Early evening summary
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said that the Tories are to blame for the fact that the government needed today to release another cohort of prisoners early, saying the prisons crisis was “the greatest disgrace of the last Conservative government”. (See 5.05pm.) She used the comment as she made a statement to MPs confirming that David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary, will lead a sentencing review for the government. Mahmood also announced further measures to reduce the jail population. (See 2.15pm and 2.16pm.) Potentially the review could lead to a liberalisation of sentencing laws, but Mahmood told MPs that some sentences could get longer, and that “in some ways, punishment outside a prison can be even more restrictive than prison”. (See 1.57pm.)
Kemi Badenoch has criticised Robert Jenrick, her rival for the Tory leadership, for focusing too much on policy. Yesterday Jenrick said it was “disrespectful” for her not to have policies. Today, in an interview with the BBC’s Nick Robinson for his Political Thinking podcast, Badenoch said Jenrick’s approach was flawed. She explained:
He doesn’t know where he’s going to be standing in four years time. So he uses the word disrespectful. I would not use a word like that about any of the candidates who have have stood …
If this was a general election, yes, it would be wrong to be standing with no policies. This is not a general election. And if you’re going to solve a problem, you need to make sure that you know what the question you’re being asked is. He thinks the question that is being asked is, what are the right policies to win a general election? I think the question being asked, is why should we trust the Conservative party?
Ministers pause plans to open 44 new state schools in England
Ministers have paused plans to open 44 new state schools in England, including three sixth form colleges backed by Eton, while they review each school’s potential demand and value for money, Richard Adams reports.
Ministers are adamant that the last government is to blame for the prison overcrowding crisis. Opening her statement to MPs this afternoon on the sentencing review, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, said:
The crisis in our prisons was, I believe, the greatest disgrace of the last Conservative government. They left our prisons on the point of collapse—a situation that would have forced us to close the prison doors, cancel all trials and force the police to halt arrests. Crime would have gone unpunished, victims would never have seen justice done, and we would have witnessed the total breakdown of law and order. The previous prime minister knew he had to act. His lord chancellor begged him to do so, but instead he called an election.
But voters are not all convinced, polling from YouGov suggests. It says that, while 40% of people think the last government is wholly or more to blame, almost a third of people (29%) think the Conservatives and Labour are equally at fault.
Who do Britons think is to blame for prison overcrowding?
— YouGov (@YouGov) October 22, 2024
Entirely/more the previous Tory government: 40%
Entirely/more the current Labour government: 5%
Both equally: 29%
Neither: 7%https://t.co/HexEUqPmvT pic.twitter.com/BB72IDxQfa
British Palestinians use meeting with Starmer to call for pilot evacuation scheme to bring children from Gaza to UK
Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner today for the first time met a network of British Palestinians to hear calls for an emergency child evacuation scheme, a Palestinian resettlement scheme and tougher measures to break Israel’s blockade on aid.
Starmer, accused by some Palestinians of being instinctively too close to Israel, was asked to consider setting up a pilot evacuation scheme for Palestinian children initially starting with 15 children unable to access any healthcare in Gaza.
There have been repeated complaints that the Home Office refuses to supply temporary visas to children needed to be admitted to the UK for private medical treatment. Most of the children would be based in Egypt.
The families also urged Starmer to set up a family reunification scheme for Palestinian refugees that includes legal pathways for families separated from loved ones in Gaza. The scheme would be modelled on the scheme operating for Ukraine, and no figure has been proposed for how many that could be allowed to come
On aid restrictions ministers have already acknowledged that Israel is restricting aid in an unacceptable way especially this month, but have not yet said ministers believe Israel is implementing what is in effect a campaign to starve Palestinians out of Northern Gaza as part of a so-called “General’s plan” that has been endorsed by the extreme right in Israel.
The families called for a British personnel presence at border crossings to ensure agile inspection processes and monitor and ensure that aid flows unrestricted into Gaza. Britain has repeatedly been denied a diplomatic presence on the aid crossing points, but has supplied £1m in emergency aid for medical evacuees in Egypt.
Israel insists aid has increased since a US warning more than a week ago that arms supplies would be blocked unless 300 aid trucks entered Gaza a day.
One of the family members reflected on the meeting, saying:
It is hard to talk about this collective trauma, but political leaders must hear our testimonies directly, so they understand the real-life impact of their policies.
