Closing summary
The government hopes to soon be able to announce measures for resolving outstanding criminal convictions in relation to the Post Office Horizon scandal, a minister has told MPs tonight. Kevin Hollinrake, the business and trade minister, told parliament that options have been “devised” for dealing with the outstanding convictions but that conversations needed to be had with senior members of the judiciary.
He told MPs: “All of us on these benches and across the house are united in our desire to see justice done. We have devised some options for resolving the outstanding criminal convictions with much more pace … I am confident that we should be able to implement measures that address the concerns expressed by the advisory board. I hope the government will be able to announce these proposals to the house very shortly.”
Ed Davey has accused senior Post Office managers of unleashing a “conspiracy of lies” against successive ministers as he defended – and refused to apologise for – his role in the Horizon scandal. The Liberal Democrat leader, who has been criticised for letting down victims of the miscarriage of justice as postal affairs minister between 2010 and 2012, said the government had “dragged their feet” on overturning convictions and issuing compensation payments.
Rishi Sunak would “strongly support” the honours forfeiture committee if it decided to review the former Post Office boss Paula Vennells’ CBE after the Horizon scandal, Downing Street has said. Calls are growing for the former chief executive, who oversaw the organisation while it routinely denied there were problems with its IT system, to hand back her honour after an ITV drama returned the widespread miscarriage of justice to the spotlight. A petition demanding that the honours forfeiture committee remove Vennells’ CBE over the scandal, which has been described as the most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history, has already attracted more than 1 million signatures.
The Scottish Labour leader, Anas Sarwar, has urged independence supporters to defect from the Scottish National party to “boot the Tories out” of Downing Street, as the first minister, Humza Yousaf, told wavering voters that the cost of living crisis made independence more urgent than ever. As the two leaders made their first major speeches on Monday, in what is expected to be a general election year, both made particular reference to pro-independence voters. The cohort will be essential in the coming campaign as voters previously loyal to the SNP are becoming convinced that Labour can offer more immediate solutions to soaring household bills and crumbling public services.
Rishi Sunak has refused to endorse the partner of the disgraced former Conservative MP Peter Bone to replace him as the party’s candidate in the Wellingborough byelection. Helen Harrison’s selection on Sunday has drawn controversy given the byelection was triggered after more than 10% of local voters signed a petition to recall Bone after revelations about his behaviour. Bone, who had held the seat with a majority since 2005, was recalled after the parliamentary watchdog found he had broken the MPs’ code of conduct on four counts of bullying and one of sexual misconduct.
Centrist Conservative MPs have hit back after one of their rightwing colleagues claimed the party “faces obliteration” at the next election unless it shifts to the right. Members of the One Nation group of Tories have rejected the claims made by Danny Kruger that the party has made Britain worse during its 13 years in power and could be on course for a heavy defeat at this year’s election.
Alok Sharma, the UK’s former business and energy secretary, will not be voting for Rishi Sunak’s oil and gas bill, criticising it as a sign the government was “not serious” about meeting its international climate commitments. The bill, due to be debated in parliament on Monday, would allow for an annual licensing regime for oil and gas exploration contracts. It has been hugely controversial among the green wing of the Conservative party – the former minister Chris Skidmore announced on Friday he would be stepping down as an MP as a result of the proposed legislation.
Labour has vowed to reset the “broken relationship between schools and families” by tackling the crisis in pupil absences and child mental health, ahead of rival policy announcements from the party and the government this week. Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, is to set out the “generational challenges” facing England’s schools and pupils in a keynote speech on Tuesday. It will come a day after the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, announces the government’s latest efforts to repair school attendance rates since the Covid pandemic.
A medical NGO known for emergency relief in war zones is treating asylum seekers housed in a disused airbase in the James Cleverly’s constituency, the Guardian can reveal. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is offering thrice-weekly clinics to people contained by the Home Office in RAF Wethersfield, Essex, which is based in the home secretary’s Braintree constituency. It is the first time that MSF, which is known for its work in Gaza, South Sudan and Syria, has offered medical relief specifically for people seeking asylum in the UK.
More than 1 million people in England died prematurely in the decade after 2011 owing to a combination of poverty, austerity and Covid, according to “shocking” research by one of the UK’s leading public health experts. The figures are revealed in a study by the Institute of Health Equity at University College London led by Sir Michael Marmot. They demonstrate the extent to which stark economic and social inequalities are leading to poorer people dying early from cancer, heart problems and other diseases.
That’s it from me, Tom Ambrose, and indeed the UK politics live blog for today. Thanks for following along.
Conservative former cabinet minister Maria Miller told the Commons: “Now is the time for the Government to consider how all convictions that relied on evidence from the Horizon system, which must now be seen as unsafe, could be quashed without victims having to endure further legal wrangling.”
Business minister Kevin Hollinrake said:
I share her ambition. Ideally we would like a process that does not require a convicted postmaster to come forward, something we could do across the board - that’s exactly what we’re looking at, and I hope to have some news for her in the coming days.
Speaking elsewhere in the session, he said:
An immediate overturning (of) convictions is something we’re looking to achieve as soon as possible, if that is possible, clearly subject to the caveats I said earlier in my remarks.
Despite what clearly the Post Office has done itself, I think most members of the public still look at the Post Office... the network, with great admiration.
Ministers were told they should consider life sentences in prison for those found ultimately responsible for the Horizon scandal.
Labour former minister Barry Gardiner told the Commons:
The minister said this is not just about compensation, it is about restoration, and that is true. But is it not also about misfeasance in public office? So will the minister confirm that the maximum penalty for a public servant who willingly and knowingly acts in a manner that results in harm, injury or financial loss to an innocent party is life imprisonment?
Business minister Kevin Hollinrake replied:
I have dealt with a number of different scandals over the years from the backbench as well as in my ministerial role here and I think it happens all too often at a corporate level for us to simply carry on in the way we have done in the past.
So I am very much happy to take away his points in terms of the potential penalty for the offence he describes. That is something I will discuss with officials and others.
