Next week the Chancellor Rachel Reeves will reveal the outcome of her Spending Review.

It will allocate money to day-to-day public services for the next three years.

It will also set infrastructure budgets for the next four years.

The review will directly impact on what Stormont Ministers have to spend on public services in Northern Ireland.

What do we already know?

Last year Reeves set what is known as the "spending envelope" – the amount by which total government spending will change in a given period.

Day-to-day spending is planned to grow by an average of 1.2% above the rate of inflation each year for the next three years.

Infrastructure spending is planned to grow by 1.3% above inflation a year over the next four years.

These are much lower growth rates than this year and last year, reflecting the new government's "emergency" injection of cash into the health service and public sector pay deals.

On Wednesday the Chancellor will break it down further, making allocations to each central government department.

The precise allocation of this money matters for Stormont's spending plans.

Health vs Defence: Why it matters?

More than 90% of what Stormont ministers have to spend comes from the Treasury through what is known as "the block grant."

The increase in the block grant is worked out using a calculation known as the Barnett formula, which is based on the annual changes in UK central government departmental budgets.

It gives Stormont an equivalent spending increase for the size of the NI population, adjusted for the extent to which each service is devolved.

Some services, like health, are almost entirely devolved but defence is not devolved.

If the government decides it is going to spend more on defence at the expense of other services that will have an impact on the amount of extra money in the Stormont pot.

In simple terms: If the UK Department of Health sees its budget increase by £100m, then Northern Ireland would get approximately £3m extra.

If the Ministry of Defence budget increases by £100m Stormont does not get anything extra.

A bigger Stormont top-up?

When devolution was restored in 2024 the government agreed a financial package which included an automatic top-up of any money awarded by the Barnett formula.

The government was persuaded that the level of need in Northern Ireland means it requires spending of £124 per head for every £100 per head spent in England.

As Northern Ireland was funded below that level, the government said that in future every £1 that comes through the Barnett formula will now come with an extra 24p.

That will apply until the overall level of funding need is reached.

The independent Fiscal Council has estimated that will be worth £815m over five years.

The government said the size of the top up could be reviewed if "independent and credible sources" provide evidence.

To that end the Executive commissioned a study from the economist Prof Gerry Holtham, an expert in the devolution of public finances.

The BBC understands that his work has come back with a range of possible funding need.

The central estimates are £123 per head, for every £100 spent in England, if agricultural spending is excluded and £128 per head if agriculture forms part of the calculation.

If the Treasury is persuaded to accept the higher end of the range it will be worth tens of millions of pounds extra over the next five years.

Softening the cliff edge?

The devolution financial package also brought a large dollop of one-off UK government funding, largely to pay for public sector pay deals.

However that creates a cliff-edge drop in Stormont funding of about £500m in 2026/27 when that short term money runs out.

The government committed to review "concerns about 2026-27 funding" at the Spending Review.

The Fiscal Council has suggested options to tackle the cliff edge could include more one-off funding or setting a new, higher baseline for Stormont's budget.

However, it is also possible that the normal operation of Spending Review will allocate enough money to largely remove the cliff edge.

Casement Park breakthrough?

The Chancellor will be allocating trillions of pounds in the Spending Review but it is a tiny fraction of that which may have most political impact in Northern Ireland.

There is a growing expectation that the UK government will come up with additional money for the construction of a new GAA stadium at Casement Park in Belfast.

That project has been bogged down in labyrinthine planning and funding issues.

The GAA official leading the project has told the BBC he is cautiously optimistic that the Spending Review will include a new financial contribution for the redevelopment project.

A man who beat a woman to death in her own home in Moray has been jailed for a minimum of 24 years.

Mother-of-two Lucretia Donaghy, 32, who was known as Keshia, was found dead at her home in Anderson Drive, Elgin, in November 2023.

Owen Grant, 43, had denied assaulting and murdered her by repeatedly striking her on the head and body.

However a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh found him guilty of murder, where Lord Scott jailed him for life.

The judge, who described the attack as involving a claw-hammer or similar implement, said: "The attack was exceptionally savage, frenzied and brutal."

He said that in a victim impact statement Keshia's mother said her heart was broken.

Keshia died after sustaining multiple blunt force head injuries and was found lying face down in a bedroom.

A neighbour had heard sounds of an argument coming from the downstairs flat and the victim calling out: "No, no, no."

