Laura Kuenssberg: Troubling issues clatter onto Yvette Cooper’s desk

Like all cabinet ministers, Cooper and her team are conscious of the ticking clock. The new government isn’t so new anymore. She has complicated problems to solve that can’t be fixed in a hurry, and Labour wants to be able to demonstrate the difference to voters as soon as possible.

Her job is “simply vast”, says one insider – and the challenges facing Cooper are fast evolving, whether that’s dangerous Channel crossings by migrants who want to make a life in the UK in numbers unimaginable 10 years ago, a huge rise in fraud, or the ways in which predators are using rapidly advancing technology to help them with their crimes in the most hideous ways.

New figures from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) shared with us this weekend show how rapidly that challenge is growing and changing. The IWF, a charity with unique powers to hunt down and remove child abuse imagery and material, has told us that the use of artificial intelligence to create illegal content depicting children is growing at an alarming rate.

According to its analysts, reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse have risen by 380% in the last 12 months. In 2024, there were 245 reports, compared to 51 in 2023. Of those, the IWF says 193 involved imagery that was so realistic it had to be treated the same as if it had been real images of children being abused.

The home secretary has already promised new laws in the coming weeks to try to crack down on this problem. And it’s one of the issues we’ll talk about when she joins us in the studio.