Conservative former business minister Paul Scully, who used to oversee the government’s efforts to deal with the Horizon scandal, urged his successor to “make sure that the judiciary allow a blanket quashing of all of the convictions”.
Tory former minister Priti Patel meanwhile told Hollinrake to “review the actions and accountability of Fujitsu, and with that the culpabilities as they are still awarded contracts week after week across government”.
Ed Davey has accused senior Post Office managers of unleashing a “conspiracy of lies” against successive ministers as he defended – and refused to apologise for – his role in the Horizon scandal.
The Liberal Democrat leader, who has been criticised for letting down victims of the miscarriage of justice as postal affairs minister between 2010 and 2012, said the government had “dragged their feet” on overturning convictions and issuing compensation payments.
He also questioned why the Tories had awarded the former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells a CBE in the 2019 new year honours list, even though hundreds of post office operators had launched a group action in the high court two years before.
In an interview with the Guardian, the Lib Dem leader said his focus was on getting justice for post office operators who were prosecuted for taking money from their businesses as a result of faulty Post Office software, developed by the Japanese firm Fujitsu.
“It’s really important that we get to the bottom of this, that we get the truth, that the people in the Post Office who were perpetrating this conspiracy of lies, that they are held to account,” he said.
Conservative former minister Sir David Davis suggested there should be criminal prosecutions for the “real villains” of the Horizon scandal.
He told the Commons:
The government needs to do four things. It needs: to stop the Post Office unnecessarily challenging the victims’ appeals and find a more rapid method to exonerate all of the innocent victims; to instruct the Post Office to stop hiring expensive lawyers to challenge the compensations claims and therefore to accelerate the payment mechanism; to strip away the Post Office’s right to police its own cases; and to accelerate the investigatory procedures prior to criminal prosecutions of the real villains in this case - which of course are, well, we know who they are.
Does the minister believe he can achieve those four aims in months rather than years?
Business minister Kevin Hollinrake replied:
I can assure him on all four counts. Yes, we want a more rapid means of overturning convictions. Yes, we want to make sure the Post Office doesn’t challenge unfairly any attempt to overturn convictions. Yes, in terms of making sure the investigatory process happens more quickly.
Hollinrake also said the compensation schemes are not being “policed or restricted” by the Post Office.
Business minister Kevin Hollinrake has said it is “perfectly reasonable” to ask the former Post Office boss to hand back her CBE.
Downing Street earlier said prime minister Rishi Sunak would “strongly support” an honours committee if it chose to look into revoking Paula Vennells’s CBE in the wake of the Horizon scandal.
Speaking in the Commons, Hollinrake said:
As a CEO who’s overseen the Post Office during a critical time when things went so badly wrong, I think, as a former CEO myself, I would say it’s perfectly reasonable to ask somebody to voluntarily hand back an honour in that specific situation, but that’s a matter for the person concerned.
Hollinrake also said securing justice for the victims of the Horizon scandal and ensuring such a “tragedy” can never happen again is his “highest priority as a minister”.
Making a statement in the Commons, he said:
Watching last week’s ITV programme has only reinforced our zeal for seeing justice done as quickly as possible. We are already a long way down that road.
He added:
Full and final compensation has already been paid to 64% of those people affected.
He told MPs:
Getting justice for the victims of this scandal and ensuring that such a tragedy can never happen again is my highest priority as a minister and has been throughout my 15 months in office.
Business minister Kevin Hollinrake said there is a need to examine the way in which private prosecutions were used by the Post Office and said he was confident the justice secretary would give the issue “proper and thoughtful consideration”.
Hollinrake told the Commons:
There is clearly great concern about the role of the Post Office in prosecuting these cases. The Post Office quite rightly decided to stop undertaking private prosecutions in 2015.
If we are to make sure that a scandal like this can never happen again we need to look at the way in which private prosecutions like these have been undertaken.
Any company can bring private prosecutions in this way, this is not a special power of the Post Office.
I know (justice secretary Alex Chalk) wants to give this issue proper and thoughtful consideration and I am sure he will report to the House about this issue in due course.
Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business and trade minister, has said the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a “powerful reminder” of how art and culture can highlight scandals, such as the Horizon scandal.
He said:
The Post Office prosecuted innocent people, causing an unimaginable amount of pain and suffering that no amount of compensation can ever alleviate. Yet to add insult to injury, the journey to justice for those subpostmasters has been mired by a great many delays and barriers.
He added:
Justice must be served to those workers and their families and that is why Labour has called for all subpostmasters to be exonerated in full.
Reynolds said Labour is in support of any measures that involve the quashing of convictions that do not involve the victims having to reopen litigation.
Government has 'devised options' to deal with outstanding Horizon convictions, minister says
The government hopes to soon be able to announce measures for resolving outstanding criminal convictions in relation to the Post Office Horizon scandal, a minister has told MPs tonight.
Kevin Hollinrake, the business and trade minister, told parliament that options have been “devised” for dealing with the outstanding convictions but that conversations needed to be had with senior members of the judiciary.
He told MPs:
This is not just a matter of getting justice for those wrongly convicted. Overturning their convictions is also key to unlocking compensation. Each person who has a Horizon conviction overturned is entitled to an interim compensation payment of £163,000.
They can then choose to have their compensation individually assessed or accept an upfront offer of £600,000. That offer is already speeding along compensation for a significant number of people.
He added:
All of us on these benches and across the house are united in our desire to see justice done. We have devised some options for resolving the outstanding criminal convictions with much more pace … I am confident that we should be able to implement measures that address the concerns expressed by the advisory board.
I hope the government will be able to announce these proposals to the house very shortly.
Updated
The government must bring forward minimum service levels in hospitals to protect patients during strikes, a Conservative MP said.
Speaking in the Commons, Dr Caroline Johnson, the MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham, and an NHS consultant who worked during the industrial action, said:
Make no mistake that these strikes are causing suffering to patients, both adults and children.
The derogation process has not worked, as the Secretary of State says, the BMA (British Medical Association) have not returned junior doctors to work when they have been asked to, when there has been a risk of dangerous harm to patients.
The first duty of any government is to protect its citizens so when will the secrectary of state bring forward minimum service levels to protect the patients from these strikes?
