Summary of the day …
Labour’s health spokesperson Wes Streeting has said “Rishi Sunak has failed on the NHS” after new NHS England data showed that despite a slight fall, waiting lists are still higher than when Sunak promised to bring them down in January 2023.
NHS England also missed its target on A&E waiting times, though the target on rapid cancer referrals was met for the first time.
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, former Post office boss David Smith acknowledged the “substantial distress” he had caused after telling the Post Office staff the result of Seema Misra’s trial was “brilliant news”. Misra was handed a 15-month prison sentence when pregnant.
Former Post Office chair Sir Michael Hodgkinson also offered an apology, but his words came after a passage in which Sam Stein KC skewered him for his lack of curiosity in the way in which the company he chaired was prosecuting people.
UK taxpayers have paid out more than £34,000 to cover the cost of science secretary Michelle Donelan’s libel case, more than double the sum the government had previously admitted.
The Unite union has announced that about 1,500 steelworkers at Tata based in Port Talbot and Newport Llanwern have voted to take industrial action over plans to close its blast furnaces with the loss of 2,800 jobs.
Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader Daisy Cooper has called on the prime minister to kick Nick Fletcher out of the party after he appeared to endorse Reform UK MP Lee Anderson.
Bus drivers will be officially getting younger under government plans to relax laws on 18-year-olds behind the wheel. The news comes on the day Labour’s shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh announced plans to end what she described as the “managed decline” of the deregulated bus network under successive Tory government.
Thank you for your comments today. I will be back with you tomorrow, slightly earlier than I had intended, as the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is going to start earlier than scheduled. I will see you then, have a good evening.
This is a brutal end to Sir Michael Hodgkinson’s appearance at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today. He has been given the chance to say some words, offering an apology, but the apology comes directly after a passage of questioning which exposed his total failure at the company to understand or show any interest in investigating what was going on.
Hodgkinson said:
I have been saddened and appalled at the evidence that’s come out over the last 15 years since I left, where so many innocent postmasters and mistresses were unfairly prosecuted under the Horizon system, and as a result suffered most dreadful experiences and devastating consequences not just for themselves, but for their families.
And I just want to put on record that I apologise unreservedly for the fact that while I was chairman of the Post Office, I did not discover the problems with the Horizon system. And all I can say is I’m very, very sorry for the misery that subsequently caused, so I apologise again unreservedly.
Asked by Sam Stein KC to what extent he was to blame, Hodgkinson feebly offered “I just don’t really know. I mean, what else could I have done? I mean, I just I tried to make sure the business was run as well as I possibly could.”
All those words followed a summing up Stein, during which Hodgkinson had to meekly concede every point. The KC put it to Hodgkinson:
Sir Michael, it comes to this. You knew that the Horizon system data was being used in the prosecution of subpostmasters.
You knew that there was an investigation department that was investigating subpostmasters.
At some point in your work as chair of the Post Office, you learn that subpostmasters are actually prosecuted by the Post Office.
And at no point did you directly try and find out exactly how the system worked in order to make sure that accurate data was used to prosecute subpostmasters. Is that about it?
During your time, Sir Michael, people were prosecuted. People were told to pay up funding shortfalls, because apparently it was their fault, because the Post Office didn’t look into it. That was during your time, Sir Michael.
Chair Wyn Williams has closed the inquiry for the day, and said they will endeavour to start a little earlier tomorrow at 9.30am as they have a significant amount to get through. Tomorrow it is Alan Cook, former managing director of Post Office Ltd, and Adam Crozier, former CEO of Royal Mail Group Ltd.
Having criticised the inquiry earlier for being a bit dull and technical about the corporate structure of the Post Office this afternoon, Sam Stein KC has now upped the pace considerably and has absolutely skewered Sir Michael Hodgkinson in a passage exposing his lack of curiosity about prosecutions by a company that he was chair of.
Stein, establishing that it was late in his term at the company that Hodgkinson even became aware that prosecutions were taking place, says:
Did you say to the people around you “Well, that’s a bit of a surprise. I’m a bit surprised that we prosecute our own staff. I’d like to know a bit more about it.”
Hodgkinson is forced to answer “No, I didn’t.”
Stein continues:
Well, you’ve suddenly been made aware that you’re the chair of a prosecution authority. That’s an unusual thing. What did you do to investigate that the Post Office was properly prosecuting its own members?
Hodgkinson replies “I didn’t do anything.”
Stein goes on to say:
So, by the time you learn that your chair of a prosecution authority, did you say to yourself, well, we need to make sure that these little people who work in the subpostmaster branches, that are running these places within the community are dealt with fairly, and properly by the Post Office of which I’m Chair. Did that occur to you?
Hodgkinson has struggled to answer during this passage, and been told to give vocal answers rather than just nodding or shaking his head for the purposes of the transcript.
Sam Stein KC has taken over questioning Sir Michael Hodgkinson at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry. Stein is acting on behalf of subpostmasters. He has set off at a brisk pace going through Hodgkinson’s work career, and after confirming each job, he is asked “Did it prosecute its own staff?”, and Stein has established that he had no experience of running a business which did so.
The Unite union has announced that about 1,500 steelworkers at Tata based in Port Talbot and Newport Llanwern have voted to take industrial action over plans to close its blast furnaces with the loss of 2,800 jobs.
Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham said: “This is an historic vote. Not since the 1980s have steelworkers voted to strike in this way.
“This yes vote has happened despite Tata’s threats that if workers took strike action, enhanced redundancy packages would be withdrawn. Unite will be at the forefront of the fight to save steelmaking in Wales. We will support steel by all and every means.”
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, the former chair of the Post Office, Sir Michael Hodgkinson, has been explaining what a dire state the business was in at the time he was there. He said that if it had been a normal business, it would have folded. It was only because of the government funding to support the rural post office network that it was kept viable.
He is being asked about the renegotiation of a contract with Fujitsu to reduce costs of the Horizon IT system for the Post Office. Hodgkinson insisted that it was a condition that it would not lead to a deterioration in quality. It was still, at this time, he seems to imply, the view of the board that this was a robust system.
Rishi Sunak has also been out and about today. The prime minister was visiting Woking community hospital on the day that new NHS England data showed that while they were falling slightly, waiting lists were higher now than when he pledged to reduce them in January 2023.
Keir Starmer has been in Blackpool today campaigning alongside Labour candidate Chris Webb ahead of the byelection there on 2 May. The Labour leader said the people of the town would not be “fooled” by gestures from the Conservative government.
PA Media reports that speaking to the media there, Starmer said:
They know we need real change and they will judge the government on whether it’s actually making material difference to them and their families on the ground.
You’ve got the seafront here, then go two streets behind here and I don’t think you’ll find many people who feel that their life is better now after 14 years of this government than it was in 2010. I suspect you’ll find quite a lot who say things are going backwards.
Webb has said that residential areas in the town felt “forgotten about” and that the local food bank was delivering 14,000 meals a week in the town, which has some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country.
Starmer said “Every time I’ve been here, I’ve been really struck by the pride and ambition that people in Blackpool have of their place. They have the pride and ambition. What they feel is the Government hasn’t invested in them and doesn’t match their pride and ambition.
“That’s the difference that we could make if we are able to form the next government, which is a government that understands that.”
Starmer again moved to dampen expectations of increased public spending, saying Labour could not “come in and turn on the money taps,” but that it would stabilise the economy, and make a significant change in the division of funding and services for councils.
The byelection is taking place after Conservative backbencher Scott Benton quit parliament after he was suspended for 35 days over his role in a lobbying scandal. The MP suggested to undercover reporters at the Times that he could lobby ministers on behalf of the gambling industry and leak a confidential policy document for up to £4,000 a month. Benton won the seat from Labour in the 2019 election with a majority of just under 3,700
I note that over at the BBC, their reporter Sean Seddon has said that this afternoon’s session at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is not “the most gripping evidence an inquiry has ever heard”, which is, if anything, an understatement.
A key things to have come out so far is that it appears there was a structural weakness in oversight in the Post Office at the most senior level.
Former chairman of the Post Office Sir Michael Hodgkinson has said he was “never” told about early concerns with the Horizon IT system raised by auditors in a 1999 letter.
He has said his interest in the system was mostly in how it could be developed to support new products. He also said that branches and subpostmasters were viewed as “highly motivated individual businesses”, perhaps a hint at the way the culture of the Post Office worked.
He has been read out a lengthy document which discussed the circumstances around a known bug in the system and said “it was difficult to answer” why this was never raised to the board.
There is a long silence when he is asked “Is there something in particular that you can pinpoint that you think went wrong in that reporting line to the board?” and he finally answered “I’ve just got no idea.”
Chair Wyn Williams is pointing out that some of the cases involved exceptionally high amounts of money, and surely these should have been escalated to board level. Hodgkinson says he agrees with Williams, they should have been, but they were not.
The inquiry is taking a break. As will I. I will back with you in a few minutes when they resume.
Gwyn Topham, our transport correspondent, reports that bus drivers are set to get younger:
Bus drivers will be officially getting younger under government plans to relax laws on 18-year-olds behind the wheel.
A shortage of drivers across the transport industry has prompted moves to lower minimum age requirements for bus and coach drivers in Great Britain, as well as speeding up training for bus, coach and lorry drivers.
Although there are already a small number of teenage bus drivers, qualified drivers under 21 are restricted to driving shorter routes of up to 31 miles (50km), ruling out jobs on most intercity coach services and many rural bus routes.
Read more here: UK government to relax rules to get 18-year-olds driving buses
There are lots of reminders on social media today that the deadline to register to vote in May’s local elections in England (and there are some police and crime commissioner elections happening in Wales on the same day too) are rapidly approaching.
⌛️ You must register to vote by midnight on 16 April to vote in May's elections.
— The Green Party (@TheGreenParty) April 11, 2024
Make sure you have your say. Register to vote now ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/pznQAEpe6e
🚨 Important deadlines for the Mayor of London and London Assembly elections on 2 May. 🚨
— Fleur Anderson MP (@PutneyFleur) April 11, 2024
Register to vote by midnight, 16 April.
To vote by post, apply by 5 pm, 17 April.
To vote by proxy, apply by 5 pm, 24 April.
For more info, check https://t.co/Dlq3l0dBCi
Sir Michael Hodgkinson is being asked at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry why he was so interested in the Horizon system.