Bringing 15 children to the UK is a tiny ask compared to the 34,000 injured, and that’s before even mentioning 16,000 killed and 21,000 missing. But we sadly know all too well how much difference one life saved could have been for us.
This would just be a tiny drop in the ocean, but it could be the start of something more.
All we can hope is that they have not just heard what we have said, but have listened.
The group is organised as the British Palestinian Families Network, an informal network set up by British Palestinians with family trapped in Gaza.
Most British arms exported to Israel don't go to Israeli Defence Forces, minister tells MPs
Anneliese Dodds, the Foreign Office minister, told MPs earlier that most British arms exported to Israel don’t go to the Israeli Defence Forces, as she sought to clarify the significance of the government’s decision in September to suspend only 30 of the 300 arms exports licences to Israel.
Speaking in the Commons, she also described the amount of aid reaching Gaza in October as unacceptable, and likely to be the lowest amount for a single month since the conflict began. But she did not set out any specific measures apart from diplomatic pressure to ensure a change.
In what the minister saw as a clarification, she told MPs:
Following the 2 September decision there are currently no extant UK export licences for items to Israel that we assess might be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of UK humanitarian law.
She said the only one exception is UK supplied components for F35s joint strike fighter program. She added:
Most licences for exports to Israel are absolutely not for the Israeli Defence Forces and I am pleased to put that on the record.
She added later there had been misconceptions about the arms exports that have not been suspended.
At the time of the September statement the Foreign Office said:
There are a number of export licences which we have assessed are not for military use in the current conflict in Gaza and therefore do not require suspension. These include items that are not being used by the IDF in the current conflict (such as trainer aircraft or other naval equipment), and other, non-military items. Export licences cover a range of products including things such as food-testing chemicals, telecoms and data equipment.
The Foreign Office has so far refused to publish a list of the suspended and non-suspended arms export licences, or their customers.
The Howard League for Penal Reform has issued a statement welcoming the sentencing review announced today. Andrea Coomber, its chief executive, said:
The trend of imposing ever longer sentences has brought the criminal justice system to the brink. An independent review presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver a more humane and effective response to crime and a lasting solution to the capacity crisis in prisons.
Leftwing MPs call for tax on 'extreme wealth' to be included in budget
A group of leftwing MPs has urged Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, to include a tax on “extreme wealth” in the budget next week.
In their letter, they call for an annual wealth tax, such as 2% on assets over £10m which they say would generate £24bn a year, and equalising capital gains and income tax rates, which they say could raise £16.7bn a year.
They argue:
In recent years, billionaire wealth has soared, increasing by almost £150 billion between 2020 and 2022. Despite this, revenue from wealth taxes has remained stagnant at around 3.4% of the UK’s GDP, proportionately only one percent higher than rates in 1965. This stands in contrast to other trends in the tax system, meaning that the richest are relatively under-taxed. This is deeply unfair and immoral: in an age of climate and economic crises, where public funds are desperately needed, it is necessary that we redress this imbalance.
The transformative potential of taxes on extreme wealth is clear, and appetite for them is growing. Governments around the world - including Norway, Italy and Brazil - are considering fiscal measures to fairly tax the super-rich. As one of the most unequal economies in the G7, the UK should follow suit.
The letter has been signed by 30 MPs and peers from Labour, the Green party, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP, and Alliance, as well as independent MPs.
The full list of signatories is: Adrian Ramsay, Apsana Begum, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Ben Lake, Brian Leishman, Carla Denyer, Cat Smith, Claire Hanna, Clive Lewis, Colum Eastwood, Diane Abbott, Ellie Chowns, Ian Byrne, Ian Lavery, Jeremy Corbyn, Lord (John) Hendy, John McDonnell, Jon Trickett, Kim Johnson, Liz Saville-Roberts, Nadia Whittome, Neil Duncan-Jordan, Olivia Blake, Lord Sikka, Rachel Gilmour, Richard Burgon, Siân Berry, Sorcha Eastwood, Steve Witherden and Zarah Sultana.
In her statement in the Commons Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, said that “fewer than 20” prisoners released under the early release scheme had been put up in hotels. This was “to prevent any homelessness that might lead to higher rates of recall”, she said. The cost was “very, very low”, she said, adding: “This is a temporary measure, and I don’t anticipate it will be used any more extensively than it has been already.”