In response, health secretary Victoria Atkins said:
We have already introduced minimum service levels for ambulance services, something that was opposed by the party opposite, but we have just closed the consultation on minimum service levels in hospitals and we are of course carefully analysing the responses.
Labour has accused Rishi Sunak of being “asleep at the wheel” after the prime minister claimed a pay dispute with nurses had been resolved.
Appearing on BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme, Mr Sunak said the government had reached a pay resolution with every other part of the NHS, except for junior doctors.
Speaking in the Commons, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, said:
In his interview on the BBC yesterday, we saw why the prime minister allowed these strikes to go on for so long without intervening himself, he is using industrial action as an excuse for the state his party has left the NHS in after 14 years and he would rather blame NHS doctors and nurses than take a shred of responsibility himself.
He added:
While the prime ,inister was bragging about all the parts of the NHS that aren’t currently on strike, because that’s how low he now sets the bar, he seemed to have forgotten that nurses are still in formal dispute.
The government sat back and let the strikes go ahead whilst sending the NHS “naked into the winter”, Labour said.
Speaking in the Commons, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said:
Before the strikes and before the pandemic the NHS has been facing winter crisis after winter crisis, as a direct result of the Conservatives’ failure, their failure to train enough staff, their failure to arm the health service with modern technology and their failure to reform.
He added:
Isn’t the truth that the Conservatives once again sent the NHS naked into the winter and patients are paying the price? Given how ill-equipped they left the NHS, and given the desperate pleas from NHS leaders for these strikes to be resolved, why on earth did the government choose to sit back and let this damaging strike action go ahead?
Not only did the health secretary (Victoria Atkins) allow talks with the junior doctors to collapse, not only did she refuse to reopen negotiations until tomorrow when the damage will have been done, at the 11th hour as junior doctors stood on the edge of this strike action she chose to push them straight into it.
Paul Scully, the Conservative MP who was minister for postal services under Boris Johnson, has suggested that compensation payments to Post Office workers were held up because the Treasury dragged its feet, John Stevens reports in the Mirror. He quotes Scully telling the BBC:
It was me who went to him when Rishi was Chancellor to ask him for the money. You had to go through this arcane process when you literally had to do a value for money exercise.
That’s all from me for today. Tom Ambrose is now taking over.
Labour welcomes Sunak running as continuity candidate, saying Starmer now clear choice for people who want change
Labour has welcomed Rishi Sunak’s decision to run as a continuity candidate (see 9.28am and 5.39pm), saying that he has confirmed that people won’t get change with the Conservatives.
This is from Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary.
Stick with 14 years of Conservative failure or vote for change with Labour.
That’s the choice.
Bring it on
Stick with 14 years of Conservative failure or vote for change with Labour.
— Wes Streeting MP (@wesstreeting) January 8, 2024
That’s the choice.
Bring it on. https://t.co/lSeP0vc7SI
And this is from Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator.
The argument that “the country needs change and the answer is five more years of the Conservatives” has failed.
The country does need change and the only way to get it is to vote Labour and change the Government.
The argument that “the country needs change and the answer is five more years of the Conservatives” has failed.
— Pat McFadden (@patmcfaddenmp) January 8, 2024
The country does need change and the only way to get it is to vote Labour and change the Government. 🌹 https://t.co/e2gUR839lq
Updated
In an article for Bloomberg Alex Wickham says that Tory officials are admitting that the new messaging used by Rishi Sunak this morning (see 9.28am) means that the “change” stragegy has been dropped and that Sunak is now fighting the candidate as the continuity candidate.
NEW: Sunak resets election strategy from change to continuity
— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) January 8, 2024
— Conservative source confirms there has been an “evolution” in approach, from the change candidate speech at conference to “stick with the plan” nowhttps://t.co/ZVj3fhHEUI
Wickham has posted this quote from John McTernan, political secretary to Tony Blair when he was PM, in which McTernan argues that Sunak should have stuck to the strategy set a year ago.
Worth reading this @johnmcternan analysis of Sunak’s many resets here
He says Isaac Levido had the right idea with the 5 pledges a year ago
But Sunak had a wobble in the summer and crashed around with different relaunches/strategies
Before correcting back to the Levido plan
Worth reading this @johnmcternan analysis of Sunak’s many resets here
— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) January 8, 2024
He says Isaac Levido had the right idea with the 5 pledges a year ago
But Sunak had a wobble in the summer and crashed around with different relaunches/strategies
Before correcting back to the Levido plan pic.twitter.com/LSXLayCtiu
George Eaton from the New Statesman has posted this on Sunak’s strategic U-turn.
In his conference speech only three months ago, Rishi Sunak vowed to end a "thirty-year political status quo".
— George Eaton (@georgeeaton) January 8, 2024
His message now appears to be that he'll keep it.
Updated
In the Commons Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, has made a statement on the winter pressures the NHS is facing and is now taking questions from MPs. She said that 90,000 appointments were cancelled because of the strike action by junior doctors that took place before Christmas.
Wes Streeting, her Labour shadow, criticised her for “patronising” junior doctors by calling them “doctors in training” in interviews before Christmas. But Atkins told him that she was surprised that he did not realise that the BMA itself has voted to stop using the term “junior doctors” because it finds the term misleading. This was a point she made when the row about her use of the term first erupted.
The text of Humza Yousaf’s speech on what the Scottish economy might be like after independence is now on the Scottish government’s website.
Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson claims Ed Davey to blame for Post Office staff being wrongly jailed
This morning Bim Afolami, a Treasury minister, gently suggested that Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, had some explaining to do as regards his role in the Post Office Horizon scandal. (See 10.33am.) His colleague Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the Conservative party, is cruder and more brutal and, in an interview on GB News, he suggested that Davey was to blame for people going to jail, and even for some people taking their lives. He said:
As MPs, we often get cases come into our surgeries, into our office, and there’s always two sides to every argument and as an MP, you have to look at both sides, speak to the victims and whoever the perpetrators are, and sometimes it’s a completely different story when you get the bottom of it.
