through social media, phone calls and leaflets as troops moved in, so the people living there thought it was safe.

Agha said: “The missile hit near a medical point surrounded by a lot of tents, in an area with more than 4,000 people.” It seemed unusual because there were no large impact craters on the ground and it sparked the large fire, he added.

The attacks were likely caused by US-manufactured GBU-39 missiles, which carry an explosive payload of 17kg, CNN and the New York Times found in investigations that looked at missile remnants photographed on site. This matched Israeli military claims about the amount of explosives that had been used. Overall the GBU bombs weigh 110kg, including the metal casing that can turn in part to shrapnel. They can penetrate 3 metres of concrete.

The Israeli military spokesperson, Rear Adm Daniel Hagari, said the strike narrowly targeted senior Hamas commanders and said the fire might have been caused by a secondary explosion. He suggested there may have been Hamas weapons stored in the area and said the military is investigating without providing further evidence.

Refugee camps are full of flammable objects that could explode and cause a fire, including cooking gas cylinders.

A large number of Sunday’s victims were originally from Beit Lahia, because many communities stayed together as they fled across Gaza. They included Zuhair’s close friend Ahmed Zayed, who left behind one cherished young child, born after a 10-year struggle with infertility.

He wants his cheerful, ambitious friend to be remembered. “I love mentioning his name so we can assure the world that our dead were not just numbers. They had lives and goals.”

Intense bombardment continued through the night, even after the flames died down, and so the next morning they packed and left again. “I remembered the first exodus from my city [in the north],” he said.

A million people have already left Rafah, and many more are likely to take to the road again in coming weeks as Israeli troops press forward.

Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said on Wednesday that fighting would last at least through the rest of 2024, signalling the country would defy fierce international criticism to continue with its operation.

“The fighting in Rafah is not a pointless war,” he said, adding that it aimed to dismantle Hamas to prevent future attacks on Israel.

Palestinians who survived attacks on Rafah this weekend, after months of flight and hunger, disagree. “They robbed us of everything. What do they want from us any more?” said Fida Al-Din Abu Jarad, a 40-year-old barber who was sheltering with his wife and children just a few hundred metres from the site of Sunday’s blaze.

On Monday evening they had been kept awake by hunger, so he heard the explosion of a missile landing nearby around 3am, and then watched shrapnel from the blast tear his family apart. In a few seconds, he saw his 18-year-old daughter, Nouira, collapse dead into her mother’s lap and heard his son scream with pain after shrapnel severed his foot.

“I felt that time had stopped,” he said, but the family’s ledger of pain was not complete. The bomb had landed even closer to the nearby tent housing his father and siblings and their families.

“Fear, pain and loss – these words can’t describe my feelings,” he said. “I tried to control my nerves and control my feelings, and I came out to see what happened.”

At his father’s tent, he saw one brother, Abu Ismail, collapsed on the floor beside his wife, who cried out “your brother is dead” as Abu Jarad arrived. Another brother, Emad, had been killed with his wife, Anwar. Their bodies were so badly damaged by the blast that he couldn’t tell one from the other.

One Tuesday he moved what is left of the family to Khan Younis, but is still in shock. Abu Jarad said: “So far I have not been able to comprehend what happened to me. When I took down the tent, I thought of the start of the operation in Rafah. At the time I suggested to my brothers that we move, but they rejected the idea and asked me what I was afraid of.

“I told them I am not afraid for myself, but I am afraid of losing someone from my family. And now it has happened, I have lost them.”

Detectives from France’s cold case unit have ordered DNA analysis of evidence in the unsolved killing of a British family and a French cyclist in a remote Alpine village 12 years ago.

Clothes belonging to one of the victims, cigarette butts found at the scene and pieces of the gun used in the killings are to be tested in the hopes of solving the mystery of the murders, described by the local prosecutor as “an act of gross savagery”.

The bodies of four people – Saad al-Hilli, 50, a British-Iraqi engineer; his wife, Iqbal, 47; her mother, Suhaila al-Allaf, 74; and a French cyclist, Sylvain Mollier, 45 – were found in an isolated layby at Chevaline near Annecy in September 2012. Each had several gunshot wounds to the head.

The al-Hillis’ two daughters, then aged four and seven, both survived the attack. The younger child hid under the legs of her dead mother in the rear footwell of the car for eight hours before she was discovered by the gendarmes examining the scene. Her sister was shot and suffered a shoulder and head wound.

The family was visiting the region in a British-registered BMW estate car whose engine was still running when the bodies were found. Examination of the vehicle suggested al-Hilli, who was driving, had attempted to reverse away. Mollier, a local man and father of three who was cycling in the area at the time, was shot five times. Detectives believed he was “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

Pieces from the butt of the weapon used in the killings, a vintage Luger P06-29 pistol, were found on the ground near the vehicle. The weapon was identified as a model used by the Swiss army in the 1930s, but its owner has never been traced. Detectives ruled out the possibility of a contract killing, saying a professional killer would not have used such a vintage weapon.

Police examined a number of leads, including interviewing members of the al-Hilli family in the UK, but the crime has never been solved.

On Wednesday, the French radio station RTL reported that prosecutors at the national cold case unit headquarters in the Paris suburb of Nanterre had been working on the case since September 2022 and ordered “new technical assessments” earlier this year.

This included DNA tests on the gun fragments, two cigarette butts found near the layby, Mollier’s clothing, including his cycle helmet and shoes, and clothing worn by one of al-Hilli’s daughters.

A person has died after falling into the spinning turbine blades of a departing passenger jet at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport.

The death occurred on the apron outside the busy hub’s terminal as a KLM flight was preparing to depart for Billund in Denmark.

“A fatal incident took place at Schiphol today during which a person ended up in a running aircraft engine,” the Dutch flag carrier, KLM, said in a statement. “Sadly the person has died.” The victim has not yet been named.

Dutch border police, who are responsible for security at the Netherlands’ largest airport, said passengers had been removed from the plane and an investigation opened.

The aircraft involved is a short-haul Embraer jet used by KLM’s Cityhopper service, which operates flights to nearby destinations such as London, Dutch news reports said.