He told them:
I, by that time, had formed, based on all the conversations and visits that I had, the view that in fact Horizon was a well-regarded, well performing system.
However, we were just about to launch a whole new array of new products, and it didn’t necessarily mean for me, coming into the business, that the system was first of all capable of adapting to those new products. And secondly was it suitable for those products?
So I said it would be very important for me to at least gain an impression as to whether people in the development of Horizon had actually thought through the future, rather than just today, so that was the purpose.
This is a theme that has come up throughout today, that the senior management at the time were extremely concerned about the viability of the business as a whole.
Earlier today former chief David Smith said his priorities had been preparing for restructuring the group and coping with the aftershocks of the global financial crisis, and Hodgkinson has repeatedly said in his testimony that the future of the company was considered to hang on the successful introduction of new financial products and services.
I detect the beginning of a spluttering outrage flurry as Deborah Haynes, security and defence editor at Sky News, has just reported that the Royal Navy is going to drop the requirement that applicants take a swimming test before being recruited into the service.
She writes that “a Royal Navy spokesperson pushed back on criticism, saying standards were not being lowered. It just means that non-swimmers or weak swimmers no longer need to take lessons in their own time before signing up – something that could have turned prospective candidates off.”
A source told her it was “a sign of true desperation to increase recruitment numbers”, and I can almost guarantee you that someone at some point in the next few hours is going to say that “the woke Royal Navy doesn’t even need you to swim now” or some such nonsense.
Anyway, it at least gives me an excuse to post a picture of a big boat, as in Leith today Rfa Stirling Castle was welcomed into the fleet after undergoing a significant conversion to become what is termed a “autonomous minehunting ‘mothership’”.
Sir Michael Hodgkinson has told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry that most of the feedback the Post Office board received about Horizon was “forward looking”.
Asked where he saw “oversight and accountability for issues relating to the Horizon system” lying, he said the board, and was asked if there was a specific feedback process to inform them about the system.
He said:
There were constant reports to the board on how the system needed to be developed going forward. And there were kind of three phases there.
There were lots of individual projects that would come up. Like for example, I remember the foreign exchange had been done on a separate terminal, and we wanted to get it onto the Horizon terminal, and so there was a project that asked for money to do that. And that was not unusual to get projects doing that.
There was then the two major projects which actually occurred during my period, one occurred and one was being planned. One was the next generation.
So there was a lot of feedback to the board generally about Horizon, but mainly on a forward looking basis. Because as I say, that there was a very strongly held view that Horizon was good.
“It could possibly have made a difference,” to the Horizon IT scandal, Sir Michael Hodgkinson has told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, if he had been full-time in his role as chair of Post Office Ltd. The inquiry has established that Hodgkinson, as well as his Post Office role, had multiple roles at other companies and organisations during the period.
My colleague Jane Croft has also been watching the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today, and this is her write-up of the morning’s proceedings.
Earlier at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, former Post office boss David Smith acknowledged the “substantial distress” he had caused after telling the Post Office staff the result of Seema Misra’s trial was “brilliant news”.
Misra began running a Post Office in West Byfleet, Surrey, in 2005, but was suspended in 2008 after being accused of stealing £74,000. She was handed a 15-month prison sentence on her son’s 10th birthday in November 2010 and was eight weeks pregnant when jailed.
After her conviction and sentence, Smith sent an email to managers, including Paula Vennells, asking to “pass on my thanks” to the legal team. His email read: “Brilliant news. Well done. Please pass on my thanks to the team.”
He told the inquiry:
Looking at it through their eyes rather than mine, you can see that it may have caused substantial upset and I really do apologise for that.
At the time, what I’m doing here is what I would do generally with lots of things in business – I’m saying to the team ‘thank you for all your hard work, it’s terrific you’ve got the result that you’ve got and I’m really happy that we’ve progressed’.
It’s nothing more or less than that – and in the context of probably receiving 200-300 emails a day, which would have been typical at that time, I would literally have gone ‘brilliant news, well done, thanks very much, send’ and that would have been it.
Misra’s conviction was quashed by the court of appeal in 2021.
In his witness statement to the inquiry he elaborated further, saying:
My comment of ‘brilliant news’ was in relation to me thinking that it was brilliant news that, in my mind, Horizon had been proved to be robust following the testing of the expert evidence in the trial.
Even if this had been a correct conviction, I would absolutely never think that it was ‘brilliant news’ for a pregnant woman to go to prison and I am hugely apologetic that my email can be read as such.
In another passage of questioning, it was put to Smith that the Post Office legal team working on the case knew there were bugs in the Horizon software discovered prior to Misra appearing in court. He denied any knowledge of this.
Updated
PA Media is carrying another little bit of news about Reform UK, with the party apologising after it transpired that one of the candidates it removed due to “inactivity” – Tommy Cawkwell – had in fact died.
A Reform UK spokesperson said: “Having it being suggested that we had rescinded Cawkwell’s candidacy for inappropriate social media messages by a local paper, I suggested that he was one of those candidates that had been removed for inactivity.
“The process, if we have not heard from a candidate in a while we try to get in touch, a number of phone calls and emails are made, then if no response a final email is sent suggesting that if the candidate does not respond then they will be removed.