John Swinney says strike action targeting schools in his constituency 'completely unacceptable'
Scotland’s first minister has said pay talks for council workers are “closed” as he condemned the “utterly unacceptable” targeting of his constituency by a trade union, PA Media reports. PA says:
Unison announced two weeks of strike action by non-teacher school staff in the Perth and Kinross council area after the union voted against a new pay deal.
Unite and the GMB backed the deal, which provided a 67p per hour uplift or 3.6%, whichever was higher, for staff and the deal was imposed on workers.
The action has led to a number of primary schools and nurseries having to close, with Perth and Kinross council unable to conduct risk assessments during the October holidays leading to disruption at the beginning of this week.
Yesterday all primary schools, nurseries, intensive support settings and two secondary schools in the area were closed.
Today 11 primary schools were able to open but dozens remained shut and others only partially reopened.
Speaking to the PA news agency on Tuesday, John Swinney reiterated the words of his finance secretary Shona Robison, who said on Monday there was no more money for pay deals.
“There is no reopening of 2024-25 pay deals,” he said. “I’m very happy to have discussions about future years but this year is closed.”
Swinney, MSP for Perthshire North, also hit out at Unison’s decision to target his area for action.
“What is utterly unacceptable for me is the fact that education in my constituency has been disrupted purely and simply because I happen to represent that area,” he said.
“My constituents have been singled out for treatment just because their MSP is first minister, and I find that completely unacceptable.”
Scenes of celebration as prisoners released early in England and Wales
Beaming prisoners were greeted with hugs and kisses as they stepped out of the metal gates of HMP Manchester and into the arms of waiting friends and family after being freed under the government’s early release scheme, Hannah Al-Othman reports.
During the Commons statement on the sentencing review, Josh Babarinde, the Liberal Democrats’ justice spokesperson, asked what was being done to ensure that domestic abusers were not being released early under the government’s scheme. He said:
Having grown up in a home of domestic violence myself at the hands of my mum’s former partner, I share the concerns of the Victims’ Commissioner [Lady Newlove] and survivors of domestic abuse that loopholes in the early release scheme’s criteria could mean that some of their abusers who are convicted of violent offences but not of domestic violence-specific offences, may have been released early today.
Domestic abuse survivors deserve to be safe.
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, replied:
There isn’t a specific offence of domestic abuse within our legislative framework. In order to bring in the emergency release to prevent us running out of prison spaces in July, I have pulled every lever at my disposal. You can only make these changes in law by excluding offences, not offender cohorts or offender types. That’s why that list of offences that are included includes offences that are most closely connected to domestic abuse situations, but of course it is not fully comprehensive – it cannot be.
The Probation Institute, a charity promoting best practice in probation work, has welcomed the sentencing review. It posted this on social media.
The Probation Institute welcomes the Sentencing Review to be led by David Gauke. Please make sure this review is genuinely about sentencing not just about prisons and focusses significantly on Probation and building resources in the community to support rehabilitation.
Edward Argar, the shadow justice secretary, was responding to statement on behalf of the Conservative policy. His first job in government was as a junior justice minister, when David Gauke was justice secretary, and he told MPs that Gauke was “a decent, honorable, able and thoughtful man” whom he regarded as a friend. Argar said that he would not pre-judge Gauke’s sentencing review, but would take a view when it was published.
In his response he largely focused instead on problems with the early release scheme already implemented by the government.
Danny Shaw, a former BBC home affairs correspondent and a former adviser to Labour, has said that the changes to the home detention curfew (HDC) rules announced by Shabana Mahmood (see 2.15am) amount to another version of early release. He has posted these on social media.
NEW Justice Secretary @ShabanaMahmood confirms major expansion of tagging scheme Home Detention Curfew.
Prisoners will be freed up to 12 months before scheduled release date - currently it’s 6 months
So, an offender jailed for 4 years could spend just 1 year behind bars.
No hiding it: HDC is a form of early release.
Number of HDC prisoners is almost 4,000 - nearly double the total a year ago...
@ShabanaMahmood also confirmed plan to relax ‘recall’ rules so fewer recalled prisoners are kept in jail...
These are separate measures to Gauke revew
Mahmood says she wants more deportation of foreign offenders, saying 'deportation as good a punishment' as jail
Mahmood ended her statement by saying she said she would accelerate the deportation of foreign offenders.
I share the public’s view that with 10,000 in our prisons, there are far too many foreign offenders in this country, costing £50,000 pounds a year, each to house at His Majesty’s pleasure.
It happens to be my personal view that deportation is as good a punishment as imprisonment, if not better.
