A summary of today's developments
David Cameron has said he doesn’t think it is right to publish legal advice about the Israel-Gaza war at the moment, and that there is no change on the UK’s position on arms export to Israel. Speaking in a joint press conference with US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Washington the former prime minister said “no like-minded countries have taken the decision to suspend existing arms export licences to Israel,” and that “We don’t publish legal advice, we don’t comment on legal advice, but we act in a way that’s consistent with it. We’re a Government under the law and that’s as it should be.”
Cameron also insisted his meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago was entirely within the protocol of senior politicians meeting a potential incoming administration, just as Blinken had met Labour leader Keir Starmer recently. Cameron said the conversation with Trump was private and did not elaborate on details of the discussions.
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry on London Alan Bates, the most prominent victim and campaigner on the scandal, gave evidence saying that it was a “fundamental flaw” of Government is that it cannot deal with issues such as the Horizon scandal “easily and sensibly”. He accused the Post Office of spending two decades “denying, lying, defending and attempting to discredit and silence me”.
Rachel Reeves has said Labour’s spending plans will make a “massive difference” to the lives of people, promising two million additional appointments a year in the NHS, 700,000 emergency dental appointments, free breakfast clubs in all primary schools as well as investment in scanners and new technology in hospitals. She said it would be funded by a crackdown on tax avoiders worth £5bn to public services.
Senior MP William Wragg has resigned the Conservative whip after he admitted giving politicians’ phone numbers to a suspected scammer. The party’s whips office said he was “voluntarily relinquishing the Conservative whip” after he had already stepped back from his roles as vice-chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee and chairman of the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.
Rishi Sunak hosted president of Rwanda Paul Kagame in Downing Street, and a No 10 spokesperson said that both were looking forward to deportation flights to Rwanda in the spring for asylum seekers who had reached the UK.
Sunak also criticised on social media a protest about Gaza and climate change which appeared to have taken place outside Starmer’s house, saying “We cannot and will not tolerate this”
Former armed forces minister James Heappey has said the Conservatives and Labour should both commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence in their election manifestos.
Junior doctors, consultants and specialists have suspended industrial action in Wales after agreeing to formal negotiations about pay with the Welsh government.
Humza Yousaf has cautioned that a vote for the Greens by Scots in the next general election would be a “wasted vote”.
Ireland’s Dáil has confirmed Simon Harris’s nomination as the new taoiseach.
Veterans of the last Labour government have called on Starmer to put a new Sure Start-style programme at the heart of his election manifesto.
Labour’s shadow foreign secretary has criticised Cameron’s decision not to publish legal advice on arms sales to Israel.
David Lammy said: “This simply is not good enough. David Cameron is still hiding from scrutiny by stating that arms sales will continue without even publishing a summary of the legal advice or offering any rationale behind his decision.
“The foreign secretary should come to the Bar of the House of Commons on its return to take urgent questions from MPs on the content of the Foreign Office’s legal advice, the time period of the advice he is referring to and what impact political pressure from other members of the Cabinet had on his decision.”
David Cameron has confirmed the government will not suspend arms exports to Israel after the killing of seven aid workers in an airstrike on Gaza last week, as he insisted the UK would continue to act within international law.
The foreign secretary said that he had reviewed the most recent legal advice about the situation on the ground but this left the UK’s position on export licences “unchanged”.
But Lord Cameron said ministers had “grave concerns” about humanitarian access in Gaza as he urged Israel to turn its commitments on aid “into reality” at a joint press conference with his US counterpart, Antony Blinken.
Downing Street has come under mounting pressure from senior Tories to suspend weapons exports in light of the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and after the deaths of three Britons in the strike on aid group World Central Kitchen.
Rishi Sunak has condemned pro-Palestine protesters who have staged a demonstration outside Keir Starmer’s house.
The demonstrators called on the Labour leader to support an arms embargo on Israel. The group, called Youth Demand, hung a banner outside Starmer’s home that read “Starmer stop the killing” surrounded by red hand prints, and laid rows of children’s shoes at his front door.
The protesters said in a video on X that weapons being manufactured in the UK were being “used to cause genocide”.
The Metropolitan police said three people were arrested on Tuesday under section 42 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, a power designed to “stop the harassment of a person at their home address”.
Sunak, whose home in North Yorkshire was targeted by climate protesters last year, said such incidents would not be tolerated. In a post on X, the prime minister said: “I don’t care what your politics are, no MP should be harassed at their own home.
“We cannot and will not tolerate this.”
Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign co-ordinator, said: “The fact it was left to William Wragg to resign is another indictment of Rishi Sunak’s weakness.
“His MPs were left yet again being sent out to defend a position that has collapsed.
“Rishi Sunak puts party management first every time – and he can’t even do that properly. It is no way to run a country.
“Britain deserves so much better than this endless Tory chaos. the only way to get it is to vote Labour on May 2.”
Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UK’s crisis response manager, said: “It’s sadly predictable that David Cameron still insists that there are no grounds for the UK to suspend arms transfers to Israel even after Israeli forces have killed thousands of civilians, including aid workers in Gaza.
“The foreign secretary ought to have told his counterparts in the US administration that the UK will immediately suspend arms transfers to Israel, including the supply of components for US-made F-35 bombers which are being used by Israeli forces in Gaza with such horrendous consequences for Palestinians.
“This was yet another missed opportunity from David Cameron to move himself and other UK officials away from their current complicity in Israeli war crimes, apartheid and possible genocide.”
Updated
William Wragg resigns Conservative whip
Senior MP William Wragg has resigned the Conservative whip after he admitted giving politicians’ phone numbers to a suspected scammer.
The party’s whips office said he was “voluntarily relinquishing the Conservative whip” after he had already stepped back from his roles as vice-chairman of the backbench 1922 Committee and chairman of the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.
The Hazel Grove MP had previously announced his intention to leave Parliament at the next election and will now sit as an Independent.
Wragg admitted last week that he had given colleagues’ phone numbers to someone on a dating app amid fears that intimate images of himself would be leaked after he was targeted in a parliamentary sexting scam.
Updated
The government should stop pursuing carers with huge fines until it investigates whether it is to blame for overpaying them, according to a former Conservative work and pensions secretary, writes Eleni Courea and Josh Halliday.
Iain Duncan Smith called on the department to stop hounding people for the repayments and investigate its own responsibility for the errors, some of which have left unpaid carers with criminal records and deep in debt.
Duncan Smith told the Guardian: “We don’t want people being forced into very serious difficulty. My advice is to pause this and review very carefully what’s been going on.”
The Guardian has revealed that carers are being forced to pay huge sums to the government and threatened with criminal prosecution after unwittingly breaching earnings rules by just a few pounds a week.
Julia Rosell Jackson, senior humanitarian advocacy adviser at charity ActionAid UK, said: “We are deeply alarmed to see David Cameron press ahead with arms sales to Israel that could be in flagrant disregard to international humanitarian law.
“It’s deeply disappointing that he has decided to continue providing arms to Israel for a conflict which is disproportionately killing women and children.
“Earlier today, the foreign secretary claimed that the UK is being ‘transparent’ over its arms sales to Israel, but in truth we’re left none the wiser.
“With the UK potentially complicit in selling arms that killed aid workers last week in Gaza and the majority of the British public supportive of an arms embargo, we urge him to come clean and publish the legal advice the Foreign Office received on its arms sales to Israel.”
The UK’s foreign secretary has said the government position on arms exports to Israel remains unchanged but it continues to have concerns about the level of humanitarian aid entering Gaza.
Rishi Sunak has welcomed the Rwandan president to Downing Street amid signs that ministers are struggling to find an airline or housing in Kigali to carry out the flagship deportation plan.
The meeting on Tuesday was overshadowed by the former home secretary Suella Braverman’s criticism of fallen expectations over the policy, which aims to forcibly send people seeking asylum 4,000 miles to central Africa.
The two leaders discussed the £500m plan before Sunak’s safety of Rwanda bill returns to the Commons on Monday – exactly two years after Boris Johnson announced the plan to deport “tens of thousands” of people arriving across the Channel in small boats. So far, none have been sent.
Government insiders said Sunak and Paul Kagame remain confident that the bill will pass by the end of April after another round of parliamentary ping pong between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and that flights will take off “in the spring”.
After David Cameron said the UK will not suspend arms exports to Israel following the killing of seven aid workers in an air strike last week, aid organisation Care International UK said the statement appeared to contradict the precedent set in 2014 when the government said it would suspend some licences as a “precautionary step” if it could not “clarify if the export licence criteria are being met”.
Care’s head of advocacy and policy, Dorothy Sang, said: “The Government’s criteria for arms exports are clear that licences should not be granted where there is a clear risk that the items might be used in violation of international humanitarian law.
“Gaza is experiencing a manmade humanitarian crisis. Over 33,000 Palestinians and 200 aid workers have been killed during this conflict. Famine is imminent if not already present in the north of Gaza.
“The UK Government must now follow its own advice and suspend arms export licenses to Israel.”