“Reform was not aware that Mr Cawkwell had passed away. Naturally, I am mortified that through ignorance I did not realise the reason for his inactivity, it must have been ghastly for his family to read about it in the way it was presented in the press.”
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry this afternoon we will hear from Sir Michael Hodgkinson, who the inquiry lists as former chair of Post Office Ltd and former senior non-executive director of Royal Mail Holdings plc. The inquiry spent some time this morning going over the somewhat arcane set of companies and holdings that made up the Post Office group in the early 2010s. In fact at one point chair Wyn Williams had to intervene to make sure that former boss David Smith was being clear about which bit of the group he meant when he was using the word “we”. The session has started again. You can watch it here:
Streeting: 'longer the Conservatives are in power, the longer NHS patients will wait'
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has had more to say about NHS England waiting lists, and the fact that Rishi Sunak has failed in his pledge to cut waiting lists. While they have fallen slightly, they remain higher than when Sunak made the promise, and A&E waiting times are below target.
Appearing on GB News, Streeting said:
I think by now hopefully people have reached a conclusion that the longer the Conservatives are in power, the longer patients will wait.
Labour has a proud record on the NHS, the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction on record.
But even more importantly, when looking to the future, we’ve got a plan to get our NHS back on its feet.
That’s two million more appointments a year to cut waiting lists, fully costed, fully funded, through to extra evening and weekend working, doubling the number of scanners so that people get diagnosed earlier, treated faster, training up thousands more GPs and cutting through red tape.
I could go on and on and the point is that unless you have that comprehensive plan that looks at the whole system, you’re not going to get the NHS out of this terrible mess that Conservatives have put us in.
He also addressed criticism of his comments that capacity in the private sector should be used by the NHS to drive down waiting lists. He said:
I’ve been accused in recent days and weeks and months of actually wanting to privatise the NHS, but over my dead body would we privatise the NHS.
I think one of the best things about it is that it’s a public service and when you fall ill you don’t have to worry about the bill.
But we’ve got in the private sector, spare capacity. Those who can afford it are paying to go private. They are being seen faster and working-class people who can’t afford it are being left behind.
And so what I’d say to my critics is, you look those people in the eye and you tell them that you’re prepared to see them wait longer because of your left wing principles. I don’t think that’s right.
The fallout from Reform MP Lee Anderson’s declarations of political friendship continues.
Now Rishi Sunak is facing calls to withdraw the whip from Don Valley’s Nick Fletcher, one of four Tory MPs that Anderson said were his friends and that he would not stand against.
In the wake of his former colleague’s endorsement, Fletcher posted a thread on X calling Anderson Ashfield’s “greatest champion”.
REFORM & LEE ANDERSON MP
— Nick Fletcher MP (@NickFletcherMP) April 11, 2024
I so wish @LeeAndersonMP_ had remained with the Conservatives. However having lost the whip it would mean the Conservative Party would choose someone other than Lee to fight the election in Ashfield.
I can understand in those circumstances why he… pic.twitter.com/oDR3fZiSF2
In response, the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, Daisy Cooper, has called on the prime minister to kick Fletcher out of the party, saying that a failure to do so would show he is “too weak” to control his MPs. “It seems even Conservative MPs don’t want the Conservatives to win. Voters are sick to the back teeth of this never-ending circus of infighting,” she wrote.
“Rishi Sunak needs to find his backbone and kick Nick Fletcher out of the Conservative party.”
Updated
Reform MP Lee Anderson has said he will not campaign in certain Tory constituencies because of his friendships with current MPs, PA is reporting.
The selective non-aggression pact means Anderson will not campaign against four Tory MPs in the next general election because “friendship means more”.
The four chosen friends, who have not confirmed if the feeling is mutual, are Ben Bradley (Mansfield), Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw), Marco Longhi (Dudley North) and Nick Fletcher (Don Valley). Anderson said they had all reached out to him following his defection.
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is breaking for lunch. And so am I. Emily Dugan will be with you for the next hour.
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry chair Wyn Williams has reiterated that former Post Office chief David Smith has a right not to answer questions if the answer might be self-incriminating.
He was then asked “whether you deliberately had your team produce a report for you, which would cover up the fact that you knew, and everyone in your senior leadership team knew, that Horizon’s integrity was very much in doubt, and that you wanted to cover that up?”
He replied “No, absolutely not.”
He is then confronted with evidence that the legal department received evidence of a bug a couple of days before a trial proceeded. “What sort of culture were you presiding over?” he was asked.
He has said he did not have this information, nor did he know that was the sequence of events. He says he is “shocked and appalled” if that was the culture.
Michelle Donelan used £34,000 of taxpayer funds to cover libel costs
Our political editor Pippa Crerar has this exclusive:
UK taxpayers have paid out more than £34,000 to cover the cost of science secretary Michelle Donelan’s libel case, the Guardian can reveal, more than double the sum the government had previously admitted.
The legal fees racked up by the cabinet minister after wrongly accusing an academic of supporting or sympathising with Hamas cost the public an additional £19,000, on top of the £15,000 libel settlement.
The revelation last month that the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) would cover the cost of Donelan’s libel prompted political anger over the use of public money.
She faced calls to resign from opposition parties and criticism from Tory backbenchers as she was urged to cover the cost of settling the libel action herself after apologising and publicly retracting her remarks.