We are currently on track to remove more foreign national offenders this year than at any time in recent years, but I will now be working with my colleagues across government to explore the ways that we can accelerate this further, including working with the Home Office to make the early removal scheme for foreign offenders more effective.
Updated
Mahmood says, to reduce jail overcrowding, maximum home detention curfews to be extended from six months to 12 months
Mahmood said the early release scheme already implemented by Labour would solve the overcrowding crisis for about a year. But “after the summer of disorder, the next crisis could be just nine months away”, she said.
She said she had already given magistrates new sentencing powers, to reduce the pressure on remand prisons where overcrowding is most accute.
But she said she needed to go further.
She said she would be increasing the maximum period offenders can spend on home detention curfew from six months to 12 months.
She also said she would be review the risk-assessed recall review process, so that when offenders get returned to jail after a breach of their parole conditions, it will be more straightforward to clear them for release again.
UPDATE: Mahmood said:
The second measure that we will introduce will address the soaring recall population, which has doubled from 6,000 to 12,000 in just six years.
Risk-assessed recall review is a power of the secretary of state to re-release unlicensed those who pose a low list to the public, avoiding the long waits that they often face for a parole board hearing. In recent years, its use has fallen to as low as 92 times in 2022.
Later this month, I intend to review the ris- assessed recall review process so that lower risk cases can be considered for re-release after they have been recalled to prison for two to three months, where their further detention is no longer necessary to protect the public.
And I should note that this will only change the cases that can be considered for release, with the final decision still in the hands of experienced probation officers and managers.
Updated
Mahmood said she was glad David Gauke has agreed to lead the review. She said he had been a “highly-regard minister … who has rightly gained the respect of both the judiciary and the legal sector”.
Mahmood says review will consider how home detention with new technology can be 'even more restrictive than prison'
Mahmood said the sentencing review would be governed by three principles.
First, sentences must “punish offenders and protect the public”, she said. She suggested in some cases longer sentences might be preferable.
For dangerous offenders, prison will always remain the answer punishment and public protection will be this government’s first priority. There will also be some offenders who I will task the review with considering, like prolific offenders – who are just one in every 10 individuals, but nearly half of all sentences.
Some of these are hyper-prolific offenders committing hundreds of crimes. And I will ask the reviewers to consider whether a longer sentence might punish them better and force them to engage with rehabilitation on the inside.
Second, the review would look at what could be done to encourage more rehabilitation.
We need both sticks and carrots in this I will be encouraging the reviewers to learn from others who have succeeded.
In Texas, for instance, Republican legislators were faced by a problem similar to ours, a soaring prison population, sky-high reoffending rates and prisons that had run out of space.
Working across political divide, the Texans introduced a system of good behavior credits, where well-behaved prisoners could earn time off their sentence by engaging in rehabilitation programs. The results were remarkable. Crime fell by nearly a third, reaching the lowest levels in half a century. The prison population fell by over 20,000 and after two decades, the Texans had closed 16 prisons rather than building new ones.
Third, the review would have to “expand the punishment that offenders receive outside of prison”, Mahmood said.
There are already ways that we severely constrain offenders, limiting their freedom outside of prison. Those under home detention curfews are in practice under a form of house arrest with a tag on their ankle and a censor in their home. They are placed on the curfews, generally for 12 hours each day. Should they break that curfew, they can be picked up and if need be locked up.
In some ways, punishment outside a prison can be even more restrictive than prison. It is a sad fact that in many of our prisons today a drinker can all too easily procure a drink.
On a sobriety tag, however, with their sweat measured every 30 minutes and a 97% compliance rate their teetotalism is almost as strict as mine …
I will be inviting the reviewers to consider the technology that they have available to them now, and also the next frontier of technology used in other countries, but not yet in ours, because I believe that the modern world presents us with the opportunity to build a prison outside of prison, where the eyes of the state follow a prisoner more closely than any prison officer can.
Updated
Mahmood said that after the August bank holiday there were fewer than 100 spaces in men’s prisons in England and Wales. She went on:
The system was only held together by the heroic work and considerable goodwill of our prisons and probation staff, and we were, on many occasions, just one bad day from disaster.
Today, the second tranche of emergency releases takes place creating desperately needed space within our prisons.
But this is not the long term solution, so I will now set out the long term plan for our prisons.
Mahmood said the record of the last government on building prisons was “abject”.