This man, this Ed Davey, has not really looked at both sides of the story. He took the side of the Post Office employers and sadly many went to prison due to him not listening …
Instead of making excuses, instead of saying he was lied to, he should properly apologise, make a public apology in parliament to these people that sadly took their lives, the families of these victims, and the people who went to prison.
Davey would not accept this. He has said that he did challenge Post Office management about claims that convictions were unsafe, but that managers did not tell him the truth.
Updated
The Labour MP Jon Cruddas was on Radio 4’s Start the Week this morning talking about his new history of the Labour party, A Century of Labour. As Toby Helm reported in the Observer recently, Cruddas is quite critical of Keir Starmer in the book, arguing that “it is difficult to identify the purpose of a future Starmer government – what he seeks to accomplish beyond achieving office”.
But, as Cruddas made clear in his interview this morning, he also rejects the conventional leftwing argument that Starmer is just offering pastiche Blairism. In the book he says that Starmer’s interest in industrial policy and unions is more Harold Wilson than Tony Blair and he told Start the Week:
A few years ago there was a lot of discussion in and around the Labour party saying the working class is over, it’s on the wrong side of history, it’s been wiped out by technological change, it doesn’t vote for us increasingly anyway, we should double down on a new demographic of urban, educated, young remainer voter. And that was the future. Technology was on its side. And that is our route to renewal.
And Keir Starmer, it seems to me, under researched and reported, is actually trying to go back before New Labour, almost Wilsonian, to try and re-eestablish Labour’s relations with a discernible working class, which is a really interesting strategy because it bucks a lot of the fashionable thinking of a few year ago.
Cruddas also stressed his commitment to ethical socalism. Asked if he really thought it was the job of a political party to make people better human beings, Cruddas replied:
Yes, I think it is. But that reveals where I come in all of this. Yes I do. I think it’s incumbent on polical parties to reanimate politics itself, and reinstil a sense of ethics and morality in terms of the public conversation, and reimagine a notion of civil virtue within the process.
A Century of Labour is an intellectual history of Labour, focusing on what people in the party thought it was for at various moments in the past, and he argues Labour does best when the utilitarian tradition (aiming to make people better off), the libertarian tradition (making them free-er) and the ethical tradition (making them more virtuous) are all represented in the party’s thinking. It’s a clever, thought-provoking book with the capacity to shape the way Labour thinks about its history.
The ethical strand favoured by Cruddas is not particularly fashionable in the party now, but – perhaps surprisingly – one person who would agree with him about the moral purpose of politics is the rightwing Conservative Danny Kruger. “I argue in this book that the purpose of politics is the cultivation of the conditions of virtue, of the moral impulses that make good conduct, and that these conditions are the normative dispositions of a conservative society,” Kruger wrote in his own book, Covenant, last year.
Updated
Mark Drakeford suggests drivers in Wales could escape fines if they're genuinely confused about new 20mph speed limit
Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister, has suggested drivers will not be fined for breaching the new default 20mph speed limit in Wales if they are “genuinely confused” about the rule.
As PA Media reports, last year, Wales became the first country in the UK to drop the default speed limit from 30mph to 20mph in built-up areas. Enforcement of the limit begins this month.
At a press conference in Cardiff, asked about the risk of people being fined because the messaging was not clear, Drakeford replied:
I don’t think they will be fined in those circumstances.
I think if the police find somebody driving above 20 miles an hour and the reason is because they are genuinely confused about that, then that’s why the police will always start with education and conversation.
I don’t think in those circumstances of genuine confusion, the police will move to enforcement.
Drakeford said the policy should be “fine-tuned” and kept “under review” to ensure consistency across different local authorities throughout Wales, PA says.
But he also said that in cases where motorists drive “well above” the limit the law would have to be enforced.
Asked to specify what speed would be considered “well above” 20mph, he said previous cases relating to pre-existing 20mph zones had involved people driving “closer to 30 than 20”.
Prison staff and justice officials have been told to make urgent changes in the wake of an alleged escape, PA Media reports.
In a Commons written statement Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, told MPs the probe he ordered into the alleged escape of prisoner Daniel Khalife from HMP Wandsworth in south London in September had concluded and that he had asked the jail, the Prison and Probation Service and the Ministry of Justice to “take forward the independent investigation’s recommendations as a matter of priority”.
Updated
Centrist Tories reject MP’s claim party must shift to the right
Centrist Conservative MPs have hit back after one of their rightwing colleagues claimed the party “faces obliteration” at the next election unless it shifts to the right, Kiran Stacey and Aletha Adu report.
Updated
Humza Yousaf claims Scottish households could eventually be £10,000 per year better off under independence
Scottish households could eventually end up being around £10,000 a year better off under independence, Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, said today.
The SNP leader quoted the figure, based on a Resolution Foundation report, in a speech at Glasgow University on the economy.
Yousaf said report claimed the average household would be £8,300 better off if the UK had the average income inequality of similar countries.
Applying the same methodology to Scotland, Yousaf said:
The prize for the typical Scottish household would be even greater, they would be £10,200 better off.
That then, is the huge prize of independence. Not to match the performance of those independence countries overnight – no one’s suggesting that is going to happen – but to start catching so that Scotland becomes more normal.
In response to questions, Yousaf said the economic changes in an independent Scotland would not happen overnight.
I’m not selling independence as being an overnight change, that somehow the day after we become independent there will be rivers of milk and honey and the manna will fall from the sky. There will be challenges, of course there will be difficulties. It will be a transitional process.
But, Yousaf said, the UK’s economic problems were “hardwired” and “systemic”.
As the National reports, Yousaf also proposed that an independent Scotland should have a ministry for industrial policy.
This is from my colleague Libby Brooks.
Over to Glasgow University where FM Humza Yousaf is setting out his plans for industrial policy in an independent Scotland, based on rejoining EU, a government ministry to drive industrial policy and large-scale public investment pic.twitter.com/i3QdZu00vm
— Libby Brooks (@libby_brooks) January 8, 2024
Updated
Starmer says government's response to Storm Henk flooding 'wasn't quick enough'
Keir Starmer said the government’s response to flooding is not “good enough” and vowed he would take pre-emptive action as he toured streets being cleared up after last week’s deluge, PA Media reports. PA says:
Starmer was speaking after Ian Clements, 68, showed him around his drenched semi-detached house in Loughborough, Leicestershire, on Monday morning.