The department declined at the time to disclose Donelan’s legal costs. However a letter from the top official at the department, Sarah Mumby, to the shadow science secretary, Peter Kyle, has now revealed the overall bill.
The letter showed that in addition to the costs incurred by the government’s legal department of £7,785 for internal legal advice, Donelan sought external private legal counsel which cost a further £11,600.
Read more here: Michelle Donelan used £34,000 of taxpayer funds to cover libel costs
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has had some slightly testy exchanges during the last session. Chair Wyn Williams intervened into the questioning at one point to demand “which is it?” of former Post Office boss David Smith about some apparent contradictions in evidence.
Smith has argued that he asked Rod Ismay to consolidate why the Post Office felt Horizon was robust into a single report. Ismay has previously told the hearing he was “only asked to present one side of the coin”.
Smith also said that it was “shocking” that queries about Horizon and calls for an investigation were being sent identical boilerplate responses. It was something that Alan Bates, who ran the justice campaign, had complained about. Smith said he was unaware of Bates’ complaints.
Dr Ian Walker, the executive director of policy at the Cancer Research UK charity has reacted to news that 78.1% of patients in England urgently referred for suspected cancer in February were diagnosed or had cancer ruled out within 28 days. It is the first time the target of 75% has been met.
Walker said:
While it’s promising that more people are finding out if they have cancer or not faster, thousands of people in England are still waiting longer than they should to begin treatment every single month. Behind missed targets are patients – friends, family and loved ones who are facing unacceptably long and anxious waits to find out if they have cancer and when they can begin treatment. NHS staff are doing their best, but our health service simply does not have enough equipment or staff to see, test and treat everyone in time.
With a general election on the horizon, there’s a real opportunity for political parties to turn things around. We urgently need more staff and equipment for the NHS, alongside reform to cancer services. Without this, cancer patients will continue to face even more fear and anxiety, during what is already a stressful time in their lives.
Streeting: 'Sunak has failed on the NHS' as waiting list figures in England remain near record levels
Here is what Labour’s health spokesperson Wes Streeting had to say about today’s NHS England figures:
Rishi Sunak has failed on the NHS. He’s missed his own targets to cut ambulance waits and A&E waits. Patients with suspected heart attacks or strokes are waiting almost double the safe amount of time, when every minute matters.
Waiting lists are still 320,000 longer than when he became prime minister, despite his promise to cut them. Doctors have said that patients in desperate need of care have been left waiting for 24 hours in A&E, while relatively healthy patients have been seen faster in order to hit this four-hour target. If only Rishi Sunak was as desperate to turn around the NHS for real as he is to spin the stats.
Only Labour has a plan for the investment and reform the NHS needs. To beat the backlog we will provide an extra two million operations and appointments at evenings and weekends, paid for by clamping down on tax dodgers.
Updated
Agricultural leaders have hit out at “major issues” with a fund aimed at farmers who suffered severe impacts from flooding at the beginning of the year.
The Government announced on Tuesday that grants of between £500 and £25,000 under the farm recovery fund would be paid to farmers hit by “uninsurable damage” from Storm Henk in early January.
The National Farmers’ Union initially welcomed the scheme but PA Media reports vice-president Rachel Hallos said on Thursday it had “very quickly become clear that there are major issues” with the fund.
“We are hearing from numerous members who have suffered catastrophic impacts who have been told they are not eligible for the fund because some of their affected areas are more than 150 metres from ‘main’ rivers. These include members with 90% of their land saturated or underwater, and huge damage to buildings and equipment.”
Here are a few of the other key moments from the testimony at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry this morning of former managing director of the Post Office, David Smith.
Smith said in his witness statement to the inquiry: “Although my time within the Post Office was brief, I have spent a lot of time reflecting on it and whether there is anything that I would have handled differently. I think that this is something that everybody has thought about and it is impossible not to feel a huge sense of regret and remorse, regardless of ones own involvement.”
Smith said he had consistently been given reassurances about the Horizon IT system by various people, including Paula Vennells and Susan Crichton.
Asked by counsel to the inquiry Sam Stevens: “To what extent did you consider that the Post Office was in an unusual position, in that it was the alleged victim of crimes that it was investigating, that it investigated those crimes itself, and then decided whether to prosecute them?”
Smith replied: “I’m sad to say at the time I didn’t really reflect on it in the way that I perhaps should have done.”
Smith told the inquiry: “I think that the passage of time has shown that conducting the case, gathering the data, acting as the prosecution can lead you to a position where you might not think as independently as you should do about the quality of information.
“Have you disclosed everything, have you presented the case in a balanced way? I think those kinds of risks are clearly there. I think the other danger is that potentially the balance of probability might be stretched too far in terms of whether to take a case through a legal process or not.”
Smith said he believed there was an “institutional bias” not to investigate further what subpostmasters were saying about the Horizon system.
Halving inflation remains the only one of Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges that his government has met, with NHS waiting lists and national debt higher than when he made the promises, channel boat crossings continuing, and the economy failing to grow.
In the wake of NHS England data being released today, PA Media have totted up a scorecard of Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges, which he made in January 2023.
Grow the economy – growth over 2023 was weak, with the UK falling into a recession in the second half of the year.
Reduce debt – the national debt rose over the course of 2023, and remains at levels not seen since the early 1960s.