While the last government promised to build 20,000 new places by the mid 2020s, by the time they left office, they had built only 6000. They were simply too terrified of their own back benchers who supported prison building vociferously – as long as those prisons were not getting built anywhere near them.
But Mahmood said that the government could not just build its way out of this problem, which is why a new approach to sentencing was needed.
Mahmood tells MPs Tories left jail system 'on point of collapse' in Commons statement on sentencing policy
In the Commons Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is making her statement to MPs on the sentencing review.
She says the prison overcrowding crisis was the greatest disgrace of the last government. She says they left the system “on the point of collapse”, with prisons close to the point where they would have to stop taking new inmates, trials would have to be cancelled and the police would have to stop arresting people.
Updated
Healey says deployment of North Korean troops to help Russia in war in Ukraine 'shocking' and 'desperate'
During the Commons statement on the new loan to Ukraine, John Healey, the defence secretary, said the deployment of troops from North Korea in support of Russia was “shocking”. He said:
In a concerning new development is it is now highly likely that the transfer of hundreds of combat troops from North Korea to Russia has begun. North Korean soldiers supporting Russia’s war of aggression on European soil. It is as shocking as it is desperate.
North Korea already sends significant munitions and arms to Russia in direct violation of multiple UN resolutions. This developing military cooperation between Russia and the DPRK has serious security implications for Europe and for the Indo Pacific.
It represents a wider, growing alliance of aggression which Nato and the G7 nations must confront.
UK to lend Ukraine an additional £2.26bn for weapons to fight Russia
John Healey, the defence secretary, has told MPs that the government is lending Ukraine an additional £2.26bn which it can use to buy weapons for use to fight off the Russian invastion. Dan Sabbagh has details of the announcement here.
In the Commons, Healey said the loan would be funded using profits from Russian assets that have been sanctioned, and that it would be on top of the £3bn a year the UK is already giving Ukraine. He said:
Loans which will be repaid using the profits generated from immobilised Russian sovereign assets. Profits on frozen Russian money supporting Ukraine’s fight against [Vladimir] Putin, turning the proceeds of Putin’s corrupt regime against that regime and putting it in the hands of Ukrainians.
I want to be clear, today’s new money is additional to the £3bn a year of military support this government has committed to Ukraine each year for as long as it takes, in addition to the £3.5bnn defence industrial support treaty, which I signed with Defence Minister Umerov in July, money that will be used by Ukraine to procure military equipment from British companies, boosting our British jobs and our British industry.
And extra too, the additional artillery, air defences, ammunition, missiles that we have announced and delivered in the first four months of this new government.
Ukraine is a first order priority for me as defence secretary. It’s a first order priority for this government. We will continue to step up support.
Rise in prison population not driven by sentencing 'arms race', says former Tory adviser
On the Today programme this morning Kirsty Buchanan, who worked as a Tory special adviser in the Ministry of Justice and Downing Street under the last government, rejected the claim that prison numbers have gone up drastically over the last 30 years because of a sentencing “arms race” by politicians. This is the charge made by David Gauke, the former Tory justice secretary who is leading a review of sentencing policy for Labour. (See 9.26am.) But Buchanan, who was a MoJ adviser when Liz Truss was justice secretary, said:
When we were [at the MoJ] we took a deep dive into what the greatest drivers for prison growth were. And people may be reassured to know that this isn’t that we’re just locking up more people and throwing away the key.
The greatest driver since the 1990s isn’t a tit for tat arms race among politicians desperate to be seen to be tougher on crime than the next person.
The greatest drivers are an increase in reporting and convictions to serious sexual offenses. So that’s rape, domestic violence, rape of a minor, and robbery. They’re all violent crimes.
And, actually, we are sentencing more people for those, and we are sentencing them for longer.
The prison population itself has remained relatively stable since about 2010, around 85,000. But [since] the 1990s the huge surge, that extra 20,000 people that we send to prison, I think we can all agree they really need to be there. They are very serious offenders.
Suella Braverman was criticised in the Commons today for complaining that Labour has not proscribed Iran’s IRGC (Islamic Republican Guard Corps) when she did not do that as home secretary.
During Foreign Office questions, Braverman said Labour had been promising the proscribe the IRGC, “the chief sponsor of global terrorism”, for years. She went on:
Is the government going to take action to tackle terrorism and extremism in the UK, or is the government going to break yet another promise?
Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister, replied:
As I understand the question from the former home secretary, she’s saying when she was the home secretary, she did not proscribe the IRGC. She thinks we should now within 100 days.