A British embassy spokesperson said David Cameron would not be meeting Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson due to scheduling issues, Reuters reports.
Summary of the day …
David Cameron has said he doesn’t think it is right to publish legal advice about the Israel-Gaza war at the moment, and that there is no change on the UK’s position on arms export to Israel. Speaking in a joint press conference with US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Washington the former prime minister said “no like-minded countries have taken the decision to suspend existing arms export licences to Israel,” and that “We don’t publish legal advice, we don’t comment on legal advice, but we act in a way that’s consistent with it. We’re a Government under the law and that’s as it should be.”
Cameron also insisted his meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago was entirely within the protocol of senior politicians meeting a potential incoming administration, just as Blinken had met Labour leader Keir Starmer recently. Cameron said the conversation with Trump was private and did not elaborate on details of the discussions.
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry on London Alan Bates, the most prominent victim and campaigner on the scandal, gave evidence saying that it was a “fundamental flaw” of Government is that it cannot deal with issues such as the Horizon scandal “easily and sensibly”. He accused the Post Office of spending two decades “denying, lying, defending and attempting to discredit and silence me”.
Rachel Reeves has said Labour’s spending plans will make a “massive difference” to the lives of people, promising two million additional appointments a year in the NHS, 700,000 emergency dental appointments, free breakfast clubs in all primary schools as well as investment in scanners and new technology in hospitals. She said it would be funded by a crackdown on tax avoiders worth £5bn to public services.
Rishi Sunak hosted president of Rwanda Paul Kagame in Downing Street, and a No 10 spokesperson said that both were looking forward to deportation flights to Rwanda in the spring for asylum seekers who had reached the UK.
Sunak also criticised on social media a protest about Gaza and climate change which appeared to have taken place outside Starmer’s house, saying “We cannot and will not tolerate this”
Former armed forces minister James Heappey has said the Conservatives and Labour should both commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence in their election manifestos.
Junior doctors, consultants and specialists have suspended industrial action in Wales after agreeing to formal negotiations about pay with the Welsh government.
Humza Yousaf has cautioned that a vote for the Greens by Scots in the next general election would be a “wasted vote”.
Ireland’s Dáil has confirmed Simon Harris’s nomination as the new taoiseach.
Veterans of the last Labour government have called on Starmer to put a new Sure Start-style programme at the heart of his election manifesto.
The Sun lost £66m last year and its online audience dropped by 4 million readers as the newspaper continued to grapple with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.
Here are some fuller quotes from what foreign secretary David Cameron has just said in Washington, via PA Media:
We’ve seen a welcome increase in trucks, with as [US secretary of state Antony Blinken] said perhaps as many as 400 going in yesterday, the highest since 7 October and of course public commitments from Israel to flood Gaza with aid.
These now need to be turned into reality. Our position is in line with our international partners.
So far, no like-minded countries have taken the decision to suspend existing arms export licences to Israel, and I’d add that Israel remains a vital defence and security partner to the UK.
We don’t publish legal advice, we don’t comment on legal advice but we act in a way that’s consistent with it. We’re a Government under the law and that’s as it should be.
Israel has previously repeatedly claimed that it was not obstructing the aid flow into Gaza, but that NGOs and governments weren’t able to supply as much aid as Israel was able to process. Aid officials have referred to the situation being a “man-made starvation”.
David Cameron has said he doesn’t think it is right to publish legal advice about the Israel-Gaza war at the moment, and says when the UK government has published similar advice in the past it has been when British troops are directly involved.
Cameron: no change on UK government position on arms exports to Israel
Foreign secretary David Cameron has been asked two questions in Washington by a BBC reporter. The first was when the government might publish legal advice it has received about whether Israel is in breach of international humanitarian law, and a second to ask if Cameron still believes some earlier words he has said about Donald Trump that he is “xenophobic, and misogynistic”.
He said the UK government position on arms exports to Israel is unchanged, but it continues to have concerns about the level of humanitarian aid entering Gaza.
He said Israel is an ally and a key defence partner. He says “we don’t publish or comment on legal advice, but we are a government that acts under the law” and keeps the situation under review.
He goes on to say the UK and US have worked for decades to keep the world safe, and that the great lesson from Nato is about sticking together.
He has side-stepped specific words about Trump but he says he sometimes drops diplomatic niceties.
“We had a good meeting” he said about meeting Trump. “We respect the electoral process and work with whoever is elected for the benefit of both our countries.”