Cut NHS waiting lists – waiting lists in England have fallen over the last five months, but remain higher than when Sunak made his pledge to cut them.
Stop the boats – channel crossings have reduced by 45,755 from 2022 levels, but remain happening, and Sunak has been unable to get his flagship Rwanda deportation plan on to the statue books.
Halve inflation – this is the only pledge to have been fully met, however economists suggest the fall in inflation was largely due to lower energy costs and rising interest rates from the independent Bank of England rather than from government action, and the rate of inflation is still higher than the bank’s target of 2%.
Former chancellor Philip Hammond has been speaking to the BBC, and suggested that politicians aren’t being honest with the public about the need to make cuts in public spending. He said he expected the Conservatives to take a “pasting” at the next election, but the Labour party does not have a “magic bullet”.
He said:
I think the formidable problem is for our democratic politics because I can easily envisage, and the polls are certainly suggesting, that the Conservative party will take a pasting at the next election.
But do I think that the Labour party has a magic bullet that will solve all the problems we have been talking about today? Not at all.
And they too will have to deal with this excruciating problem of ever rising demand for ordinary public spending and then on top of it, the need to decarbonise and to rearm the country in the face of big existential threats.
What would you cut? That’s the question to ask any politician – what would you cut?
And the politician who tells you we don’t need to cut anything, we’re just going to do it by collecting a bit more of the tax that’s due, making our public services a bit more efficient, I’m afraid is not being honest and frank with you.
I think we have a problem in this country, that the electorate is not really willing to engage with this argument.
It’s very difficult to ask politicians to present the electorate with choices and challenges which are so stark that their reaction is: ‘Oh well, I’ll vote for somebody who offers me a more palatable option.’
And unfortunately that’s the challenge of democracy. How do you get big, difficult long-term decisions made in a world where the politicians who are making them have to put themselves up for election every four or five years?
A lot of David Smith’s testimony at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry so far has had him saying that problems with the Horizon IT system and the move from Horizon to Horizon Onlline was not a high priority for him, as the bigger problem he was dealing with was keeping the business afloat following the global financial crash, and also preparing for a corporate restructure.
“I was made aware of some of the challenges that Horizon had encountered,” David Smith, former managing director of Post Office Ltd, has said at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry.
“I’d been made aware of the Computer Week, sort of press type of noise, that was out there.”
This is very early in the chronology of the scandal, when he was joining the business, and he says “I obviously asked about why we believe that our system was robust, and why we were continuing to be successful through court cases.”
He says “This was not a huge probing exercise to get to the bottom of every single case” but that he was assured “the system’s pretty much tamper proof. We’ve got strong audit records. We’ve got independent security going around checking and balancing. And the court cases that we’ve held, have been largely successful.”
He says the assurance was “kind of that level rather than anything more detailed”, and he said he would have spoken to Paula Vennells and Susan Crichton.
There is an awkward exchange as well when it transpires the inquiry has had some difficulty with documentation because at the time another David Smith worked at Post Office Ltd but worked in IT, and it has been confusing as to who has been included in some emails.
Here is a video that the Labour party have put out with shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh talking about their plan for buses across England.
In it she says that for 14 years, buses, which are the number one way people in Britain get around, have been “overlooked”, and under Conservative governments that have “fallen into managed decline.”
She says:
Since 2010 Britain has lost nearly 8000 across rooms and the routes that remain often don’t make sense for local communities. That’s because Britain is the only country in the developed world that gives private companies the right to pick and choose routes and fares.
I travelled the country hearing from people about the impact this has had on their lives. Missed opportunities for education because there wasn’t a bus to college. Turned down shifts because the bus couldn’t get them to work on time. And I’ve heard from women who decide to stay at home because they can’t rely on a safe journey back.
She contrasts the bus network around the country with that in London, where “they kept public control of buses” and says people should vote Labour for “better buses”.
Britain's bus services are in crisis.
— Louise Haigh (@LouHaigh) April 11, 2024
Labour has a plan to Take Back Control 👇 pic.twitter.com/PWJ8vyjfPr
Boris Johnson – remember him? – has been speaking in Canada, where he has criticised Rishi Sunak for his plan to phase out cigarette smoking by progressively raising the age at which tobacco can be bought.
Johnson, who stepped down as an MP in June 2023 to pre-empt a damning verdict from the Commons privileges committee into whether he misled parliament over lockdown-breaking parties, was speaking at a gathering of conservatives in Ottawa. He told the Canada Strong and Free Networking Conference:
We are, on the whole, in favour of freedom and it is that single Anglo-Saxon idea of freedom that I think unites conservatives, or should unite conservatives.
And when I look at some of the things that we are doing now, or that are being done in the name of conservatism, I think they are absolutely nuts.
When the party of Winston Churchill wants to ban cigars, donnez-moi un break as they say in Quebec, it’s just mad.
It isn’t entirely clear that they do say “donnez-moi un break” in Quebec.
Introducing his policy, Sunak had said: “If we want to build a better future for our children we need to tackle the single biggest entirely preventable cause of ill-health, disability and death: smoking.”
A bit of economic news from my colleague Phillip Inman here:
Cuts in UK interest rates should be “a way off”, according to a Bank of England policymaker, who has said that inflationary pressures will keep the cost of borrowing higher than financial markets expect.
