Afternoon summary
The arrival of more people in the UK following a rescue in the Channel may take the official number of people recorded as coming to the UK on small boats above 100,000 since record-keeping began in 2018. (See 12.17pm.) The revelation has led Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chairman, to say that if Rishi Sunak’s small boats strategy does not work, the Tories may have to take “drastic action”, such as withdrawing from the European convention on human rights. (See 1.11pm.)
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NHS Providers, which represents hospitals and other NHS trusts, says today’s waiting list figures (see 9.44am) will ring alarm bells for health leaders. Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive at NHS Providers, said:
A perfect storm of squeezed funding in the NHS, the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, workforce shortages and now industrial action has pushed the waiting list to its highest point at 7.57 million.
This will ring alarm bells for trust leaders up and down the country as mounting care backlogs inevitably pile more pressure onto an already overstretched NHS. Amid ongoing strikes, this is an extremely busy summer for A&E while ambulance services also face very high demand and more urgent calls.
Cordery also said that, because of the impact strikes were having on the ability of hospitals to bring down the backlog, it was vital for government and the unions to try to resolve the pay dispute.
On the subject of immigration, there is at least one category where Lee Anderson is not going to have to worry about numbers soaring. When Priti Patel was home secretary, she announced that the UK would issue “global talent” visas to people deemed to be among the brightest and the best in the world. One way of qualifying was to win one of various “global talent” prizes on a Home Office list, including ones like the Nobel prize.
According to a report for Research Professional News (RPN), just three of these global prize visas have been issued.
Carol Monaghan, the SNP’s education spokesperson at Westminster, said:
It is embarrassing for the UK government that they cannot attract the ‘brightest and the best’. They have failed to understand that it is not simply a matter of opening the doors to global talent, but rather fostering a welcoming environment and creating an immigration system that is fair and dignified for all – not just Nobel prize winners.
The prize pathway is only one route to getting a “global talent” visa. Overall, more than 2,500 global talent visas had been issued by November last year. RPN says the number of applications is going up, with more than 6,000 received in the past year.
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The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) has said lifeboats from Dover, Ramsgate, Dungeness and Littlestone were called by HM Coastguard to an incident in the Channel this morning. This is the incident mentioned earlier in the report saying the small boat arrivals picked up today may take the total number of recorded arrivals since 2018 past 100,000 for the first time. (See 12.17pm.)
The charity said in a statement:
This morning all-weather RNLI lifeboats from Dover, Ramsgate and Dungeness, along with Littlestone RNLI’s inshore lifeboat, were tasked to an incident in the Channel by HM Coastguard.
On arrival at the scene, some casualties were found to be in the water. All casualties are believed to be accounted for and were brought to safety by the RNLI’s volunteer crews.
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UK considers tighter rules on investment in China after US clampdown
The British government is considering tightening rules on investment in China after the US president, Joe Biden, announced new measures aimed at limiting the dollars and expertise flowing into sensitive technologies in the country, Anna Isaac reports.
How do small boat arrival numbers compare with other types of immigration?
Here is a request from a reader, prompted by the figure about 100,000 people arriving in the UK via small boats since 2018 being in the headline.
Please could we have some context for the number of small boat arrivals v the overall immigration numbers? I think I saw a suggestion that most immigrants are on business visas, specific country schemes or students, and that boat arrivals are actually negligible in comparison. Is this so?
The reader is right. The people who arrive in the UK in small boats are only a tiny proportion of the overall number of immigrants coming to the UK every year.
The small boat arrivals don’t even make up a majority of the people who apply for asylum. As the Home Office says in this report:
The majority of small boat arrivals claim asylum. In 2022, 90% (40,302 of 44,666 arrivals) claimed asylum or were recorded as a dependant on an asylum application. However, small boat arrivals account for less than half (45%) of the total number of people claiming asylum in the UK in 2022.
There was more information about the asylum seekers who do not arrive by boat in this Times story last week.
And asylum seekers as a whole – the ones who arrive by small boat, and those who arrive by other means – are still only a small fraction of the total annual immigration cohort. This report from the Migration Observatory provides a good overview. It includes this graph.
The exact proportion of immigrants who are refugees varies considerably from year to year, and the figure also depends on whether you just count refugees who claim asylum, or whether you include other types of refugees admitted to the UK on humanitarian grounds (such as Ukrainians). This House of Commons library briefing, published in March, has more detail. Here is an extract.
Asylum seekers made up around 6% of immigrants to the UK in 2019.
In 2020, when overall immigration was lower than usual due to the pandemic, asylum seekers might have made up around 12% of immigrants.