Clements described how water from the nearby canal surged down Bottleacre Lane on Wednesday, reaching more than a foot deep in his lounge.
The Labour leader explained how he would set up a flood resilience taskforce to make sure preventative measures were in place before the winter flooding season.
He said: “The response wasn’t quick enough. So I just don’t think it’s good enough for the government to come after the event again and express empathy. Get ahead of this with a taskforce. That’s what I would do.”
Asked if Labour would provide more money for flood prevention, Starmer said: “Of course it does need money but the taskforce is not just about money. It’s about getting the basics done. Getting those drains cleared. Getting the local authorities together. Having a plan.”
Updated
Cable accuses Tories of scapegoating Ed Davey over Post Office scandal - but says all ex-ministers involved should apologise
Sir Vince Cable, the former Lib Dem leader and business secretary from 2010 to 2015, when concerns about the safety of the Post Office Horizon convictions were mounting, has given an interview to the World at One about the scandal. Here are the main points.
Cable accused the Tories of trying to scapegoat Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, over the Post Office scandal. (See 10.33am.) Asked if Davey had questions to answer, Cable said:
All ministers who dealt with this, under the previous Labour government, and even more under our successors, the Conservative government, had dealt with this problem in the same way that Ed Davey did. He is now being highlighted. I suspect the reason is that this is election year and it’s quite good for somebody to try to make a scapegoat of a Lib Dem minister. I don’t think this is a party political matter at all.
There obviously is a terrible failure of governments in general and of the criminal justice system. And that’s why the independent investigation is taking place …
Trying to find a scapegoat is an understandable, human reaction. But it’s not actually the heart of the problem.
He backed Keir Starmer’s call for a system to be set up to allow all convictions to be overturned en masse. (See 10.57am.) Cable said this would be justified even if it meant some guilty people being exonerated.
He said as business secretary he did not have the power stop the Post Office prosecutions. Ministers only had the right to make requests, he said.
Parliament had given the Post Office enormous powers not just to operate commercially, but to run a kind of private police force, a bit like the railways. There was mounting concern, I think, in the department about this, but it wasn’t at all clear what we could do to intervene.
He said the Post Office was given considerable independence so that decisions on closing individual post offices would not be matters for ministers.
He said he was only once approached by a delegation of sub-post office operators about miscarriages of justice when he was business secretary. “It wasn’t something that was constantly on the radar of me, and probably other ministers,” he said.
He said he was happy to apologise for what happened. Asked if he had nothing to apologise for, he replied:
No, I wouldn’t be so arrogant. I think any minister who’s involved in this, as I said, before our government and after it, has some responsibility … I’m very happy to apologise, as all ministers who are involved in this I think should …
I feel a sense of responsibility that I and a lot of other people, had we known how to do it, would have intervened more actively.
Updated
Updated
Sky’s political editor, Beth Rigby, who went to the PM Connect event at Accrington but did not get called to ask a question (memo to No 10 – that’s a bad idea), says she has been told that Harry Cole’s story about Rishi Sunak wanting to advocate scrapping the Rwanda policy when he was running for Tory leader in 2022 is accurate. (See 11.48am.)
As per @MrHarryCole story, I have also been told by a campaign insider the PM “wanted to scrap the Rwanda scheme” and “had no serious in interest” in illegal or legal migration “until he was persuaded otherwise during the campaign” (PM today said he didn’t say GOING to scrap…
🚨As per @MrHarryCole story, I have also been told by a campaign insider the PM “wanted to scrap the Rwanda scheme” and “had no serious in interest” in illegal or legal migration “until he was persuaded otherwise during the campaign” (PM today said he didn’t say GOING to scrap… https://t.co/1LFkUVH9Yf
— Beth Rigby (@BethRigby) January 8, 2024
Updated
There will be a Commons statement on the Post Office Horizon scandal today, but it won’t start until quite late. There are three other items first after defence questions ends at 3.30pm. Here they are, with rough timings.
3.30pm: Urgent question on Gaza, tabled by David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary.
Around 4.15pm: Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, makes a statement on how the NHS is handling winter.
Around 5.15pm: Robbie Moore, the minister for water and rural growth, gives a statement on the flooding.
Around 6.15pm: Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for postal services, gives a statement on the Post Office Horizon scandal.
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No 10 says Sunak would 'strongly support' review of whether former Post Office boss should keep her CBE
Downing Street has hinted that it would like the honours forfeiture committee to remove the CBE awarded to Paula Vennells, the former Post Office boss.
Normally, when asked about the prospect of someone being stripped of an honour, No 10 just says it is a matter for this committee, which operates in a relatively secretive manner.
But today No 10 said Rishi Sunak would “strongly support” the committee if it decided to look at revoking Vennells’ CBE in the wake of the Horizon scandal.
The prime minister’s spokesperson said that Sunak would “strongly support” the forfeiture committee “if they were to choose to investigate”.
More than one million people have signed an online petition organised by 38 Degrees saying:
Having been handed a CBE for services to the Post Office, and moved out into other senior positions in government and healthcare, it is only right that this award is now withdrawn through the process of forfeiture.
Paula Vennells has subsequently refused to answer questions from these staff as well as the media and has refused to apologise for the cover-up, misery and trauma caused which has brought not only herself but the Post Office, the honours system and government into disrepute.
UPDATE: The PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing:
The prime minister shares the public’s feeling of outrage on this issue. He would strongly support the forfeiture committee if it chose to review the case.
It is a decision for the committee, rather than the government.
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Sunak's PM Connect event - snap verdict
In sales you have to sound enthusiastic and, if anyone landed in Accrington this morning after a four-year holiday on the planet Mars and listened to the prime minister, they might assume that all was going rather well. Rishi Sunak sounded upbeat, cheery, and positive (even though he does not have the exuberance of Boris Johnson, or urbane self-confidence of David Cameron). He came over as well briefed. And he did not get booed, as he was last week.
