Closing summary
This blog will be closing shortly. Thank you for reading it and for the comments below the line. You can keep up to date with the Guardian’s UK politics reporting here.
Here is a summary of the latest developments:
The government’s outdoor smoking ban will aim to make “fewer places where you actually can smoke”, education minister Jacqui Smith has said. Responding to calls from industry that an outdoor smoking ban would be another “nail in the coffin” for hospitality, Smith told Sky News: “The biggest nail in the coffin of most people in this country is smoking – 80,000 people die every year from smoking related diseases.”
The reported outdoor smoking plans were met with despair by the pub industry, which claimed restrictions on outdoor smoking could harm a fragile sector still recovering from Covid. However, health experts backed the idea, while polling showed it had majority support among every demographic and voting group apart from Reform UK supporters.
A move to end the winter fuel allowance for all pensioners is to be extended to Northern Ireland, Stormont’s communities minister Gordon Lyons has confirmed. Lyons said he “strongly disagreed” with the move by the Labour government but said there was “no additional resource” which would allow the region to diverge from the UK decision. According to the PA news agency, all of the Stormont ministers have written collectively to the prime minister on the issue.
Thames Water has lobbied the government to intervene with the regulator to allow it to charge far higher bills, the Guardian can reveal. Advisers and board members of the beleaguered water company are understood to have met Whitehall officials in recent weeks to warn that allowing it to be temporarily renationalised would have a “chilling effect” on the entire UK’s appeal to international investors, sources familiar with the discussions told the Guardian.
Education minister Jacqui Smith dismissed reports of businesses being forced to accept employees’ demands for a four-day week, saying the government’s plans for flexible working would enable fewer days to be worked through compressed hours. She told LBC radio: “We think that flexible working is actually good for productivity.” She also spoke about government-funded childcare hours, saying that nurseries will have to provide options to parents rather than charge for additional provisions such as food or nappies during those hours.
Business groups have reacted to reports that the government will give workers the right to request a “compressed” four-day working week. Ben Willmott, head of public policy for the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the professional body for human resources, said the government should “take stock” of recent rule changes around employment, which allow people to request flexible working when they start new jobs, before making more changes. Matthew Percival, director of Future of Work at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), said flexible working “depends on the job”, and some workforces might not all be able to have flexibility at the same time if it means they cannot meet customer demands.
Keir Starmer has had a portrait of Margaret Thatcher removed from No 10 Downing Street, according to his biographer. Tom Baldwin said that after Starmer took office he had spoken with the prime minister in Thatcher’s former No 10 study, unofficially known as the Thatcher Room, where a portrait of her was on display. However, education minister Jacqui Smith pledged on Friday, during an interview with LBC radio, that portraits of Thatcher will remain in No 10.
Starmer has been warned against caving in to pressure to water down a ban on exploitative zero-hours contracts, after fresh evidence showing the financial hit for millions in insecure work. Bosses have told the prime minister he risks causing “real damage” for the economy if the government’s proposals for the biggest overhaul in workers’ rights for a generation are pushed through too quickly.
Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has called on landowners, local authorities and housebuilders to “unblock sites” and to “get shovels in the ground”. In the post on X, the housing secretary also linked to a piece in the Mirror, where she detailed plans for a New Homes Accelerator, described as “a crack team of experts from my department and Homes England”.
The prison population of England and Wales has hit a record high, with the number jumping by nearly a thousand in the past four weeks. The sharp rise is believed to have been driven by the number of jail sentences handed to those found guilty of taking part in recent riots.
Priti Patel has become the second Tory leadership candidate to hint that they might include former prime minister Boris Johnson as member of a their cabinet should they win the contest. Asked if she could see Johnson serving in her cabinet, Patel said: “Our party owes Boris Johnson a great deal. He’s a man that won us a 2019 general election and motivated the grassroots, and actually was a true leader. He really was.”
Speaking at her leadership campaign event in London on Friday, Patel declared herself the candidate who will make the Tories “compelling and attractive to young people” and promised to get the party “back to winning ways”. Also, during her speech, Patel denounced Starmer’s No 10 speech earlier this week as “one of the most feeble, pitiful and dishonest speeches you will ever hear”.
The government’s policy of ramping up immigration raids and detaining and deporting undocumented migrants is driving more people underground and increasing their risks of exploitation, dozens of charities have warned. In a letter on Friday, coordinated by Migrant Voice, more than 80 organisations called on the home secretary to make it easier for undocumented migrants to regularise their immigration status so they can work with less risk of falling prey to exploitative employers and human trafficking gangs.
Badger culling will end in England by 2029, the government has said. Some culls under existing licences will continue until 2026, according to sources at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), but it is highly unlikely any new ones will be granted.
