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An MP has urged the work and pensions secretary, Amber Rudd, to make the benefits system more humane over Christmas by reinstating a long-standing £10 extra payout and returning to a previous pause on sanctioning claimants over the festive period.

The SNP’s Hannah Bardell said Rudd, who pledged last week to make sure the social security system helped people when they most needed it, should act on her words and do the “decent and right thing”.

She also demanded a reinstatement of a traditional pause over the festive period of sanctioning claimants, in which their payments are docked or stopped as punishment for alleged failures to comply with jobcentre rules.

Labour has pledged £100m a year in additional help for rough sleepers in cold weather, which the party says is key to reducing the unacceptably high number of homeless people who die each year.

There is already a severe weather emergency protocol, under which local authorities are meant to provide extra assistance for homeless people during cold snaps and other weather events such as heatwaves and floods.

Labour’s plan would put initial one-year funding of £100m into a new rough sleepers cold weather fund, which would also find staff to connect them with support workers, with the longer-term aim of helping them stay off the streets permanently.

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The collapse of civilisation and the natural world is on the horizon, Sir David Attenborough has told the UN climate change summit in Poland.

The naturalist was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the 2015 Paris climate deal into reality.

Recent studies show the 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, and the top four in the past four years. Climate action must be increased fivefold to limit warming to the 1.5C scientists advise, according to the UN.

More than 130,000 homeless children will be living in temporary accommodation over the festive period in Britain, the equivalent of five youngsters in every school, according to estimates by the homelessness charity Shelter.

Nearly 10,000 of those will wake up on Christmas Day in bed and breakfasts, hotels or hostels where in many cases their family will have been put up in a single room, sharing bathrooms and kitchens with other residents.

More than 500,000 British workers have been swept into working poverty over the past five years, according to a report that shows the number of people with a job but living below the breadline has risen faster than employment.

In the latest sign that the link between entering work and making ends meet has become increasingly frayed in 21st-century Britain, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) said that the number of workers in poverty hit 4 million last year, meaning about one in eight in the economy are now classified as working poor.

The schools watchdog Ofsted has delivered a damning indictment of the education of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), warning that provision is “disjointed and inconsistent”, with thousands missing out on vital support to which they are entitled.

In her second annual report as chief inspector of England’s schools, Amanda Spielman drew attention to the plight of pupils with SEND, warning that diagnoses were taking too long, were often inaccurate and mental health needs were not supported sufficiently.

Growing numbers of middle-aged and older people are ending up in hospital suffering serious mental health problems after taking drugs, new NHSstatistics reveal.

The number of people in England aged 45 and above admitted with a drug-related mental and behavioural disorder has soared 85% over the last decade.

Cuts to public services and benefits that disproportionately affect the least well-off, single parents and disabled people put the government in breach of its human rights obligations, a study for the UK equalities watchdog has found.

Echoing the recent findings of the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Philip Alston, the study concluded the scale of the cuts and their lopsided impact on the most disadvantaged were a policy choice, rather than inevitable.

Britain crashing out of the European Union without a deal would trigger a deep and damaging recession with worse consequences for the UK economy than the 2008 financial crisis, the Bank of England has warned.

Raising the stakes as Theresa May battles to win support in parliament for her Brexit deal, the central bank said that failure to reach a deal with Brussels – with no transition period to a new trading relationship – would spark an immediate economic crash.

Air pollution cuts the average lifespan of people around the globe by almost two years, analysis shows, making it the single greatest threat to human health.

The research looked at the particulate pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels by vehicles and industry. It found that in many parts of the worst-affected nations – India and China – lifespans were being shortened by six years.