A picture posted by the Dutch public broadcaster, NOS, showed the plane surrounded by fire trucks and ambulances next to the departure terminals.

Safety and security measures are strict at Schiphol and accidents are rare at the airport, which handled about 5.5 million passengers last month alone, according to airport figures.

Rachel Keenan’s account of the rapid and ongoing destruction of her home town of Inverbervie, Aberdeenshire, is stark, but sadly she is not alone (‘The fear has properly set in’: how it feels to watch my home town disappear into the sea, 21 May).

Here in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the tidal surge resulting from December 2013’s Storm Xaver left 158 homes and 233 commercial properties flooded, with many people made homeless. In response, improved floodwalls were completed in 2023, but in January 2024 the plug was pulled on the construction of a tidal barrier due to the emergence of a £124m funding gap. Instead of a flood defence system, Lowestoft has therefore been left with what worryingly looks a lot like a funnel.

Coastal communities have always been exposed to the forces of nature. However, more recently climate change has intensified risks along the UK’s North Sea coast, leaving low-lying communities and infrastructure with inadequate and outdated sea defences more vulnerable than ever.

We in the Use Your Voice Lowestoft group are convinced that the metric the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) uses to make its capital investment decisions perversely disadvantages smaller communities and ignores the economic benefits of improved flood protection. The metric should be reviewed and changed. Some 500 protection schemes have fallen foul of the metric. But only one of those has been revealed by Defra: Lowestoft.

It is true that government funds are available for flooding and coastal erosion projects. For example, on the north Norfolk coast, the villages of Bacton and Walcott, due to their proximity to the Bacton gas terminal, benefited from a sandscaping scheme, with £5m from central government. Elsewhere, many places such as Inverbervie, and Hemsby and Happisburgh in Norfolk, have been left to fend for themselves.

We who live in coastal areas need to promote a united front and demand that governments north and south of the border take action to protect our precious east coast.
Kate Stott
Use Your Voice Lowestoft, Suffolk

By increasing its use of renewable energy, the US has not only slashed its planet-warming emissions but also improved its air quality, yielding hundreds of billions of dollars of benefits, a new report has found.

The study, published in Cell Reports Sustainability on Wednesday and based on publicly available data, focuses on uptick of renewable energy in the US from 2019 to 2022.

“From 2019 through 2022, wind and solar generation increased by about 55%,” said Dev Millenstein, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “By 2022, wind and solar provided roughly 14% of total electricity needs for the US.”

During that time period, by reducing the use of fossil fuel power plants, the nation’s use of wind and solar power cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 900m metric tons, the authors found. That’s the equivalent of taking 71m cars off the road every year.

Those major climate benefits can obscure the air quality benefits renewable power yielded, wrote the authors, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and renewable consulting firm Clean Kilowatts. To illuminate those co-benefits, the researchers quantified how much the use of wind and solar reduced toxic air emissions, focusing specifically on sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen dioxides (NOx), which are both produced during fossil fuel combustion.

They found emissions of SO2 and NOx – both linked to increased asthma risk and a variety of other health issues – decreased by a total of 1m metric tons over that three-year period.

To determine the impact of that reduction on public health, the authors “used air quality models to track the population exposed to pollution from power plants”, Millstein said. They also employed epidemiological research to examine the effects of those emissions, and quantified the benefits by using an Environmental Protection Agency dollar value establishing the value of reducing the risk of early death across the population, he said.

All told, the emission reductions from SO2 and NOx provided $249bn of climate and health benefits to the US, the authors found – a figure Millstein said he found was “noteworthy”.

The study went on to examine the benefits wind and solar offer to particular regions of the United States. Wind power, for instance, is particularly beneficial to the across the Central states due to the displaced emissions on the local power grids; the same is true of solar power in the Carolinas. It’s an aspect of the research that Jeremiah Johnson, a climate and energy professor at North Carolina State University, who did not work on the study, applauded.

“These findings can help us target future wind and solar development to provide the greatest climate and health benefits,” said Johnson, whose work is cited in the study.

He said he hopes the paper helps the public focus on the benefits wind and solar are already creating.

The public “is often focused on the challenges we face” when it comes to ecological damage, he said. “But it is also important to recognize when something is working.”

Shortly after turning 18 in February, Daniil Yermolenko fulfilled a long-held wish and signed a contract with Russia’s armed forces. A month later, he voted for the first time, casting a ballot in the presidential election for Vladimir Putin, who had already been in power for six years when Yermolenko was born in 2006.

By late March Yermolenko had completed a basic two-week military training, and he was sent to Berdychi in eastern Ukraine where Russian forces were engaged in a devastating assault as part of its spring offensive.

There, on 4 April, during a storming of a Ukrainian position, Yermolenko found himself separated from his unit, surrounded by intense enemy fire. Before losing contact, Yermolenko reportedly radioed his base: “This is it guys. I am doomed.”

Last week his family and friends gathered in a small town in central Russia to receive Yermolenko’s casket, which was draped in the Russian flag. A military orchestra presided over the ceremony where the casket was lowered into the ground.

Yermolenko is the only recorded Russian casualty so far to have been born in 2006, making him the youngest known soldier to have died since Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine more than two years ago.

“He couldn’t wait to join the fighting, so when he came of age he took his chance,” said his brother Maksim, 25, in a telephone interview from the small town of Krasnoufimsk, near the Ural mountains, to where he returned from the frontlines to attend the funeral.

Maksim had signed up for the army first, in 2022, shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. “He wanted to follow my example and enlist. I warned him that war isn’t pretty … but mentally he was ready,” he said of his brother.

“I am proud of Daniil,” Maksim said. “He always said he wanted to fight Nazis and fascists there,” he added, repeating some of the false narratives popularised at home by the Kremlin to try to justify its war on Ukraine.

Thousands of young Russians, often referred to as “Generation P” for having lived only under Putin’s presidency, have died fighting in Ukraine. Mediazona, a Russian outlet that tracks war casualties using open sources, has identified nearly 5,000 soldiers under the age of 24 who have died in the war, including 1,400 under the age of 20. The real toll is likely to be much higher, the outlet says.