The SNP needs to win back voters who defected to Labour rather than those who stayed at home, the party’s Westminster leader has said. The party met for its first conference since the election loss last month which saw them drop dozens of MPs, an event starting with a behind-closed-doors postmortem led by first minister John Swinney. Speaking to journalists after the session, Stephen Flynn said the party suffered from multiple “self-inflicted wounds” in the election campaign.
Environmental protesters – including John Swinney’s former teacher – have declared the Scottish first minister must “try harder to protect the climate”. Caro Wilkinson, who taught Swinney German when he was a pupil at Forrester High in Edinburgh, was among a group of campaigners from the Edinburgh Climate Coalition to stage a demonstration as the SNP conference got under way.
Ousted MP David Duguid has said he would have won the seat lost by party leader Douglas Ross. Duguid was barred by Scottish Conservative officials from running for the Aberdeenshire North and Moray East seat, citing health reasons, but the former MP – who represented the now defunct Banff and Buchan seat since 2017 – said he would have won the contest Ross lost to the SNP on 4 July.
The Labour minister Patrick Vallance, who helped spearhead the country’s response to the Covid pandemic, has said he would not have served as a minister in a Conservative government. The former UK government chief scientific adviser was made a peer and appointed science minister this year after Starmer’s party swept to victory in the general election. And he made clear on Thursday that, if he had been asked by Rishi Sunak to consider serving in a Tory government: “I wouldn’t have done, no”.
James Cleverly has been accused of increasing the asylum backlog in the spring of this year by “dithering” over key decisions. Ministers under the then home secretary refused to give caseworkers permission to tackle outstanding cases covered by the Illegal Migration Act, departmental sources and the UK’s biggest civil service union have told the Guardian.
Eton college will raise fees by 20% as a result of the government’s removal of the VAT exemption on private schools, it said in a letter to parents. From January, the government plans to remove the VAT exemption and business rates relief for private schools to enable funding for 6,500 new teachers in state schools.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has said the UK is “deeply worried” by the “methods Israel has employed” in an IDF military operation in the occupied West Bank. In a statement on Friday morning, an FCDO spokesperson said: “We recognise Israel’s need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods Israel has employed and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.”
An Olympic gold medal-winning canoeist will be among climate activists protesting in Windsor this weekend to demand the Labour government takes climate action seriously. Extinction Rebellion, which is organising the three-day event, which began on Friday, said it had been disappointed by the new administration’s lack of action on reducing fossil fuel emissions.
Cleaners and caterers working at the Foreign Office have voted overwhelmingly for strike action in a dispute over pay. Members of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) employed by contractor OCS voted by 100% to reject a pay offer the union said would have given most of them no more than the voluntary living wage of £12 an hour.
Updated
Move to end universal winter fuel payments for pensioners to be extended to Northern Ireland
A move to end the winter fuel allowance for all pensioners is to be extended to Northern Ireland, Stormont’s communities minister Gordon Lyons has confirmed.
Lyons said he “strongly disagreed” with the move by the Labour government but said there was “no additional resource” which would allow the region to diverge from the UK decision, reports the PA news agency.
Meanwhile, the Stormont executive has written to prime minister Keir Starmer raising concern that the change will have a “negative impact on a significant number of people of pension age in Northern Ireland”.
Labour has said that the policy will stop winter fuel payments for people in England and Wales who are not in receipt of pension credit or other means-tested benefits. Lyons has now confirmed that the change will also apply to Northern Ireland.
He said:
On 29 July 2024 the chancellor of the exchequer announced that entitlement to winter fuel payments in England and Wales would be restricted to those people receiving pension credit or other means-tested benefits only. I strongly disagree with this decision.
The estimated additional cost to the block grant of maintaining universal entitlement to a winter fuel payment in Northern Ireland for winter 2024/25 is £44.3m, and this does not include any additional delivery or staffing costs.
Regrettably, there is no additional resource available in the budget to allow us to diverge from the UK government decision without significantly cutting other public services.
I have made clear to the secretary of state for work and pensions my total opposition to this decision and outlined the detrimental impact it will have on many people in Northern Ireland.
I am committed to ensuring that people can access all the support to which they are entitled and would encourage anyone affected by these changes to check their benefit entitlement.”
According to the PA news agency, all of the Stormont ministers have written collectively to the prime minister on the issue. The letter, seen by the news agency, states that ministers “convey our collective concern at your government’s intended changes to the winter fuel payments scheme.”
The letter goes on to say that the decision “will have a direct and negative impact on a significant number of people of pension age in Northern Ireland who are already struggling with the consequences of the rise in the cost of living”.