After the murder, Grant turned up drunk at a woman's address and gave her money to source cocaine. She returned to the house and told him she had learned that Keshia was dead.

Grant cried but went on to claim the information was wrong and that police activity at her home was a drugs raid.

A railway line has reopened after four days of engineering work to make the track safe.

Trains between Shrewsbury and Hereford and between Shrewsbury and Llandrindod Wells were suspended, with some services replaced by buses.

Network Rail said had to take action after a collapsed culvert was discovered beneath the track between Craven Arms and Church Stretton in Shropshire.

It said track had to be lifted up to allow the work to be carried out.

Trains on the Heart of Wales line ran between Llandrindod Wells and Swansea only.

Network Rail said it was looking into the cause of the damage.

In parts of Birmingham waste continues to go uncollected as all-out strike action by bin workers grinds on into its sixth week, leaving some of the city's 1.2 million residents to deal with the fallout.

The UK's second city is the largest local authority area in the country, with more than 400,000 households within its boundaries. But they have not been affected equally by the industrial action, and as more time has passed a contrast has begun to emerge.

The dispute has seen waste pile up in some areas, with the problem most stark in the densely populated inner-city areas. Wealthier, more sparsely populated parts have experienced fewer problems.

On the same day that the streets of Balsall Heath were being overwhelmed with rubbish, so much that it was hard in places to walk down the street, a few miles away in wealthy Harborne, wheelie bins stood neatly waiting for collection with no sign of any additional waste.

Talks to end the bin strike in Birmingham will not resume until next week, after the Unite union and the city council failed to reach an agreement on Wednesday.

Members of Unite began staging one-day walkouts in January after being told some workers would be downgraded and have their pay cut.

The action escalated on 11 March, when more than 300 workers began an all-out strike.

Unite said that if the council was prepared to make a firm offer of a one-off payment and guaranteed that there would not be any further pay cuts, its members would go back to work.

For the first three-and-a-half weeks of the industrial dispute striking bin workers used delaying tactics at the city's three main depots to prevent the working wagons, staffed by non-union members and agency staff, from leaving to carry out their rounds.

They walked slowly in front of the gates to delay the lorries departing and continued to walk in front of them after they had left the gates for several hundred metres.

Although more than 300 staff are on strike, several hundred are not.

The delaying tactics meant that wagons were stopped from carrying out their rounds and only about 10% of Birmingham's regular daily bin collections were being completed.

By the beginning of April, because of the industrial action, 22,000 tonnes of uncollected waste had accumulated on the city's streets.

I've been covering the industrial action since it began, and even before it escalated, piles of waste were already mounting up in parts of Birmingham.

This time it already seemed worse than the last strike in Birmingham in 2017, and like then, it appeared to highlight the disparity of wealth in Britain's second city.

The poorer the area, the worse the smell and the bigger the mess.

There was already talk of the infestation of rats, and a pest controller I met in Handsworth told me his workload had already doubled as result of the waste piling up in the streets.

The effects of the strike have been most visible in the city's most deprived wards and places like Small Heath, Sparkbrook and Ladywood.

Here the streets of Victorian terraced houses are home to large multi-generational families or have been divided into flats.

The population density is highest in this area, so there is more waste, and fewer people have access to cars to take their rubbish to the tips. These are the areas where the biggest piles of rubbish have grown.

In Small Heath I met Semir Said, the senior outreach project manager at the Green Lane Mosque, who described how the area had been affected.

"It's very obvious really, piles of rubbish, mountains of rubbish really in streets inner city Birmingham, so yeah a very, very big problem," he said. "Rats feasting is the way I'd describe it, so yes it's a very, very big problem."

He told me, he thought the inner city areas were faring worst.

"It's sad to say but these deprived areas… [you] do find this problem of not being treated fairly, it's very unfortunate, but it is the reality."

The mosque was, he said, trying to find its own solutions and that was why they had arranged for the council's street cleaning team to base their wagons there, so people could bring their rubbish to be disposed of.

Queues of cars were waiting to offload their rubbish, and the mosque had enrolled the services of teenagers on their Easter break to help with the unloading.

During the strike these have been one of the few options people could take to get rid of their rubbish. At one, at Woodgate Valley Park, on the outskirts of the city near its border with Worcestershire I witnessed a queue that was more than a mile long.

Some people had parked their cars and were carrying unwanted items into the site, where everything was simply thrown into the same waste truck – metal, glass, household waste and recycling. Here there was exasperation and anger, and the sense that Birmingham's reputation was being dragged down.