Russia portrays these fallen men, many of whom hail from the hinterlands, as heroes. And the Kremlin has gone to great lengths to make sure many more young people join the fighting as Putin seeks to re-engineer the country into a militarised society.

Shortly after the war began, Russian authorities amended its laws to allow 18-year-olds like Yermolenko to enter contract service immediately after finishing school. More ambitiously, the Kremlin has embarked on an unprecedented campaign to mould a new generation of Russians eager to enlist in the military.

Ever since Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian government has attempted to impose a state ideology on its youth, investing heavily in pro-government youth organisations. But for years these efforts seemed to be failing, with young Russians often at the forefront of pro-democracy protests and topping polls expressing anti-government sentiments.

The war in Ukraine, however, gave the Kremlin a renewed momentum to indoctrinate teenagers with Putin’s highly aggressive and anti-western version of patriotism.

“We are waging at least three wars,” said Sergei Novikov, a senior Kremlin bureaucrat, in July 2023. “There is the war on the frontlines. There is the economic war. And the third war is an ideological war … a war for the minds of the youth.”

Russia has dramatically increased its spending on patriotic education and state-run militarised groups for children and teens, from £25m in 2021 to more than £382m in 2024. Since the onset of the conflict, public school textbooks have been rewritten to align with the Kremlin’s foreign policy, reflecting Russia’s interpretation of history that emphasises the need to reclaim “historical territories” lost to Ukraine.

Moscow has placed special importance on war veterans, including former convicts from the Wagner group, who have returned home from Ukraine. In a recent speech Putin said more than 1,000 Russian veterans were already employed in schools. Starting in September, many of them will lead compulsory military lessons, which will include training in operating drones and handling Kalashnikovs.

Young Russians are also confronted with more conspicuous, physical reminders of the war. Across schools in Russia, thousands of memorial plaques have been set up to honour former students who died in what is framed as the ultimate sacrifice for the homeland.

In one school in the Siberian city of Bratsk, members of Russia’s youth army, Yunarmiya, gathered in February to inaugurate a memorial dedicated to six graduates. A video report of the event published by a local news outlet showed grieving mothers sitting on a school bench as Yunarmia youth read out poems that glorified war. The video then cuts to a young Yunarmia member introduced as Denis who says he “would like to become a hero like these men”.

The long-term effectiveness of the state’s militarised messaging is still up for debate. “Ideological indoctrination of teens is one of the areas where the Russian state comes closest to being totalitarian,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist.

But she pointed to recent polling that showed younger Russians still preferred individualist success over state ideologies. “It is still too early to say how successful the Kremlin has been,” she said.

Schulmann said the massive financial incentives to sign military contracts were likely to play the biggest role in persuading young men to join the army.

In Krasnoufimsk, Maksim Yermolenko stressed he was eager to return to fight. “After my brother’s death, I feel extra motivated to finish the job,” he said.

More than anything, Maksim said he wanted young Russians to follow his sibling’s example. “I hope Daniil’s story will serve as an inspiration for others to enlist.”

This article is reported by AfroLA and co-published by AfroLA, Guardian US and the Mammoth Sheet. It’s the first of several stories examining the impact of Los Angeles’s extensive landownership in the Owens Valley.

A red horse statue perched on a 12ft pole greets drivers coming to the town of Bishop from the south. It’s one of the first landmarks here, part of Mike Allen’s corrugated metal feed store – a local institution that sells camping gear, livestock feed and moving equipment in this expansive region of inland California.

But Allen desperately wants to sell it so he can retire.

“I own the building, the inventory, and the asphalt for the parking lot,” Allen said. “But I don’t own the land under it.”

And so Allen can’t get rid of it.

The land under Allen’s store belongs to an owner 300 miles away: the city of Los Angeles, specifically its department of water and power (DWP).

LA has owned large swathes of the Owens valley, where Bishop is located, for more than a century. The city first swooped in in the early 1900s, at the dawn of California’s water wars. As the metropolis grew at breakneck speed, its leaders searched for ways to sustain that population, and when they entered the Owens valley, they found what LA lacked: plenty of water.

Over the next decades, LA agents secretly, and aggressively, worked to buy up Owens valley land and take ownership of the water rights that came with those parcels. By 1933, DWP had gobbled up the large majority of all properties in the towns of Bishop, Big Pine, Independence and Lone Pine.

Today, DWP owns 90% of privately available land in Inyo county, which encompasses the Owens valley, and 30% of all the land in neighboring Mono county. Aqueducts transporting water from both counties provided 395,000 acre-feet of water to LA last year – about 73% of the city’s water supply.

Stories of LA’s brazen land grab in the Owens valley have been told for decades – it was loosely depicted in the 1974 film Chinatown. And the fierce legal battles that have ensued, including over the environmental impact, have made regional headlines for years.

But residents, business owners, and some municipal leaders in this rural region say LA’s landownership in the valley has taken on a new, and crippling, dimension in recent years.

DWP has taken steps to exert even greater control over its land holdings in the valley. An AfroLA review of hundreds of documents obtained through records requests, as well as interviews with municipal officials, residents, legal experts and business owners, reveals DWP started changing the terms of leases in 2015, and formally added restrictions on the transfer of leases from one owner to the next in 2016.

DWP’s moves have meant that hundreds of families who have built lives in the Eastern Sierra region have seen their plans upended, often being left with the stark choice of abandoning their livelihoods or fighting DWP.

For Allen, the owner of the feed store, the 2016 changes mean that he can’t retire to Montana, where his wife moved seven years ago.

Selling the store had always been Allen’s retirement plan. But since the new owner will not be able to transfer their lease or sell the business to recoup their investment, he hasn’t found a buyer. Meanwhile, his own lease has gone into holdover status: he continues to pay his rent and abides by the terms of his lease, but he can be evicted at will with 30 days’ notice.

Leases lapsing into holdover status have long been an issue, but between 2015 and 2023, more leases have gone into holdover than did before.

Allen now faces a brutal choice: continue to make month-to-month payments on an inactive lease, or surrender the building to DWP and abandon his business. If he lets the lease go back to DWP, he has to liquidate all of his inventory and demolish all of the improvements he has invested in over the years – including the asphalt in the parking lot and the building itself. That’s just a standard clause in DWP leases.