But Sunak is not addressing a country with its memory wiped clean. Voters already have a largely settled, and extremely negative, view of what Sunak’s government has achieved, and this year’s election campaign will be decided by whether Sunak can find anything to shift that. There was nothing this morning that would do the trick.
This was an event organised by CCHQ, not the government, which meant that Sunak had free rein to be party political. And he did attack Labour, and Keir Starmer. But, whereas CCHQ has ceaselessly been trying to make the case that Labour’s £28bn green investment plan means Starmer would have to put up taxes (Starmer says that’s nonsense), Sunak did not make that argument with any gusto and instead just settled for the rather limp attack line that Starmer “doesn’t have a plan” and just “snipes from the sidelines”. (See 11.17am.)
There are three problems with this: a) Starmer does have lots of plans (whether they are inspiring or effective is another matter); b) even if he didn’t, not having a plan is not hardly worst thing that can be said about an opposition; and c) sniping from the sidelines is, literally, Starmer’s job as leader of the opposition. Labour HQ will have been watching that this morning thinking: ‘Is that it?’
Sunak was contrasting Labour’s stance with his own “long-term plan”. This worked for Cameron in 2015 but, as Matthew Holehouse from the Economist points out in posts on X, there are good grounds for thinking it won’t this time.
Sounds a lot like the campaign 2015. The challenge is that in 2010-15 enough people accepted the grand Cameron story: of when and what the "square one" was, and that there was a "long-term plan". Hard to say the same today... https://t.co/CVd29wqnI0
— Matthew Holehouse (@mattholehouse) January 8, 2024
Sounds a lot like the campaign 2015. The challenge is that in 2010-15 enough people accepted the grand Cameron story: of when and what the “square one” was, and that there was a “long-term plan”. Hard to say the same today...
Sunak’s telling appears to date “square one” as Oct 2022, when he replaced Liz Truss. But it is not hard to see why this may be less resonant with voters than in 2015, when “square one” referred to the GFC [global financial crisis] and the last time the opposition were in power.
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Jason Groves, political editor of the Daily Mail, says Keir Starmer was much better at taking questions from the press during his Q&A last week than Rishi Sunak was today.
Sunak taking noticeably fewer qs from the press than Starmer these days. Just four media qs permitted by the PM in Lancashire today, compared with 17 fielded by Starmer on his day out in Bristol last week
— Jason Groves (@JasonGroves1) January 8, 2024
Partly that might be because the format was different; Sunak was meant to be taking questions mainly from members of the public, whereas Starmer’s event last week was just media-focused. But for some time now Sunak has been more likely to limit the number of questions he accepts from journalists at events like this than Starmer. Being more open to scrutiny tends to be a sign of confidence.
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Harry Cole from the Sun says that, although Rishi Sunak dismissed the story Cole published this morning saying that he considered advocating scrapping the Rwanda policy during the summer Tory leadership campaign in 2022 (see 11.33am), he did not deny what the story actually said.
NEW: Sunak offers carefully worded response to our revelation that he discussed scrapping Rwanda during the 2022 leadership race.
Tells PM Connect event: “I did not say I was going to scrap it”
As the story made clear - he was convinced not to do it.
No denial of discussions.
NEW: Sunak offers carefully worded response to our revelation that he discussed scrapping Rwanda during the 2022 leadership race.
— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) January 8, 2024
Tells PM Connect event: "I did not say I was going to scrap it"
As the story made clear - he was convinced not to do it.
No denial of discussions. https://t.co/PQ0N9rWsU8
Sunak says if Tories have 'bright ideas' to improve Rwanda bill, he's open to considering them
Sunak says he is open to changes that would make the Rwanda bill more effective. But he says dozens of legal experts have said that the bill as drafted will do what it is meant to do.
The entire Conservative party is supportive of the bill, he says.
(That’s not true. Around 30 of them deliberately abstained at second reading.)
And that’s the end of the Q&A.
UPDATE: Sunak said:
If people have bright ideas about how we can make this more effective whilst complying with our international obligations and retaining Rwanda’s participation in the scheme … then of course, I’m open to having those discussions.
But I have worked on it for a very long time, so I’m confident that it is a good deal and it will do the job for us.
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Sunak claims the government is taking steps to improve school attendance. Making sure that children have the chance for a world-class education is the most important thing you can do, he says.
That is one of the things that brought him into politics, he says.
And he says children in England are the best readers in the western world as a result of the government’s reform. Education is one area where he is most proud of the government’s record over the past 13 years, he says.
Sunak dismisses - but does not fully deny - report claiming he considered scrapping Rwanda plan for in summer of 2022
Q: If you are so committed to the Rwanda scheme, why did you consider scrapping it when you were running for Tory leader in 2022, as the Sun reports? (See 9.57am.)
Sunak says he never said that.
I didn’t say I was going to scrap it. I mean that’s completely false. Of course I didn’t.
(The report did not say that he ever advocated that position – just that he privately considered it as an option.)
He says he addressed this in his BBC interview yesterday; he supported deterrent, but as chancellor had to scrutinise the plan.
He says the questions are for Labour; you will only tackle this with a deterrent, and so why are they not supporting the Rwanda bill? He says it has to be the government that decides who comes to the UK.
UPDATE: See 11.48am and 1.17pm for more on this.
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Sunak says he wants to speed up process of paying compensation to victims of Post Office scandal
Sunak is now taking questions from the media.
Q: Why did it take an ITV drama to get your government to focus on the Post Office miscarriage of justice? And will you now quash all convictions?
Sunak says this is a scandal. But he says he predecessors started the process of putting things right. They set up the inquiry, and approved compensation. But he wants to speed up the process, he says.
What happened was wrong.
Q: What can you do to show us you are offering business certainty?
Sunak talks about full expensing. He says no other big economy in the world offers business such a generous tax break.
And it is now permanent, he says.