"It's absolute carnage, it's scandalous", one man with heavy bin bags in each hand and a full car to unload told me.

'Postcode issue'

I first met Naz Khan during the last bin strike when he and his friends hired a lorry to collect rubbish from people who could not take it away themselves.

Eight years later I bumped into him again, once again trying to help people get rid of their rubbish.

He told me that the problems in his area had been exacerbated by people from elsewhere bringing their rubbish into poorer inner-city areas to get rid of it.

"A lot of people are using our areas to do a lot of fly-tipping", he said, adding that he felt there was a "postcode issue" when it came to bin collections.

In one of the biggest piles of waste I saw there was an old bed frame, several empty tins of catering cooking oil and even the front bumper from a Toyota.

Other people have also been doing their bit and trying to clear up their neighbourhoods. Sadia Khan, the chair of Friends of Sparkgreen Park, has been organising litter picks since before the strike began, but things have only got worse since it started.

"It feels like the litter picks aren't making any difference, the litter and the fly-tipping is coming back twofold. It's a gloomy place to be in, it's depressing," she said.

Her aim was to try to clear the park of waste before the Easter weekend so that if the weather was nice, people would be able to head out for picnics.

"You want a beautiful park, enjoy the Easter weekend and the holidays now, and people can't go for a picnic, they can't even have time with their friends and family out in the park.

"It's just so sad to see," she added.

Two-tier system accusations

One evening in Balsall Heath, I spoke to a resident who told me that the problems had been exacerbated by a lack of civic pride from locals, but blamed the poor waste collection service their area had experienced even before industrial action began for creating a sense of malaise.

It is a common complaint, that waste collections are missed here and not in wealthy Edgbaston.

You often hear the unsubstantiated claim that streets where councillors live are always spick-and-span, but the ones nearby are left to fend for themselves.

People repeatedly have told me they believe there is a two-tier waste collection in operation.

During the dispute I have put those allegations to both the leader of the council, John Cotton, and the strategic director of city operations, Craig Cooper, and each told me that they were aware of the problems and were committed, as part of the council's reorganisation of waste collection, to make things better and fairer once the strike was over.

The striking members of Unite also acknowledge that there has been a problem in poorer areas, but say council plans to go to fortnightly collections will simply mean a return to some of the scenes we have witnessed since March.

"There were so many bins it was causing conflict with neighbours", said Alexandra Giddings, who lives with her 12-year-old son in a small house near the busy Ladypool Road, in another of the more deprived parts of Birmingham, within the city's famous Balti Triangle.

Her son has chronic asthma and their home is damp, but she was unable to open the windows even during the recent warm spell, because of the stench from the bins that had been mounting up outside.

Things have begun to improve since strikers were prevented from delaying the non-striking bin workers from completing their rounds and army logistics experts were brought in to help with the clear-up.

Despite one recent collection, the bins are piling up again and the stink is really unpleasant.

"I want to go out at least for a walk. Now, I don't want to because the smell's horrendous," Ms Giddings said.

The situation has changed since the beginning of the fifth week of the strike.

West Midlands Police stopped the strikers' delaying tactics by threatening them with arrest and being fined, which enabled more working wagons to carry out daily collections, so that now about 50% of the council's fleet is fully operational.

It cannot separate household waste from recycling, but everyone should now be getting a weekly collection.

People who had waited for six weeks to see a bin lorry have finally had their black bags removed, with the most noticeable improvement made since Army logistics experts were brought in, as they have been able to better co-ordinate the clear up.

The council said that the backlog of waste should have been cleared by this weekend.

By Wednesday, the amount of uncollected waste had fallen to less than 5,000 tonnes.

It has represented a major clear-up operation since the police tactics changed on the picket line and the behind-the-scenes interventions by the government.

One of the striking bin men, Dave, said: "We say to the people of Birmingham, obviously we're residents ourselves, and we really apologise… we're going to make every effort to come back to work as soon as possible and collect the bins again".

Nearly everyone I have spoken to has their own "rat" story.

Reports of infestations have been a headline writer and meme maker's dream, but the rodents have proven surprisingly difficult to capture on film.

When, before the all-out strike began, one resident told BBC News that there were "rats the size of cats" roaming the streets, it gave birth to the phrase that will haunt Birmingham and may tarnish its reputation for the foreseeable future.