Since DWP implemented the changes, at least 13% of leases in Inyo county have reverted back to DWP control, an analysis of property tax records reveals.

Los Angeles is not alone in importing water from hundreds of miles away. San Francisco obtains most of its water from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir and water system in Yosemite, and the California state water project gets most of its water from rural areas in northern California. LA’s also not the only city that secures its water supply through land holdings – New York City has similar landlord-tenant relationships. But DWP in the Owens valley is the “poster child” for negatively impacting the broader local economy, according to Greg James, special counsel for Inyo county.

As water becomes increasingly scarce in a more extreme climate, urban communities like Los Angeles will increasingly need to rely on imported water, obtained at the expense of the environment and economies of rural and Indigenous communities. Los Angeles claims to be working toward diversifying its water portfolio through stormwater capture, recycled water and conservation as well as importing water from the Colorado River basin and northern California. But even after conservation efforts, LA projects it will still need to get about 30% of its water from the Owens valley by 2045, meaning the city and the valley are locked in a relationship for the foreseeable future.

Los Angeles DWP did not respond to a detailed request for comment from AfroLA. DWP’s Eastern Sierra division also did not respond to a request for comment.

The Land of Flowing Water

Inyo county is a land of extremes. The region is larger than the state of Vermont but fewer than 20,000 people call it home. In its west, the peaks of the Eastern Sierra tower 10,000ft above the Owens valley. In its south lie the desert landscapes of Death valley. Brave hikers can trek from Mt Whitney, the highest point in the continental US, to Badwater Basin in Death valley, the lowest point.

During winter, the Owens valley ground is parched. But come spring, when snowmelt runs from the Sierra and White Mountains down to the Owens River, the valley turns lush green. The Paiute, who have lived in the valley for thousands of years, named it Payahuunadü, the Land of Flowing Water.

William Mulholland, LA’s famed water and infrastructure czar, realized the valley’s potential when he camped in the area in 1904. LA agents soon went on a buying spree, locking in land and water holdings.

In the late 30s, the city briefly authorized the sale of about half of Bishop’s properties back into private ownership, but by the mid-40s, DWP had stopped that practice. Between 1967 and today, DWP added 10,000 more acres in the valley to its holdings.

Today, LA owns 252,000 of the county’s 6.5m acres. The federal government, which owns the land in Death Valley national park and Inyo national forest, holds much of the rest.

DWP’s extensive holdings make it the de facto landlord for many of Inyo county’s residents. DWP leases the majority of the region back to those living there – to the county government, to ranchers, to veterinarians and retailers, to families who have lived here for generations and people compelled to move in because of its stunning outdoors.

Living here had long been affordable, too. LA’s leases were inexpensive, and for decades, the lease process was simple and straightforward, valley residents said. Much like the way many mobile home parks operate, property owners own the structures of their homes and businesses, but not the land underneath. DWP leases them that land through agreements with fixed terms, at fixed rates. Lease holders pay either month-to-month or yearly. When a lessee previously sold their home or business, the lease for the property transferred to the new owner after a credit score check, lease holders recalled. Lease transfers were hardly ever rejected, they said.

That changed in 2016. That year, DWP ruled the way it had been treating leases conflicted with the 1924 Los Angeles city charter, which outlaws the sale or lease of city property except at public auction. From then on, DWP has only allowed leases to be transferred once. That meant an existing tenant could pass on their lease, but the new tenant could not, and instead would have to let the land revert back to LA control.

If leases go out to bid, DWP auctions the lease off to the highest bidder. Under the old system, the lessee was able to profit directly from the sale of their business. Now, DWP reaps the financial benefits of the auction.

DWP retroactively applied this policy to leases established before 2016. For lessees like Mike Allen, who have leased for decades, it has devalued their businesses and made them difficult to sell, because a new owner has no guarantee of recouping their costs.

The department carved out an exemption for families, allowing leases to transfer within a family an unlimited number of times.

“For 100 years they’ve never cared,” said Mark Lacey, a Lone Pine resident and rancher who sits on the Owens Valley Committee, a non-profit that helped negotiate environmental mitigations in a water agreement between LA and the county. “Now all of a sudden, you know, somebody decided, ‘Well, we’re going to actually follow the letter of the law based on the LA city charter that says, you know, we can’t do this. We have to put [leases] out to bid.’”

Many lessees often only learned of the changes when they went to renew their leases, or tried to transfer them.

Tom Talbot was the valley’s veterinarian for more than 45 years. Talbot owned Bishop veterinary hospital, a yellow cottage on the north side of Bishop near the intersection of Route 395 and Route 6. It’s the only full-service vet practice for hundreds of miles in every direction.

In 2015, Talbot wanted to retire from medicine while still healthy enough to ranch full-time. But when he went to sell the hospital and transfer his lease, he said, he found completely rewritten rules.

Talbot had hoped his son-in-law Tyler Ludwick, and Nicole Milici, who had volunteered working at the clinic since she was a teenager, would jointly take over the business.

But the new transfer policy meant Milici could not be put on the lease. As a relative, Ludwick could. “We’re 50% partners in the business,” said Ludwick. “But it’s all me on the lease.”

The lease structure forced Ludwick to take on more risk, he said in an interview, leaving him at the mercy of changes to his lease terms. But it was just the start of the veterinarians’ problems.

“It’s just a giant handcuff that completely stymies any possibility of growth, equity, business advancement, because you don’t have anything real to sell,” Ludwick said.

Ludwick’s lease has been expired for years, and DWP hasn’t renewed it. Without a lease active for the long run, it’s been hard to secure funds for repairs and improvements, he said.

The yellow and brick building that houses the clinic is 60 years old and “rotting out from under us”, said Ludwick.

After Talbot transferred his lease to Ludwick, lease policies changed again. Starting in 2016, the family transfer policy was limited to transfers between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, and between spouses. As Talbot’s son-in-law, Ludwick would never have been able to take over the lease.

Ludwick and Milici recently purchased an out-of-business Ford dealership on some rare non-DWP-owned private land. They built a brand new veterinary hospital on the land and they plan to use their current lease to provide specialty care, such as physical therapy.