Megan Greene, a member of the Bank’s nine-member monetary policy committee (MPC), which sets interest rates, said financial markets were betting “in the wrong direction” when they judged how quickly the central bank would make its first rate cut.
Read more here: Interest rates need to stay higher for longer, says Bank of England policymaker
NHS England misses target on four hour A&E waiting times
The NHS recovery plan set a target of March this year for 76% of patients attending A&E to be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours, and in the latest figures the health service only achieved 74.2% of patients in England being seen within four hours.
This is an improvement on the February figure of 70.9%, and PA Media reports it is the highest figure since April 2023.
One target that has been met is that 78.1% of patients urgently referred for suspected cancer in February were diagnosed or had cancer ruled out within 28 days. It is the first time the target of 75% has been met.
Cancer referrals are up year-on-year from 229,769 in February 2023 to 253,025 in February 2024.
The first person up at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today is David Smith, former managing director of Post Office Ltd. He is being questioned by barrister Sam Stevens. So far it has been a somewhat unenlightening deep dive into the complex corporate structure of the company at the time Smith was there, which began in 2010. Previously he had been at Parcelforce.
An interesting nugget from PA Media here on those NHS England figures, where patients in England who are waiting for treatment by community services are no longer included in the overall waiting list.
Around 36,000 treatments have been excluded from the figures for February, PA Media reports, including some of the patients who have been waiting the longest.
It is likely, it says, that this change has had an impact on the data for February, which shows that 9,969 people had been waiting more than 18 months to start routine treatment at the end of February, down from 14,013 in January.
This figure had previous risen six months in a row.
The Government and NHS England set the ambition of eliminating all waits of more than 18 months by April 2023, excluding exceptionally complex cases or patients who choose to wait longer.
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is starting for the day. You can watch it here.
NHS England waiting list figures fall slightly for fifth month in row but remain near record high
The waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has fallen for the fifth month in a row, figures show.
An estimated 7.54 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of February, relating to 6.29 million patients, down slightly from 7.58 million treatments and 6.29 million patients at the end of January, NHS England said.
The list hit a record high in September 2023 with 7.77 million treatments and 6.50 million patients.
In 2010, when David Cameron’s coalition government came to power, the figure stood at about 2.5 million.
More details soon …
Back on migration for a second, and home secretary James Cleverly has issued a video statement claiming that the government is delivering “the biggest ever cut to migration numbers”.
In it, he says:
At the end of last year, we promised to change the migration system to deliver the biggest ever cut to migration numbers. And today, we’ve enacted the final part of that plan.
Taken together, the measures we’ve introduced will radically reduce legal migration. 300,000 people who arrived in the UK last year, would no longer be eligible to do so under these new rules.
We’ve tightened the rules around overseas students, the vast majority of whom can now no longer bring dependents to the UK whilst they study.
We’ve reformed the health and social care visa, introducing more safeguards to protect this route from abuse and removing the ability of care workers to bring dependents.
And we’ve also raised the skilled worker visa salary threshold by 48%, and replaced the shortage occupation list to encourage British businesses to invest in a British workforce, and also to prevent wages being undercut by overseas workers.
And finally, we’ve raised the family visa minimum income requirement, ensuring that people can only bring dependents to the UK that they can financially support.
It is a firm approach, but it is a fair approach and we are delivering the change that we promised, and which the British people expected.
At the end of last year, we promised to change the migration system, to deliver the biggest-ever cut to migration.
— James Cleverly🇬🇧 (@JamesCleverly) April 11, 2024
Today we have met that commitment. pic.twitter.com/TrKUwwlfUY
The last couple of days at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry have seen some very gentle questioning of key figures in the campaign for justice for subpostmasters like Alan Bates and former MP James Arbuthnot. The chair of the inquiry, Wyn Williams, was even moved to warn people attending the hearing not to applaud at the end of their testimonies. I suspect the tone will be rather different in the next two days, when it will be Post Office and Royal Mail bosses giving evidence. That starts at 10am and I will bring you the key moments.
If you missed the last couple of days, here is what happened …
37 housing and homelessness charities have written to home secretary James Cleverly warning that new government legislation risks criminalising homelessness.
Matt Downie, chief executive of Crisis, said “The government cites a moral imperative to end rough sleeping, yet these new measures will make it more difficult to do so. They will punish people for having nowhere else to go and push them further away from support. The first and easiest thing the home secretary can do is listen to the concerns of these experienced organisations and remove these cruel and counterproductive measures.”
Speaking about the plans during the media round this morning, health secretary Victoria Atkins said:
We have been very, very clear. What we’re trying to target are those criminal gangs that make a living out of intimidating people.
We want to stop some of the aggressive begging that can happen around cash points, for example.
But we do not and will not criminalise people who don’t have a home. Absolutely not. That is not what this bill is about.
There are real vulnerabilities here that we want to support. And this is not about criminalising people who are homeless.
The proposals have been criticised for loose language in the drafting. Police in England and Wales are to be given powers to fine or move on rough sleepers deemed to be causing a “nuisance”.
The bill defines “something that is a nuisance” in relation to a person who “causes or does something capable of causing damage”. A section of the criminal justice bill defines that damage as including “excessive noise, smells”. Education secretary Gillian Keegan was forced to clarify that people wouldn’t be arrested just because they smell.