He concedes policy did change on net zero. But he says he did that because he felt people were being forced to change too quickly. He wanted a pragmatic and proportionate approach. The UK will still get to net zero faster than other countries, he says. He says he was criticised for this, but the move was right.
He says we can now get to net zero “in a way that saves you money”.
James Chapman, a former political editor of the Daily Mail who worked as special adviser for David Davis when he was Brexit secretary for about a year until he left convinced that Brexit was a terrible mistake, says he does not think the “back to square one” line really works as an attack line against Labour.
The trouble with Sunak’s latest slogan is that I suspect a large number of voters think Britain is so broken under the Tories that “going back to square one” sounds like a wholly positive idea
The trouble with Sunak's latest slogan is that I suspect a large number of voters think Britain is so broken under the Tories that "going back to square one" sounds like a wholly positive idea https://t.co/eOdczpJkBP
— James Chapman (@jameschappers) January 8, 2024
John Crace makes a similar point.
Rishi Sunak thinks Labour will take us back to Square One. Because Square Two is working so well
— John Crace (@JohnJCrace) January 8, 2024
Sunak claims Starmer 'doesn't have a plan' and 'just snipes from sidelines'
On the NHS, Sunak said that the government had not made “significant enough” progress on cutting waiting lists. That was partly because of the strikes, he said. But he said, without strikes, waiting lists could come down. And he said the government was acting to strengthen the NHS.
On the economy, he said inflation had halved and the national insurance cut had just taken effect.
And he said Keir Starmer would just take the UK “back to square one”.
He’s been leader of the opposition for four years now. And in that time, he hasn’t said what he would do differently.
That’s because he does not have a plan. He just snipes from the sidelines.
He can’t tell you how he’s going to stop the boats because he doesn’t have a plan to do that.
He can’t tell you how he’s going to control welfare because he doesn’t have a plan.
He can’t tell you how he’s going to fund his £28bn-a-year spending spree because he doesn’t have a plan to pay for it.
He doesn’t have a plan for Britain because he’s more interested in political game playing and saying as little as possible to get votes.
That’s not my approach. I’m prepared to take the difficult decisions for the long-term benefit of our country and you saw me do that, after the pandemic, [making] a decision to reduce overseas aid given the other demands we had on our public finances, being restrained and fair on public sector pay, charting a new pragmatic course on net zero that gets us there but saves you thousands of pounds.
Labour, of course, would dispute this. The party has published five missions setting out in considerable detail what policies it would implement in key areas.
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Sunak said that, year on year, the number of people crossing the Channel on small boats was down by 35%. In the last quarter of 2023, numbers were down 50%, he said.
He said “the long-term solution to this problem is to have a deterrent” and that was why he wanted to pass his Rwanda bill.
But Labour just wanted to stop the flights to Rwanda, not stop the boats, he claimed.
According to the BBC report on Saturday, government papers from 2022 recorded No 10 as thinking that Sunak’s view of the Rwanda plan at the time was “deterrent won’t work”.
Sunak claims he has 'made progress' on his five priorities as he holds first major campaign event of 2024
Rishi Sunak has just started his PM Connect event. He is in Accrington in Lancashire.
He starts by claiming he has “made progress” on the five priorities he set out last year.
(That is not the view of expert bodies like the Institute for Government, which said last week he was likely to fail to meet three of them.)
Starmer says government should set up scheme to allow Post Office Horizon convictions to be overturned en masse
Keir Starmer has been in Loughborough to witness the impact of the recent flooding. In an interview with broadcasters, he said there were three things the government should be doing in relation to the Post Office Horizon scandal.
Starmer called for a process that would allow the convictions to be overturned en masse. He said:
These convictions, the remaining convictions need to be looked at en masse …
I think all the convictions need to be looked at because there’s a root cause of the problem here.
The government could pass legislation, so obviously we’d support that if they did.
It might be possible to get these cases back before the court of appeal quickly – I’ve done that when I was a prosecutor – but whichever way it’s done, these convictions need to be looked at.
Prof Chris Hodges, chair of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board, has also called for a collective approach to overturning convictions. He told the BBC this morning: “A civilised state should overturn these convictions and deliver compensation with people having to do as little as possible.” One option would be for parliament to pass a law pardoning or exonerating those convicted, and Hodges argued that this would not encroach on the rights of the judiciary.
Starmer said prosecution powers should be taken away from the Post Office. He said:
I think that the prosecution should be taken out of the hands of the Post Office and given to the Crown Prosecution Service. I used to run the Crown Prosecution Service, we’ve prosecuted for other departments, we can do it here – that should be done straightaway.
And he said compensation needed to be paid swiftly. He said:
Compensation needs to be paid, that’s already allocated for in the Treasury – they need to get on and pay that.
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Ed Davey needs to explain how he responded to Post Office concerns when he was minister in charge, senior Tory says
The Post Office Horizon scandal relates to the unsafe prosecution of hundreds of sub-post office operators, starting in 1999, when Labour was in office, and going on until 2015, at which point the Conservatives had been in power for five years. Yet it seems to be the Liberal Democrats who are in most peril over the scandal at the moment. The Lib Dems were in coalition with the Tories between 2010 and 2015 and, as doubts about the Post Office prosecutions grew, the two postal affairs ministers were first Ed Davey (2010 to 2012) and then Jo Swinson (2012 to 2015), both serving in the business department led by Vince Cable. Davey is now Lib Dem leader, and Swinson and Cable were his two most recent predecessors.
Yesterday the Sunday Times used its splash to focus in particular on the role of Davey. In their story Caroline Wheeler and Harry Yorke said:
The Sunday Times can also disclose that Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, was warned 12 years ago that legal action against the Post Office over the accounting scandal could leave the taxpayer exposed to “astronomical” costs.
Alan Bates, the former sub-postmaster who has led the long-running campaign for justice, warned of the huge potential “financial liability” in a 2011 letter to Davey, then minister for postal affairs.
The correspondence is one of at least five letters Bates sent him between 2010 and 2012, when he was the responsible minister, as the sub-postmasters repeatedly urged the coalition government to intervene and help them secure justice.