“The good news is we got something that is ours,” said Ludwick. “It gives us freedom.”

Reagan Slee, owner of a sporting goods store, went through a different set of disappointments.

In 2019, DWP changed its stance on selling properties to lessees. The new policy allows some business owners the chance to purchase the land they are leasing. Slee’s store, filled with hunting and fishing gear, was at the top of that list.

Appraisers appraised, surveyors surveyed, and more than a year later Slee had a purchase agreement with the city of LA. That’s where progress stopped.

“The price was fair,” Slee said. He put money in the bank, then waited. More than 18 months have passed since Slee signed his purchase agreement.

“There was some excitement a year or two ago where we thought, ‘OK, this is finally going to happen,’” Slee said. “But now, I would be surprised if they called and said, ‘Hey, we’re ready to move forward.’”

Slee’s lease expired in 2017, so he, too, is in holdover status. It would take more than a year to draft a new lease in order to sell his business, he said.

Meanwhile, Slee struggles to upgrade or perform maintenance on his store. “You’re invested in something that is unknown, that is not yours and then there is no date attached to it. The value of the business is worth almost nothing, because if I was to go sell, it can’t be transferred.”

According to Slee, DWP could keep the lease in holdover for 15 years, or it could pull the plug tomorrow. DWP did not respond to questions about Slee’s case.

Since the transfer policies went into effect nearly a decade ago, approximately 20 leases have changed hands, according to AfroLA’s review of tax assessor data.

Meanwhile, at least 49 of DWP’s 354 leases and use permits in Inyo county have been removed from circulation and not put back out to bid. Use permits, which function similarly to leases, are “agreements for private use”, according to the aqueduct operations plan. These include people’s backyards, pasture for horses and other uses.

Tamara Cohen, a former Inyo county public health officer who served for 23 years, saw the use permit for her backyard return to DWP control. For years, she lived on a multi-home lot with two business partners, Kenney Scruggs and Benett Kessler, and a shared 1.3-acre backyard. The homes and the land underneath them were in a trust, with Scruggs’s name on the use permit. When Scruggs died, the DWP agreement passed to Kessler. And when Kessler passed away, Cohen was ready to take it over in turn. Instead, a DWP real estate officer paid her a visit, and told her to vacate the yard within 60 days.

The rules had changed since 2013, when Kessler, an investigative reporter who spent her career monitoring DWP, took over the agreement, Cohen recalled the agent saying. Because the agreement was held in a trust, the agent said, it was taken out of circulation and would need to go to auction instead of being transferred.

The agent didn’t seem happy about the prospect of an auction either, Cohen recalled: “[He] was pretty clear with us that going for the bid process was just really a hassle for him to do,” said Cohen. “He said they are trying to get rid of these kinds of [backyard] leases.”

Cohen was later given until the end of the original agreement, an additional 18 months, to clear out and vacate the land. This included ripping out a patio and Scruggs’ garden. Now there is nothing but dirt and locust trees. Last spring, Cohen spent $7,000 to remove the dead vegetation on DWP’s property in order to prevent flooding and fires.

“It’s disconcerting. The trees have come down on what used to be leased land and it’s scary – it’s such a fuel for fires,” Cohen said, pointing to the dead locust trees that line the creek behind her home. “That used to be a lease that was maintained, and now it’s not. It’s a fire risk.”

The cost of drought

The circumstances LA found itself in when it applied the lease changes were similar to the ones it faced when it arrived in the Owens valley more than a century ago: it was desperate for water.

If LA’s 200,000 residents were thirsty in 1904, today, the city has a daunting task of servicing 3.8 million people living in an ever-warming climate. Much of the south-west US has faced crippling drought conditions at various points in past decades, with states and cities competing for few resources.

DWP has also seen its operations in the Eastern Sierra curtailed. The origins of a trio of lawsuits settled between the late 80s and the early aughts are long and complicated. But the outcome of the suits, initiated over rules on environmental protections, legally requires DWP to leave hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water in Inyo and Mono counties for the towns; people, including Indigenous nations; and wildlife of the region.

The drought lasting from 2011 to 2016 marked the driest years ever recorded in California. In 2014, internal DWP documents show, department staff recognized it needed to make changes to “prevent waste of water” in some of its most important leases: those of Inyo county’s ranchers.

The majority of acres leased by DWP in the Eastern Sierra are to ranchers, who graze their herds in the shadows of rugged Sierra Nevada mountains.

Ranchers and DWP have a “symbiotic relationship”, said Scott Kemp, whose family ranches more than 1,000 cattle on department land, one of the largest herds in the valley. “We take care of the land … People from Los Angeles can come up here and fish, and do what they do.”

A 2006 internal agency document describes the relationship as such: “The ranch lessees serve as stewards of the land and monitor and manage their leases consistent with LADWP’s goal of providing a reliable high quality water supply to Los Angeles. With the ranch leases providing this function, LADWP is able to concentrate its personnel on maintaining and operating water conveyances.”

In 2014, amid the drought, DWP proposed to the ranchers to change their lease terms to limit the amount of irrigation water they receive as part of their leases in years of normal water supplies. The department also proposed to allow DWP to provide water at its sole discretion in years with low snowmelt from the mountains, and place restrictions on water for cattle to drink.

Inyo county’s water department responded that those changes could violate the 1991 water agreement between the county and DWP.

The proposed lease changes led to conversations between DWP and the trade group representing the ranchers. Both parties agreed on restrictions for how water, particularly for cattle to drink, would be used. They also agreed that ranch lessees from then on could only transfer their lease once. They agreed that DWP would keep the proceeds from leases that would be auctioned off instead of transferred.

A year later, DWP attempted to cut water off from the ranch lessees a second time. In a 27 April 2015 letter, DWP informed ranch lessees it would cut off their water supply in three days. According to a letter dated two days later, “plainly stated, there is insufficient water to meet all water users’ needs”. Concerned community members and the county met with DWP. The solution? Diverting some water destined for Owens Lake, which helped keep toxic dust from the dry lakebed out of the air, to irrigation water for ranchers.