Campaigners have said new visa rules are destroying the idea that the UK is a place where families can “thrive”.
As the minimum income for family visas rose by more than £10,000 to £29,000 from Thursday, the organisation Reunite Families UK claimed the values of family and love are being treated as “as yet another political football to be sacrificed in order to receive better poll or electoral results”.
The minimum income requirement will rise further to £38,700 by early 2025.
Caroline Coombs, co-founder of Reunite Families UK, said people are feeling “punished” and “excluded” by the new rules.
Coombs said: “This increase, together with the ones which will come into force in the next 12 months destroy the notion of the UK as a place where families can thrive.
She added “We are dealing with a community of members who are punished and feel excluded and discriminated by their own government only because they fell in love with somebody from abroad and do not or cannot earn the ‘right amount’ to be able to love whoever they choose.”
In advance of the publication of NHS England waiting lists, health secretary Victoria Atkins has said “nobody pretended at the time” that it would be easy to bring waiting lists down.
She also blamed industrial action as a factor in Rishi Sunak failing to meet his key pledge on waiting lists.
She told viewers of ITV’s Good Morning Britain:
We know the pain and the anguish that waiting lists cause people – none of us want people to be waiting for the treatments they need. And that’s why the prime minister set it as one of his five priorities, and nobody pretended at the time that this was going to be easy to achieve.
Now, in fairness, in the last four months we have seen a reduction in waiting lists and that is even though we’ve had, sadly, industrial action – particularly damaging industrial action – by junior doctors in January, which of course is the busiest time for the NHS coming out of Christmas.
But despite that we’ve seen this fall in waiting lists, and I am focused relentlessly on trying to improve waiting lists times.
With junior doctors, my message has always been: ‘Look, if you work with Government, if you come to the table with reasonable expectations, as the consultants did, we will be able to find a deal.’
Labour’s big announcement today is a plan to improve bus services in England, with shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh promising to end “four decades of disastrous deregulation”.
She said:
Reliable, affordable and regular buses are the difference between opportunity and isolation for millions of people across the country.
Four decades of disastrous deregulation of Britain’s buses has robbed communities of a say over the vital services that they depend on, instead handing power to unaccountable private operators who have slashed services.
Labour will give every community the power to take back control of their bus services, and will support local leaders to deliver better buses, faster.
Labour’s plans will create and save vital routes and services, end today’s postcode lottery of bus services, and kickstart a revival of bus services across England.
The announcement was given short shrift by transport minister Guy Opperman, who said “Labour’s bus nationalisation policy won’t work but will force huge council tax hikes. Because Rishi Sunak and the Government took the long-term decision to cancel HS2 phase 2, we have been able to extend the £2 bus fare cap and invest £1bn in bus services across the Midlands and the North.”
The NHS England data today comes against a backdrop of persistently high waiting lists and public discontent with the service.
At the end of last month, Denis Campbell reported that public satisfaction with the NHS has fallen to its lowest ever level, with long delays to access care the biggest source of deepening frustration, a study has shown.
At the beginning of April, a new estimate suggested almost 14,000 people died needlessly last year in England while waiting in A&E for up to 12 hours.
ONS figures have suggested that the NHS data may be underestimating waiting lists by up to two million people.
Health secretary: government making progress on NHS waiting lists in England
Health secretary Victoria Atkins has claimed the government is making progress on waiting lists.
She told listeners to Times Radio:
We’ve seen now for four months in a row a reduction in waiting lists. That is a significant achievement, particularly when it is against the background of industrial action by junior doctors.
We have seen waiting lists fall, we have an unrelenting commitment, determination, to reduce yet further those backlogs and we are seeing progress.
Across the country there are different achievements, across the country different trusts managing to manage their waiting lists and what we are trying to do is spread that good best practice across the country incentivising trusts so that they are dealing with their backlogs but also importantly meeting the targets for people who are entering the system today and next week and so on.
Health is a devolved matter, and the Westminster government is only responsible for the NHS in England. Cutting waiting lists was one of Rishi Sunak’s five key pledges announced in January 2023, and was one of several which he failed to meet. The latest NHS waiting list data is due to be published by NHS England at 9.30am.
Welcome and opening summary …
Good morning. Health secretary Victoria Atkins has been on the media round today, touting government progress with NHS waiting lists in England. New figures will be published today. More of that in a moment. Here are the headlines …
Rishi Sunak spent £2m on focus groups for ‘eat out to help out’ scheme during the pandemic
The government has insisted it isn’t criminalising homelessness as a number of charities hit out at new plans
English schools could lose £1bn by 2030 as pupil numbers fall
A Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) survey showed property prices stabilised in March after months of decline, and are expected to return to growth within the next 12 months
There is some committee business scheduled at Stormont, but Westminster, the Scottish parliament and the Senedd remain on recess.
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry continues. Former managing director of the Post Office David Smith, and former chair of Post Office Ltd Michael Hodgkinson appear. I will bring you the key lines.
It is Martin Belam with you again today. I do try to read all your comments, and dip into them where I think I can be helpful, but if you want to get my attention the best way is to email me – martin.belam@theguardian.com – especially if you have spotted my inevitable errors and typos, or you think I’ve missed something important.