The Sunday Times: Post Office fury intensifies #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/mjhQ7RXfgn
— George Mann (@sgfmann) January 6, 2024
Bim Afolami, a Treasury minister, told LBC this morning that Davey needed to do more to explain how he responded to the concerns raised with him at the time. Asked if he thought Davey should consider his position over this, he replied:
To be honest, I’m not one who goes around saying that (someone) needs to resign, but I do think he needs to do is he needs to be honest with people and explain why as a minister, he didn’t ask the right questions.
In my job, you get a huge amount of information, there are a lot of people in the civil service who are working very hard on your behalf, but what you have to do is you have to ask the key questions and interrogate what you’re told.
And I think that Sir Ed needs to explain what he was told [and] why he allowed certain things to develop in the way that they did.
Davey has said he was '“deeply misled” by Post Office bosses about what was happening.
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Post Office scandal: more than 1m sign petition to strip ex-boss of CBE
A petition calling for the former Post Office chief executive, Paula Vennells, to lose her CBE over the Horizon scandal has attracted more than 1 million signatures, Kevin Rawlinson reports.
On Saturday the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg revealed that internal No 10 documents from 2022 showed that, when Boris Johnson’s government was considering the Rwanda deportation scheme, Rishi Sunak as chancellor had significant doubts about the plan. When Kuenssberg interviewed him on her Sunday show yesterday, he claimed that he had always been in favour of the plan in principle but was just subjecting it to proper value-for-money scrutiny.
But in the Sun today Harry Cole says that, when he was running for Tory leader against Liz Truss in the summer of 2022, Sunak considered dropping the plan altogether. Cole reports:
Rishi Sunak considered axing the Rwanda scheme in July 2022.
He “weighed up” ditching the £290m deportation plan during the Tory leadership election amid fears it would not work …
One campaign insider said: “He was told very clearly it would go down badly with the MPs who loved it and he changed his mind.”
The Sun story, and the fact that No 10 papers about the Rwanda scheme from 2022 ended up with the BBC, imply that people who worked with Sunak in government during that period, are actively briefing against him. There may also be an attempt to pressurise Sunak into toughen up the Rwanda bill, which is due to be debated by MPs later this month. Many Tory MPs think as drafted it does not do enough to close off legal challenges to deportation flights.
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Former Cop26 president Alok Sharma says he won't back oil and gas bill, saying it implies 'UK rowing back from climate action'
Alok Sharma, the former Cop26 president and former Conservative cabinet minister, will not be voting for the Rishi Sunak’s oil and gas bill tonight, criticising it as a sign the government was “not serious” about meeting its international climate commitments. As Helena Horton reports, Sharma told the Today programme this morning:
What this bill does do is reinforce that unfortunate perception about the UK rowing back from climate action.
We saw this last autumn with the chopping and changing of some policies and actually not being serious about our international commitments. Just a few weeks ago at Cop28 the UK government signed up to transition away from fossil fuels. This bill is actually about doubling down on new oil and gas licences. It is actually the opposite of what we agreed to do internationally, so I won’t be supporting it …
The government has said this bill is about protecting energy security. But the reality is, the oil and gas extracted from the north sea is owned by private companies – the government doesn’t get to control who they sell to. And the price of oil and gas is set internationally so it won’t actually lower domestic energy bills either.
Here is Helena’s full story.
'Stick with the plan delivering long-term change', Rishi Sunak to say to voters
Good morning. There are three types of campaign you can run during an election: ‘it’s time for a change’ (normally an opposition message, but a governing party can also campaign like this, as Boris Johnson did in 2019); ‘give us time to finish the job’ (the standard incumbent’s message); or (the last resort option) ‘you might not like us, but at least we’re not as bad as the other lot’.
Other things being equal, the change message is normally the most powerful one, and for a few weeks last autumn Rishi Sunak tried hard to make the case that he was the candidate best equipped to offer change. Leading a party in office for more than 13 years, it was a hard sell and eventually Sunak accepted that as an argument it was implausible. Today, after some low-key meetings last week, he is doing his first major campaign event of the year, a PM Connect Q&A with voters in the north-west of England. And, according to a quote released overnight, he will formally adopt message 2 as the Conservative party’s election theme. He will say:
The choice is whether we stick with the plan that is starting to deliver the long-term change our country needs, or go back to square one with the Labour party.
The problem for Sunak is that it is increasingly questionable whether this argument is credible either. “Stick with the plan that is starting to deliver,” he will say, but as Kiran Stacey reports, some of his MPs believe that the only honest campaign message is ‘we may be rubbish, but at least we’re not Labour’. As Kiran says, the Conservative MP Danny Kruger told Conservative party members at a private event last autumn:
The narrative that the public has now firmly adopted – that over 13 years things have got worse – is one we just have to acknowledge and admit.
Some things have been done right and well. The free school movement that Michael Gove oversaw, and universal credit – and Brexit, even though it was in the teeth of the Tory party hierarchy itself, and mismanaged – nevertheless Brexit will be the great standing achievement of our time in office.
These things are significant, but, overall I’m afraid, if we leave office next year, we would have left the country sadder, less united and less conservative than when we found it.
Kruger also said that the Conservatives were at risk of “obliteration” if they did not become more responsive to the needs of the electorate.
Kruger is not just any random backbencher. He is co-chair of the New Conservatives, a new group of rightwing Tory MPs that is about to go to battle with the government in the next few weeks over amendments to the Rwanda bill.
With luck, Sunak will be asked about these comments at the Q&A – although that is not guaranteed, because most of the questions will come from members of the public, not journalists.
Here is the agenda for the day.
10am: Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, gives a speech on Scottish independence.
11am: Rishi Sunak holds a PM Connect Q&A event in the north-west of England.
Morning: Keir Starmer is visiting the victims of flooding in the east Midlands.
Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
After 3.30pm: There is likely to be a ministerial statement on flooding. Another minister may make a statement, or respond to an urgent question, on the Post Office Horizon scandal. At some point today Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, and Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for the Post Office, are meeting to discuss how convictions might be cleared swiftly.
Late afternoon: MPs debate the second reading of the offshore petroleum licensing bill.
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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