Even though the transfer limits originated with the ranchers, the department applied the policy broadly. On 15 November 2016, commercial lessees and Inyo county supervisors grilled the aqueduct manager about the lease changes during a board meeting.

The county supervisor Jeff Griffiths told the then DWP aqueduct manager he hoped he and the city understood the repercussions of imposing the lease-transfer restrictions the ranchers had agreed to on commercial lessees as well. “This could be the largest economic impact to the community since LA’s original acquiring of Owens valley land,” said Griffiths.

A DWP memo on the origin of the one-time assignment policy that was included in emails between DWP real estate staff and the then board president, Mel Levine, in 2016 only addresses ranch leases, and explains the changes were designed to bring the lease transfer process into compliance with the Los Angeles city charter and state law protecting DWP lessees in Inyo county.

But reporting by AfroLA shows the one-time assignment policy and the family transfer policy are being applied to commercial leases and use permits, such as Cohen’s backyard.

The restrictions that have been imposed on how much water LA can pull out of Inyo county, either through negotiations with the county or the courts, have been extremely costly for the city.

Internal DWP documents indicate that DWP has spent $30m-$40m annually buying water from southern California’s metropolitan water district to offset the water it now leaves in Inyo for the ranchers. The water DWP has been required to provide to Indigenous communities, for environmental mitigation and for agriculture since the water agreements costs the agency at least $124m annually, according to an internal briefing book.

A way of life

Though long constructive, the relationship between DWP and some ranchers has been strained by years of drought and lease changes.

“DWP is nice to us in the wet years,” said Talbot, the former veterinarian, whose ranch is located in the picturesque Round valley just north of Bishop.

In years water is plentiful, the department releases more water and provides flood control measures, Talbot said. But in dry years, DWP limits the ranchers’ water allocation to the minimum it is legally required to provide, he said.

Many Inyo county ranchers have been affected by severe cuts DWP has made to water allocations in Mono county, which doesn’t have the same legal protections as Inyo county.

Mark Lacey said he had to look for pasture land as far away as Oregon and Nebraska when DWP cut water to Mono county in 2015.

“I got transportation costs going up and then coming back. And then I had to pay for that pasture while I was there, as well as everything I have from DWP,” he recalled. “The transportation costs were horrendous.”

“After 2016, I couldn’t afford to do what I did. The price of cattle just didn’t allow me to make those moves,” he said. “Freight was too high. Pasture elsewhere either wasn’t available, or it was poor, [the price] was too high.”

Lacey has seen every drought in the Owens valley since the 70s. He said the 2011-16 drought was not as bad as the 1980s drought, but the impacts were more acute because of the water shutoffs.

For some in the county, the changes to the leases do not outweigh the benefits of LA’s land ownership. The county supervisor Jen Roeser said the agency’s presence in Inyo has been critical to maintaining the rural lifestyle residents enjoy.

Roeser lives in a mobile home on a DWP lease she’s had for decades. “It’s our whole lifestyle. And our purpose in life that we felt we were given was to operate a quality business in the mountains,” she said, one of her dogs napping in the shade of the black locust trees.

Roeser and her husband recently retired from running a mule packing business, which serves tourists hiking deep into the Sierra backcountry and also serves as one of the only ways to fight fires high up in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Bishop’s home to a week-long mule rodeo, and Roeser is a mule rodeo champion.

“[We’ve] introduced families and tourists to amazing experiences that impacted their lives and gave them memories that last generations, and we hear from hundreds of people every year that have memories that are still with them from pack trips. And these leases make that possible,” said Roeser.

On the other side of the Sierra, Roeser explained, the lease rates of winter pasture land have grown increasingly expensive. DWP land, she said, is higher quality than alternatives.

DWP, she added, also stimulates local economies as the county’s largest employer. It provides well-paying jobs – employing engineers and scientists and staff maintaining its infrastructure – with good benefits for local residents, including multigenerational families who live in the county but work for the city of Los Angeles, she said. DWP’s payroll in the Owens valley was approximately $60m.

As Los Angeles takes steps to diversify its water sources, the Eastern Sierra region will still make up a critical supply of the city’s water needs. For the Owens valley, that means a continuation of good jobs, but also the continued presence of a landlord 300 miles away making decisions about its residents’ livelihoods. While decisions, often behind closed doors, are made, lessees like Slee and Allen wait.

Credits

This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.

The stories are the result of more than two years of records requests, interviews and data analysis by AfroLA. Guardian US provided assistance as a co-publishing partner in the editing, production and promotion of this story. Collaboration and co-publication with the Mammoth Sheet helped ensure that Owens valley residents have ready access to news that directly affects their lives and communities. Thank you to the many people who made reporting and sharing this story possible.

For AfroLA

Justin Allen, technology manager

Dana Amihere, editor

Jennings Hanna, interaction designer

Alexandra Kanik, web developer

Katie Licari, reporter

Stu Patterson, copy editor

Alex Tatusian, visual designer

For Guardian US

Matthew Cantor, copy editor

Will Craft, data editor

Eline Gordts, editor

Thalia Juarez, photo editor

Andrew Witherspoon, data editor

Diane Abbott has confirmed she has been banned from standing as a Labour MP at the next election, bringing to an end a near 40-year career as one of the party’s highest-profile politicians.

The MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington issued a statement to broadcasters on Wednesday morning confirming she had been handed back the Labour whip after a months-long investigation into her conduct, but would not be allowed to stand again as a Labour candidate.

The decision leaves Abbott, the first black woman to be elected to the British parliament, likely to head out of parliament having sat as an MP since 1987.

According to the BBC, Abbott said: “Although the whip has been restored, I am banned for standing as a Labour candidate.”

Separately, Abbott said on X she was “dismayed” that reports overnight suggested she was being barred as a candidate, reflecting a chaotic 24 hours in which her political future hung in the balance.

She appeared to suggest she would not stand as an independent candidate to challenge Labour, tweeting: “Naturally I am delighted to have the Labour Whip restored and to be a member of the PLP. Thank you to all those who supported me along the way. I will be campaigning for a Labour victory.”

Abbott did not respond to a request to comment further.