We will take the necessary action in the UK to prevent the IRGC from taking action on these streets, but we do not comment as she knows well, on whether or not an organisation is under consideration for proscription in the normal way.
No 10 says criminal justice system would face 'complete paralysis' without early prisoner release scheme
Keir Starmer “shares the public’s anger” at the sight of prisoners being released early today, Downing Street said this morning. But the last government is to blame, the prime minister’s spokesperson suggested, because without the early release scheme there would be “complete paralysis” of the criminal justice system.
Commenting on the latest batch of early prisoner releases, the spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing this morning:
The prime minister shares the public’s anger at these scenes and thinks it is shocking that any government should ever inherit the crisis that this government has when it comes to our prisons.
But just to be clear, there was no choice not to act. If we had not acted, we would have faced a complete paralysis of the system.
Courts unable to send offenders to prison, police unable to make arrests and unchecked criminality on our streets, so the government clearly could not allow this to happen.
Voters will think Labour has failed if cuts debt and borrowing, and avoids tax rises, but NHS fails to improve, poll suggests
Voters will judge the Labour government to be a failure if it keeps its promises to be responsible on government borrowing and tax, but fails to improve public services, according to polling research published today.
The left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has published a very detailed report exploring what voters say about how they would assess the record of the Labour government in 2029, depending on what it has achieved by then.
The results suggest that voters care a lot more about seeing NHS waiting lists halved, public services getting better and infrastracture improved than they do about government borrowing and debt coming down, or taxes not going up.
This is particularly the case with people who switched to Labour at the last election.
And people would even be happy to see Labour break its promise on national insurance if NHS waiting lists halved as a result, the polling suggests.
The IPPR says in its summary:
We found that Labour government which is perceived to have delivered on its ‘tax, borrowing and spending promises’ but failed to deliver change in public services will be judged a failure and punished by voters. This is especially crucial for voters who switched to Labour in 2024. Among general election 2024 switchers to Labour, a scenario in which government debt and deficits have been reduced but NHS waiting lists are unchanged leads to a government approval rating of -12, a fall of 28 percentage points from current approval ratings with switchers.
Instead, the public prefer the government to borrow more, find additional tax revenues (within their rules) and deliver on change - with a particular focus on public services. A scenario where waiting lists are halved – even at the expense of debt or taxes rising – leads to a +31 approval rating with this group, 15 percentage points higher than now. Similar results are found seen for Conservative to Labour switchers.
Steve Akehurst from Persuasion UK, a research company that worked with the IPPR on the report, said:
It’s clear from this research that voters will not reward Labour simply for being good stewards of the economy. The public wants to see tangible improvements in essential services. Key parts of Labour’s coalition do not necessarily like the idea of higher borrowing or tax, but they seem willing to forgive it as the price of improved services.
The funeral of Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister who died suddenly earlier this month after delivering a speech in North Macedonia, will be held on Tuesday 29 October, his family has announced.
The funeral will be at Strichen parish church in Aberdeenshire. It will be conducted by Rev Ian McEwan, a friend of the family, and only family and close friends are invited. Salmond will be laid to rest in Strichen cemetery.
A public memorial service will be held at a later date.
On the Today programme this morning Nick Robinson talked about Britain being “the European leader in locking people up’”. (See 9.26am.) According to this briefing paper from the Commons library, published this summer but using Eurostat data from 2017, England and Wales are top – but only for Western Europe. It says:
According to the Eurostat data, England and Wales had 144 prisoners per 100,000 head of population, the 8th highest rate among EU countries and the highest amongst western European jurisdictions. Scotland had the 9th highest with 137 prisoners per 100,000. Northern Ireland had 76 prisoners per 100,000 of population and was ranked 24th.
Jenrick hits back at Gove over 'Tory boy' jibe
Last week Michael Gove, the former cabinet minister and Kemi Badenoch ally, said that Robert Jenrick would not be ideal as party leader because he looked like a “Tory boy”.
In an interview with BBC Breakfast this morning, Jenrick hit back. As the Mirror reports, when asked about the jibe, Jenrick said:
Well, the last person I would take advice from in a leadership contest I think is Michael Gove … I don’t know what [Tory boy] really means … I didn’t come from a traditional Conservative background.
Neither of my parents were card carrying members of the Conservative party … I don’t consider myself to be a ‘Tory boy.’ I want the Conservative party to be the trade union of working people right across this country.