In the year ending June 2022, the latest period for which we have estimates, asylum seekers and refugees made up approximately 18% of immigrants to the UK. This includes arrivals under the Ukraine schemes, the Afghan relocation and resettlement schemes, arrivals in small boats, other resettled persons and arrivals on family reunion visas (around 190,000 individuals in total). If including the British National (Overseas) scheme in the category of humanitarian routes [the scheme for people from Hong Kong], up to 25% of immigration in that year would fall into that category.
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What gets included in headline NHS waiting list figure?
Here is a question from a reader about the NHS waiting list figures.
Is the 7.6 million number of people or the number of operations? I am on the list for 4 completely separate ones only one of which I have a date for.
The 7.6 million figure relates to waits, not people. Technically it refers to what the NHS calls “referral to treatment (RTT) pathways” – cases where someone is waiting for treatment (which does not necessarily involve an operation).
That means that, if there are people like the reader who posed this question waiting for more than one treatment, they get counted more than once.
Arguably this makes the headline figure misleading, because the number of individuals waiting for treatment will be lower than the overall total quoted in the statistics. But the NHS does not have an equivalent figure for individuals, not cases, and the headline figure is easily understood, and does represent real people. Arguably if one person is waiting for four treatments, that is just as bad as four people waiting for a single treatment each.
This is what NHS England says on this point in the notes to its news release.
Each pathway relates to an individual referral rather than an individual patient so if a patient was waiting for multiple treatments they may be included in the figures more than once. Where we refer to the number of ‘patients’ waiting or starting treatment, technically, we are considering the number or percentage of ‘pathways’.
Anderson says Tories will need to take 'drastic action' on ECHR if PM's small boats plan does not work
Yesterday Downing Street said Rishi Sunak believed he couuld stop the small boat crossings, and implement the plan to send people to Rwanda, without the UK having to leave the European convention on human rights.
Asked about this in his GB News interview, Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chair, indicated that he accepted the government’s position.
But he said that, personally, he was in favour of withdrawal from the ECHR, and that if Sunak’s plan did not work, “drastic measures” would be needed. He said:
You only have to Google my name and put ECHR in and you’ll see where I stand on the matter and I’ve spoken about it in the chamber as well.
I’ve always been an advocate of leaving, but you know, we’re a team. And if things don’t work, if things don’t go to plan, then we’ve got to take drastic measures and I would fully support the government in doing that.
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Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson says he's 'very angry' small boat arrivals numbers may have passed 100,000
Lee Anderson, the Conservative party deputy chairman, has said he is “very angry” about the PA Media report saying that the small boat arrivals picked up in the Channel today may take the total number of people who have come to the UK via this route above 100,000 for the first time. (See 12.17pm.) The official numbers will be out tomorrow.
The Home Office data goes back to 2018, which is when small boats arrivals were first logged as a problem. The official database won’t include any people coming to the UK irregularly on small boats before then, and any migrants who arrived without being recorded.
In an interview with GB News, Anderson said:
I’m very angry about the number. Again, very angry, as you know, every single day when I see these illegal migrants.
Anderson also repeated his claim that people arriving on small boats are not genuine asylum seekers – even though Home Office data suggests that a majority of them are. Last year 90% of people who arrived this way claimed asylum. Most of these claims have not yet been processed, but of all the claims that have been processed since 2018, 61% have been accepted.
Anderson told GB News that the situation was “infuriating”, but that the Conservatives were the only party that could sort the situation out.
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Number of small boat arrivals since records started in 2018 may have passed 100,000 following landing this morning
The number of people crossing the Channel on small boats in the last five and a half years could have passed 100,000 following fresh arrivals of migrants on lifeboats on Thursday, PA Media reports. PA says:
PA news agency analysis of government figures since current records began on 1 January 2018 showed that, as of Tuesday, 99,960 people had arrived in the UK after making the journey.
And RNLI lifeboats were spotted bringing dozens to shore this morning, meaning it is likely the milestone has been reached.
A witness said there appeared to be more than 40 people brought ashore onboard two lifeboats, which had attended a dinghy out in the Channel.
Data on the number of people detected crossing the Channel in small boats to enter the UK each day is published by the Home Office and Border Force.
The figures are published the day after and the latest update shows that on Wednesday zero people were detected.
Since the beginning of January 2023 to 9 August, figures show 15,071 people crossed the Channel.
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Eustice says government should be flexible about how it gets to net zero to avoid risk of backing wrong technology too early
George Eustice, the former environment secretary, was interviewed this morning on the Today programme. He was primarily there to talk about his opposition to the government’s plans on the installation of new oil boilers in off-grid homes from 2026.