Her allies had previously said she had not been informed of a reported decision to ban her from standing as a Labour candidate. Reports on Wednesday suggested she had wanted to announce her own retirement but was caught off guard by a story in the Times saying she would be barred from standing for Labour.

Abbott was suspended from the party last year after writing a letter to the Observer that appeared to play down racism against Jewish people. She argued that minority groups such as Jewish people, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people faced similar levels of prejudice to people with red hair.

Abbott apologised for her remarks, was placed under investigation and lost the Labour whip.

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, sparked some hope among Abbott’s allies when he defended her this year after the Guardian revealed she had been the subject of racist remarks by the Conservatives’ biggest donor, Frank Hester.

Starmer praised Abbott at the time as a “trailblazer”, adding: “She has probably faced more abuse than any other politician over the years on a sustained basis.”

Abbott’s friends were dismayed that she did not get the whip back in the subsequent weeks.

Starmer said this week that the investigation into her conduct was ongoing. But it emerged on Tuesday it had concluded in December, with Abbott being told to complete an online antisemitism training course in February.

Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, said on Wednesday: “The Labour party has been telling everybody this investigation into Diane Abbott is ongoing, [but] it now appears it concluded months ago. So really it’s a question for them to clear this all up, what happened when, be transparent about it.”

John McTernan, a former adviser to Tony Blair, described the events of the last 24 hours as “a mess that could have been avoided”.

Jacqueline McKenzie, a lawyer at Leigh Day and a friend of Abbott, told the BBC on Wednesday: “What was really astonishing was the fact that just this week we saw Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, as well as senior officials saying that an investigation was still under way. I think it’s really incumbent upon them to explain. Have they been honest about this process? And I think that’s what’s really shocking.”

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “This is a decision for the Labour party’s national executive committee.”

He sought to put Abbott’s case in the context of Starmer’s desire to clamp down on antisemitism in the party. “Keir Starmer, when he talks about improving standards in the Labour party, he really meant it,” he said.

Asked on Times Radio whether he felt comfortable about the way Abbott’s case had been handled, Streeting said: “No, not particularly.”

The poet Patrick Kavanagh was inspired to write sonnets about the “leafy-with-love” banks of the Grand Canal near Baggot Street bridge in south-central Dublin. There was not much poetry or love on the same stretch of the canal the other day, as rain whipped a row of brightly coloured tents neatly lining the towpath, side by side.

The occupants I met were mostly keeping hidden from the rain and, perhaps, from those who kick the tents and attack volunteer helpers, or the self-styled “patriots” who travel the country burning down designated refugee accommodation sites, chanting that Ireland is full.

But Nabil, who arrived in Ireland on 8 May, told me about his journey from the Gaza Strip, through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, reaching Ireland via “Italia”. Despite the pitiful and precarious conditions, he was relieved to be in the country, he said, and hoped his family – including a newborn – would eventually be able to join him. He made a cradling gesture as he said the word “baby”.

If Nabil had heard about Ireland’s advocacy for Palestinian rights, he might be puzzled by his current plight. As of 28 May, Ireland officially recognises that the Palestinian state exists. Nabil is no longer stateless in the eyes of Ireland – he is just homeless on the streets of its capital.

Ireland’s recognition of Palestine is applauded by millions of people around the world. Younger generations in particular feel immense pride at the willingness of a small country to go out on a limb, to take a historic step that the taoiseach Simon Harris told the Dáil on Tuesday, is “the right thing to do”.

Micheál Martin, the foreign minster, told the Guardian in March that empathy was a factor driving Ireland’s outspokenness on the slaughter and starvation in Gaza. “We’ve experienced famine, we know what it’s like in our psyche,” he said.

Martin is right that Ireland’s national trauma should give its people a particular antenna for injustice. Few families were not touched by mass starvation, displacement or dispossession. My ancestor Rose died at the age of 20 on a “coffin ship” crossing the Atlantic to reach the US in the spring of 1850, when famine had claimed nearly one million lives. I see little difference between her resolve and that of Nabil, and the many others who risk their lives every day to reach Europe.

But if our history can inspire a bold and principled foreign policy, why at home is the state telling a vulnerable Palestinian that the best Ireland can do for him is a pop-up tent and a sleeping bag?

About 1,800 people seeking asylum are homeless in Ireland. Mini-encampments began to mushroom in Dublin after the distressing forcible dismantling by the authorities of a bigger “tent city” on 1 May. The tents keep sprouting because Ireland’s asylum system is broken, and a panicked government, having failed to find spaces for asylum seekers or make them less visible ahead of local and European elections on 7 June, wants to be seen to be putting a “full” sign on the door.

They have become symbolic of immigration as an issue that is dominating an Irish election campaign – for the first time. The toxic context is months of small but persistent protests, clashes and arson attacks on vacant buildings designated for refugee accommodation. No charges have been brought, but online conspiracists, racists and ultra-nationalists, some of whom found an anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown platform in the pandemic, have openly encouraged anti-refugee hatred.

In December, the government announced that it could no longer provide beds for asylum seekers – only tents. The timing, only weeks after riots in Dublin in which far-right agitators tried to whip up violence against foreigners by circulating a false rumour that an asylum seeker was responsible for a stabbing, was not a coincidence.

Claims and counterclaims about the “Rwanda effect” of UK policy have added a new layer of panic. Is the UK pushing its unwanted asylum seekers to Ireland via Northern Ireland? Gardaí have been stopping and searching buses travelling from Belfast to Dublin.

Either way, tents in the streets are welcome visual evidence for international conspiracists that Europe is swamped by “refugee camps”. To many Irish voters, they signify chaos and failed policy, but also a sense that immigration in all its forms is “out of control”.

And so Ireland, which has never elected a far-right politician, and whose government is showing commendable moral leadership over Palestine, risks heading down the same perilous rightward lurch on immigration as much of the rest of Europe.

Not all of this was inevitable. True, immigration is a very recent Irish phenomenon. Before the mid-1990s, and then an influx of labour from eastern Europe after 2004 that framed the “Celtic Tiger” boom years, the idea of anyone coming to Ireland for work or refuge would have seemed ridiculous.