Updated
Hague backs Badenoch for Tory leader, while Braverman says she's voting for Jenrick
Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary, has put a post on social media explaining why she is backing Robert Jenrick for party leader.
I’m supporting @RobertJenrick to be the next leader of the Conservative Party.
We need to rebuild trust on one of the defining issues of our age: the global migration crisis.
Robert’s unequivocal commitment to leaving the ECHR and placing a cap on visas is how we start.
In a separate development, William Hague, a former leader of the party, has used his Times column to say, “after hesitating for a while”, he has decided to back Kemi Badenoch. He explains:
While Jenrick has set out a series of very specific commitments, most notably on immigration and leaving the European convention on human rights, Badenoch has rightly resisted the pressure to do so. She seems to know instinctively what I wish I had worked out before I became opposition leader in 1997: that before voters will pay any attention to the policies you announce, they need to understand your values.
Badenoch’s insistence that principles rather than policies are the starting point for political revival is correct. It is borne out by the experience of the more successful opposition leaders in recent history, from Churchill to Thatcher. Her chosen values of truth, personal responsibility, active citizenship, equality under the law and family – in the broadest, modern sense of family – are strong foundations on which to rethink policies over several years. And her emphatic view that the processes of government need to be re-engineered to achieve anything significant is also spot on. Add in her pugnacious personality and it is possible to discern the combination of values and energy that could yet lift the Conservative party up from the electoral floor.
Updated
Treasury warns of difficult decisions in budget after September borrowing rise
The Treasury has said it will need to take difficult decisions in next week’s budget after higher debt interest payments and pay awards for public sector workers pushed government borrowing to £16.6bn last month – the third highest September figure on record, Larry Elliott reports.
Updated
Braverman defends using personal email for work as minister, claiming there's 'tedious' explanation and it was 'not unusual'
As Pippa Crerar reports, yesterday it emerged that Suella Braverman forwarded government documents to her private email accounts at least 127 times while serving as attorney general, in a potential breach of the ministerial code.
This morning, in an interview with LBC, the former home secretary and former attorney general said that what she did was “not particularly unusual” and that there was a “tedious” explanation for it. She said she was not transferring “sensitive” material to her private email account and that she only emailed government documents to that account because she wanted to use two laptops at the same time when working from home during Covid.
Braverman said that, as a minister, she was not allowed to use her government email account on her personal laptop. She had to use her government email on her ministerial laptop. She said that she was allowed to take her ministerial laptop home, but that during Covid, when she was working at home a lot, she wanted to have two screens on the go at the same time.
When the presenter, Nick Ferrari, asked her why she did not just use her ministerial laptop, Braverman replied:
But that’s not very practical when you are reading a lot of documents online and you simultaneously need to write lengthy documents and pieces as part of your work. Sometimes you need two screens.
So it’s a bit tedious as an explanation. There’s nothing to do with spies or state secrets here … There was nothing sensitive that was transferred.
It was literally a way to enable me to view documents on one screen and simultaneously type on another screen so that I could explain my views those people.
Ferrari did not ask Braverman why she could not just use a split screen function on her laptop.
Asked if she would do it again, Braverman replied:
Listen, I was never actually advised that that was not permissible, and we were in a strange scenario where a lot of that was done during Covid and lockdown, when there was a lot of working from home, and I wasn’t getting as many papers in physical copy.
And she claimed that what she did was not particularly unusual. Asked why other ministers did not also get into trouble for using personal email addresses for ministerial business, she said:
If you look back at the records, there have been some of my colleagues who have been found to be using their personal emails many years ago. I’m not going to name any names. But you can find that out as well. So it’s not particularly unusual, I would say, amongst ministers.
The revelation about Braverman forwarding government documents to her personal email account at least 127 times came out after an 18-month Freedom of Information Act inquiry from the Times newspaper resulted in a tribunal ordering disclosure of the information. The paper was particularly interested in Braverman’s record in this area because when she was home secretary under Liz Truss she was forced to resign because she forwarded an unpublished government document deemed sensitive to a backbench Tory MP.
In her LBC interview, Braverman also said she was backing Robert Jenrick for next Tory leader because he was committed to leaving the European convention on human rights.
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Shabana Mahmood says errors that affected first round of early prison releases in September now 'ironed out'
Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said that mistakes that affected the first set of early prisoner releases under Labour should have been “ironed out” ahead of the second round take place today.