Instead of encouraging people to install heat pumps, it would be better for the government to get them to convert their boilers to run on renewable fuels (like hydrotreated vegetable oil made from waste cooking oil), he said.
But Eustice also argued that this issue showed why the government should not be too prescriptive yet about how it will achieve net zero. He said:
We remain committed to net zero but where I absolutely agree with the prime minister at the moment is we’ve got to get there in the right way. And the reason we are aiming for net zero by 2050 is to create a strong pull towards new technologies, new innovations that will help us get there.
And the real problem we’ve got is groups like the Climate Change Committee, endlessly harrying the government to lock down prematurely the wrong kind of policy mix now which actually would jeopardise getting to net zero.
So we’ve got to keep the space for new technology and new innovations to come forward. And the failure at the moment is everybody’s on the government’s back asking them to lock down prematurely to quite possibly the wrong technologies.
Eustice said the government should achieve net zero “in a cost-effective way”. He went on: “And I think that’s why the current prime minister is right to push back against some of these things.”
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Bas Javid, currently deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police, has been appointed director general of immigration enforcement at the Home Office, the government has announced. Javid, who will start his new job in November, is brother to Sajid Javid, the former home secretary.
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The Royal College of Nursing says today’s hospital waiting list figures for England (see 9.44am) show the NHS is “falling into deeper crisis”. In a statement Nicola Ranger, the RCN’s chief nursing officer, said:
With a record number of patients now on a waiting list in England, the NHS is falling into deeper crisis.
A decade of underinvestment in the NHS has led to dire consequences for patients and pushed many nursing staff out of the profession they love and with unrelenting pressure on those who remain.
A&E waiting times and ambulance response times in England improving, figures show
The latest figures from NHS England show a small improvement in A&E waiting times and ambulance response times, PA Media reports.
Some 74% of patients in England were seen within four hours in A&Es last month, up from 73.3% in June, PA says. The figure hit a record low of 65.2% in December. The NHS recovery plan sets a target of March 2024 for 76% of patients attending A&E to be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours.
The number of people waiting more than 12 hours in A&E departments in England from a decision to admit to actually being admitted was 23,934 in July, down 10% from 26,531 in June, PA says. The figure hit a record 54,573 in December 2022.
The average response time in July for ambulances in England dealing with the most urgent incidents, defined as calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries, was eight minutes and 21 seconds, NHS figures show. This is down from eight minutes and 41 seconds in June but is above the target standard response time of seven minutes, PA says.
Ambulances took an average of 31 minutes and 50 seconds last month to respond to emergency calls such as heart attacks, strokes and sepsis, PA says. This is down from 36 minutes and 49 seconds in June, while the target is 18 minutes.
Response times for urgent calls, such as late stages of labour, non-severe burns and diabetes, averaged one hour, 50 minutes and nine seconds in July, down from two hours, five minutes and 40 seconds in June, PA says.
The Labour party is committed to setting up a publicly-owned energy company, Great British Energy, to champion green power. Today the TUC has published research claiming that, if the government were to invest in this “at the right scale” (it proposes a £40bn investment in clean technologies), this could generate £140bn for the economy.
Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary, said:
Publicly-owned energy companies work. Across Europe they are lowering household bills and delivering good jobs.
But the UK is feeding foreign firms’ profits and subsidising cheaper bills abroad, while British households struggle to heat their homes and pay their bills.
It’s common sense – those who invest in the future end up better off. A British public energy champion – at the right scale – could create good jobs, speed up the path to net zero and make everyone better off by a mammoth £140bn.
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Labour says one in eight people now waiting for NHS treatment under Tories
Opposition parties are claiming that the latest hospital waiting list figures from NHS England (see 9.44am) show the government is failing in this area.
For Labour, Rosena Allin-Khan, the shadow mental health minister, said:
One in eight people are now waiting for NHS treatment, more than ever before. Patients are waiting in pain and discomfort for months or even years. Rishi Sunak has no plan to turn this around, he only offers excuses …
The last Labour government delivered the shortest waiting lists and highest patient satisfaction in history. The next Labour government will provide the staff and reform the NHS needs, so it is there for us when we need it once again.
And for the Liberal Democrats, Daisy Cooper, the deputy leader and health spokesperson, said:
This latest Conservative health secretary is not up to the job and owes the public an apology. He says his main focus has been bringing down the waiting list, but he is failing miserably, leaving millions in pain and discomfort …
This Conservative government should hang their heads in shame. Rishi Sunak needs to bring forward a proper plan to bring down waiting times as a matter of urgency.