Refugee numbers have risen sharply since 2022, even if Ireland is not by any stretch the most burdened EU state. In 2013, there were 940 first-time asylum applicants to Ireland. Between 2022 and the end of 2023, there were more than 26,000.So far this year, more Palestinians have applied for protection from Ireland than for the whole of 2023.

The suddenness of the transition from a country that was almost entirely monocultural and white to one in which 20% of the population was born abroad created an obvious space for pushback. Yet, in the 2020 general election, only 1% of people said immigration was an important factor in how they voted. Ireland took in about 100,000 Ukrainians after the 2022 Russian invasion – to zero public outcry. Until late 2023, immigration registered as a concern for only about 5% of respondents in an Irish Times survey.

At least some of the tolerance was the result of planning. I know this because about 3,000 refugees from nearly 30 countries were resettled in small rural places (including my home town) between 2000 and 2019, and a further 2,100 Syrians arrived from UN camps in Lebanon and Jordan between 2015 and 2021, with minimal fuss.

Language and other professional supports were provided. Schools and sports clubs were liaised with, and were happy to have new pupils and players in their midst. A councillor in another part of the region proudly told the local paper in 2023 that most of the Syrians who had arrived a few years earlier had become part of the community. “It’s good for your heart to see it,” he said.

The place where I grew up, and where my family has lived (and emigrated from) for generations, has a population of less than 8,000. Almost imperceptibly, it has gone from homogeneity to multi-ethnicity in 20 years. Syrian families have settled in alongside eastern Europeans. The small Muslim community has a prayer centre a few streets away from the church. Modular housing for 200 Ukrainian refugees opened in July 2023, barely noticed. No doubt racism shows its face occasionally, but immigration has been a non-issue. And this in itself is a remarkable achievement.

Or it was. Now, in a climate of disinformation and hardened mainstream political rhetoric, 63% of voters in Ireland clamour for a tougher asylum policy and more than a third say immigration is a negative thing. A modular homes project like the one that raised no eyebrows a year ago, has drawn violent protests in another town in the region.

A structural housing and rent crisis is often cited as a source of justified anger across Ireland. But refugees are not competing with people trying to get on the housing ladder. It is far-right and anti-immigrant voices who conflate the two issues, to foster a dishonest narrative in which foreigners are jumping the queue. Deliberately or not, the government’s hard talk seems to confirm the connection: you can’t get a house? Don’t worry, no foreigner will get anything better than a tent.

A dehumanising and shambolic refugee system – the current backlog of unprocessed cases is 21,000 people – could have been fixed.

When I was back visiting family this month, it was disturbing to see canvassers for far-right candidates handing out their incoherent and hate-filled flyers for the European elections.

But it’s been even worse to hear elected politicians on local radio, dog-whistling thinly disguised nativism as concern about the safety of local communities. Most people in small towns will not have had a negative encounter with a refugee, but once the public discourse is contaminated it is hard to detoxify.

When trouble flared at a protest against an asylum centre in County Wicklow recently, most of the social media posts egging on the “patriots” were generated in the US, UK and Canada. This suggests that support for hi-vis vest-wearing troublemakers is still fringe. But letting them set the discourse is playing with fire.

Anti-immigration candidates are standing in each of Ireland’s three European parliament constituencies. They may not gain an electoral foothold this time, but the anti-immigrant vote will almost certainly build if the political class nods along with their arguments. A general election must be held by March 2025. And as Ireland’s neighbours elsewhere in Europe have discovered, when mainstream politicians make elections about far-right issues, voters don’t vote mainstream – they vote far right.

In our old world, the national story was simpler: stagnation, unemployment, emigration. Now, having dwindled for a century, the population has, for the first time since the famine, recovered to exceed 5 million people and is growing.

This is good news. The Irish government is running a country which has full employment. It has enough wealth to fix its multiple housing issues and support those communities that are hosting refugees.

It is not too late to challenge the baleful myths of the far right. And just as they have dared to do on Palestine, Ireland’s leaders must pull public opinion with them behind a confident and hopeful narrative for a progressive, inclusive country that knows “the right thing to do”. If Ireland can inspire others with its political and moral leadership in the world, it can do the same at home.

The next government should force all tradespeople who install home heat pumps, solar panels and insulation to sign up to a mandatory accreditation scheme to counter mistrust in the industry, a leading consumer group is demanding.

A report from Which? found that households face “significant anxiety” in choosing tradespeople to fit low-carbon heating systems, such as heat pumps, and insulation after “press stories about poor work and rogue traders”.

It said 45% of households report that they do not know what qualifications to check for when selecting a tradesperson to carry out work in their homes, and 55% find it difficult to trust the available information, including contractors’ own claims and customer reviews.

The lack of clear information and quality controls threatened to delay home upgrades that were essential if Britain was to wean households off fossil fuel heating and hit its climate targets, the consumer group said.

Under current rules, installers who undertake work through the government’s boiler upgrade and energy efficiency schemes must sign up to either the Microgeneration certification scheme or the Trustmark certification scheme.

However, installers who plan to undertake work paid for without government funds are not required to sign up to any accreditation body.

Which? has called on whoever wins the 4 July election to set a clear deadline for all tradespeople to be certified via the same schemes, and to take responsibility for their oversight in order to maintain standards.

Rocio Concha, a director at Which?, said: “Over the next few years, millions of households across the UK will make significant changes to their home heating systems – such as installing heat pumps – to make their homes more energy efficient and support lower energy costs.

“It’s essential that the right standards are in place to ensure that work is done to a good quality and people are protected against the small minority of rogue traders and cowboy builders.”

Government data shows that by the end of January this year fewer than 5,000 homes had been insulated under a scheme which aimed to insulate 300,000 homes to guard against volatile energy prices.

Separate research from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank found that a lack of progress on insulating British homes is costing bill payers £3.2bn a year, despite recent drops in energy prices.

It reported that upgrading the average UK home with an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of D to a C would have saved the bill payer £200 a year. For the 4.4m homes that have a rating of E or F the savings would have been between £400 to £550.

Last year, the government scrapped its target for all privately rented homes to be rated EPC C or above by 2025, in an overhaul of its net zero pledges. The ECIU said upgrading those homes alone would save those households a total of £1.4bn a year under the new prices.