In an interview with Times Radio, she said that 37 prisoners were released by mistake when around 1,700 inmates were released early in September. She went on:
All 37 were returned to custody, and that operational part of the system actually ended up working exactly as it should.
But those mistakes have now been ironed out, and I’m confident that the releases taking place will now be exactly as we need them to be, and victims who are required to be notified will be notified.
Mahmood also said that the rates of recall for prisoners released early were “broadly in line” with usual prison releases.
Speaking on LBC, she said:
We’ll do a statistics release in due course, as we normally would, on rates of recall and on reoffending in our prison estate.
What I can tell you is our early assessment is that the rates of recall and potential reoffending in the cohort that has been released as a result of the emergency release measures is broadly in line with what we would expect.
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Paul Brand from ITV says, if the government thinks that, by getting David Gauke to carry out the sentencing review, they will get the Conservatives support for it, they will probably be disappointed. He has posted this on social media.
Govt hopes by appointing Gauke - a former Tory Justice Sec (tho admittedly a centrist in today’s party) - they can get cross-party agreement on sentencing reform. But it’s likely Tory leadership candidates will say Labour being soft on criminals, and on the political debate goes.
David Gauke calls for end to ‘sentencing bidding war’ between parties as he is appointed to lead MoJ prison policy review
Good morning. Michael Howard was Conservative leader at one point, and was instrumental in ensuring that David Cameron succeeded him in that job, but perhaps he will be best remembered for his time as home secretary in the 1990s, when he gave a speech that summed up criminal justice policy for the next three decades. He told the Tory conference:
Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists - and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice … This may mean that more people will go to prison. I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population.
And, around that time, the prison population in England and Wales started to soar. The election of a Labour government did not make any difference to this trend; Howardism prevailed.
Today, is that all going to change? As Rajeev Syal reports in our overnight story, to coincide with the 1,100 more criminals being let out as part of the early release policy introduced by Labour to deal with the jail overcrowding crisis, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is announcing a review of sentencing policy, which will be carried out by David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary. It will consider alternatives to sending people to jail.
The Ministry of Justice’s press release about the review is here. And the terms of refererence are here.
Mahmood has been giving interviews this morning and it has been notable that she has not been declaring war on the Michael Howard approach. The Ministry of Justice says that one of the principles behind the sentencing review is to “make sure prison sentences punish serious offenders and protect the public” and it says the government is committed to creating 14,000 more prison places. Although the review will consider “tougher punishments outside of prison”, the terms of reference also imply sentences should go up for offences against women and girls.
On the Today programme this morning Nick Robinson asked Mahmood to clarify how radical she was being. Did she just want to curb the rate at which the prison population was going up? Or did she want fewer people to be jailed, and Britain to stop being “the European leader in locking people up”? In her reply, Mahmood rather fudged it, implying she wanted both. She said:
Well, the problem is that the rate of increase is such that nobody can keep up with demand, and you risk running out of prison places … We reach critical capacity again by next summer. We cannot build our way out of this crisis.
To put it in context, I have HMP Birmingham in my constituency. That’s a very large, older Victorian prison. It has a capacity of over 1,000. We need to build nearly five of those every single year to keep up with demand. So we do have to manage demand into the prison system.
But for a period it’s obvious that demand is going to go up, because we are going to have to build those 14,000 places. If we don’t, we run out of prison places earlier than we would expect.
The crisis is so acute that all of these things, building more supply, dealing with demand, have to be part of the solution.
But in the end, the sentencing review is our best opportunity to set a new trajectory where we can manage that demand, where I can make sure we never run out of prison places again, where there is a prison place for everyone who needs to be locked up, and where we expand the range of punishments outside of prison.
But Gauke himself has been a bit more willing to denounce Howardism. He has written an article for the New Statesman about the sentencing review and he says he wants to use it to end the “sentencing bidding war” between political parties. He says:
For the last 30 years, there has been a sentencing bidding war between the political parties seeking to compete to be seen as the toughest on crime by promising ever-longer prison sentences. Rightly, the public expects criminality to be punished and prison is often viewed as the only effective means of punishment. But the capacity crisis in our prisons has meant that – at the very least – we have no choice but to pause the increase in the prison population. It is also sensible that we now look more broadly at the evidence and ask whether sentencing policy should be more fundamentally reformed. By next spring, we should have the answer.
There will be a lot more on this as the day goes on.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 12.30pm: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the sentencing review.
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