Northern Ireland police chief urged to consider position over data breach
Simon Byrne, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, has been urged to consider his position over the mass breach of officers’ data amid warnings that terrorists could use the information to carry out attacks, Aubrey Allegretti reports.
There is a mixed picture on the cancer figures in the NHS England data, according to the data reported by PA Media. Here are the main points.
Referrals
Some 261,006 urgent cancer referrals were made by GPs in England in June, up 6% on 245,595 in May and up 13% year-on-year from 231,868 in June 2022, PA says.
The proportion of cancer patients who saw a specialist within two weeks of being referred urgently by their GP fell slightly from 80.8% in May to 80.5% in June, remaining below the target of 93%, PA says. The 93% target was last hit in May 2020, during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Diagnosis
Some 73.5% of patients urgently referred for suspected cancer were diagnosed or had cancer ruled out within 28 days, up from 71.3% the previous month, PA says. The NHS elective recovery plan sets a goal of March 2024 for 75% of patients who have been urgently referred by their GP for suspected cancer to be diagnosed or have cancer ruled out within 28 days.
Treatment
A total of 59.2% of cancer patients who had their first treatment in June after an urgent GP referral had waited less than two months, up slightly from 58.7% in May, NHS England figures show, PA says. The target is 85%.
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Government still has not achieved target of eliminating all 18-month hospital waits in England, figures show
The government still has not achieved its target of getting rid of hospital waits in England lasting more than 18 months, today’s NHS England figures show.
Rishi Sunak wanted to eliminate 18-month waits by April. But the figures show that at the end of June 7,177 people had been waiting more than a year and a half for treatment, down from 11,446 at the end of May.
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383,083 people waiting more than year for hospital treatment in June, NHS England figures show
Today’s NHS England figures also show that 383,083 people in England had been waiting more than 52 weeks to start routine hospital treatment at the end of June – down very slightly from 385,022 at the end of May.
The government wants to eliminate all waits lasting more than 52 weeks by spring next year.
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Number of people waiting for hospital treatment in England reaches new record high at 7.6m
The number of people in England waiting to start routine hospital treatment has risen to a new record high, PA Media reports. PA says:
An estimated 7.6 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of June, up from 7.5 million in May, NHS England said.
It is the highest number since records began in August 2007.
Rishi Sunak has made cutting waiting lists one of his priorities for 2023, pledging in January that “lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”.
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Grant Shapps tells Tories net zero essential for global security
Good morning. Since the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection, in which the Tories held the seat unexpectedly following a voter backlash against the extension of Ulez (the ultra low emission zone), which will impose extra costs on some drivers, the Conservative party has been toning down its support for green measures considerably. Rishi Sunak even resorted to posing for a photograph in Margaret Thatcher’s old Rover, and promising to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves.
But this morning there has been a bit of pushback from Grant Shapps, the energy secretary. In remarks that may be aimed as much at his party as the wider world, Shapps says there will be no global security without net zero.
Shapps made the comment in an interview with Politico in which he said that the UK will be hosting a global summit on energy security in spring 2024. Shapps said it would discuss the the need to “diversify from fossil fuels” and he declared:
We can’t have global security without net zero … There’s no global security if millions of people are having to uproot because of weather patterns.
The UK, and other countries, would be more secure with alternative sources of energy, he said. “Greater diversity could actually give us much greater security,” he said.
All of this sounds quite obvious. But in the Conservative party, and particularly in the Tory press (the Sunday Telegraph is calling for a referendum on net zero), these are not truths universally acknowledged, as a better writer would have put it.
In his interview Shapps also implied China might be invited to the conference. He said the details had not been finalised, but he declared he wanted it to be “inclusive in nature”. If China is invited, that may go down badly with some in his party too.
We are into the middle of August – normally death valley for Westminster political news – but, in so far as there are stories around, some of them relate to net zero. The TUC has published a report on the potential benefits of having a publicly owned energy company, and George Eustice, the former environment secretary, has given an interview about his call for the government to change its plan to ban the installation of new oil boilers in off-grid homes from 2026. For the third day in a row, Lee Anderson’s call for migrants to “fuck of back to France” is still being talked about. In Northern Ireland Simon Byrne, the chief constable, faces questions from the board overseeing the Police Service of Northern Ireland about the massive data leak. And Labour has accused the government of “catastrophic financial mismanagement”, claiming it has “lost” £251bn from the value of assets created to rescue the banking sector after the 2008 financial crash. Phillip Inman has the story here.
If you want to contact me, do try the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line, privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate), or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.
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