Foreign secretary David Cameron says he is meeting people in Congress on both sides of the aisle during his visit to Washington, but with trepidation because “it is not for foreign politicians to tell legislators in another country what to do.”
He says people in Tehran, Pyongyang and Beijing will be watching closely whether the west backs its allies against Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
The first question at the joint press conference between Antony Blinken and David Cameron from the US media was a multi-part one, that asked two questions to Blinken, two to Cameron, and one joint question. Blinken said a new format had been invented.
The main substance of interest to the UK politics blog in the answers was that the foreign secretary was asked about his meeting with Donald Trump, and if he felt reassured about the future of US support to Ukraine.
Cameron side-stepped the latter part of the question, but made a point of saying this his meeting was entirely in line with usual protocols, that he remembered meeting Mitt Romney when in opposition, and that Blinken had met Keir Starmer recently, and that was entirely to be expected.
He said his meeting with Trump was private, and would not comment on the discussions.
David Cameron has said in Gaza he wants to see 500 aid trucks a day going into the territory, he wants to see Ashdod port open, and the situation needs deconfliction. He says he wants to see a temporary pause in fighting, Hamas leaders removed from Gaza and terrorist structures decomissioned, leading to a political solution to the fighting. He prefaces this by restating that the UK supports Israel’s right to self-defence. He says the UK and the US are like-minded on solving these difficult issues.
David Cameron and Antony Blinken are now taking questions from the US media.
In Washington foreign secretary David Cameron has said “in a time of danger” close relationships matter and none is closer than the UK and the US.
He has said Ukraine can win its war and a just peace against Russia, and has praised initiatives to provide more ammunition. He says they need a good outcome to the Nato summit, and they need money in the form of frozen assets in a process that can be taken forward with the G7.
He said he has “no intention to lecture people” or interfere in US politics, but says it is profoundly in the interests of the US and its partners to release more money for Ukraine. “It is right to stop Putin,” he says.
Rishi Sunak has offered his congratulations to Simon Harris on becoming taoiseach.
“As the closest of neighbours, I look forward to forging even stronger ties between our two countries so we can deliver for people across these isles,” PA Media reports Sunak said.
Incidentally there’s been a read-out from the Donald Trump campaign about his meeting with David Cameron during the foreign secretary’s jaunt to the US.
Léonie Chao-Fong reports for us that the pair discussed “the need for Nato countries to meet their defence spending requirements” during a dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
The pair also discussed “the upcoming US and UK elections, policy matters specific to Brexit, the need for Nato countries to meet their defence spending requirements, and ending the killing in Ukraine.”
Antony Blinken has just started speaking at the joint press conference with Cameron.
Alan Bates: it is a 'fundamental flaw' of government that it cannot deal with issues like Horizon scandal 'easily and sensibly'
In his afternoon evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, campaigner Alan Bates said it was a “fundamental flaw” of Government is that it cannot deal with issues such as the Horizon scandal “easily and sensibly”, and said unless it sold to someone like Amazon and received a huge cash injection, “it’s going to be a bugbear for the government for the years to come”.
Edward Henry KC, who represents a number of post office operators, asked: “You’ve exposed over many years the Post Office’s suppression of disclosure covering up the truth over Horizon’s flaws, but you have also exposed, have you not, the Government’s reckless indifference to the Post Office’s misconduct over many years, would you agree?”
Bates replied: “Yeah, I think that is the case. Since this year, I suppose, since the [ITV] drama we’ve had far more publicity about the issue nationally.
“I’ve noticed there’s a general frustration with many other organisations that have that problem with Government as well. It seems to be a fundamental flaw in the way Government works that it can’t deal with these types of things easily and sensibly.”
Bates said he came to believe believed a mediation scheme set up to address the Horizon IT scandal was part of a “cover-up” and a “fishing expedition” to discover what evidence subpostmasters had about Horizon.
Asked by Jason Beer KC for his thoughts on the culture of the Post Office, he told the inquiry:
It’s an atrocious organisation. They need disbanding. It needs removing. It needs building up again from the ground floor. The whole of the postal service nowadays – it’s a dead duck. It’s beyond saving.
It needs to be sold to someone like Amazon. It needs a real big injection of money and I only think that can happen coming in from the outside. Otherwise it’s going to be a bugbear for the government for the years to come.
Foreign secretary David Cameron is due to speak in Washington alongside US secretary of state, Antony Blinken. Léonie Chao-Fong is following it on our US politics live blog, and I’ll bring you any key lines here.
Alan Bates evidence has concluded at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry for the day. As he finished, the chair Wyn Williams intervened to say that he could see people in attendance putting their hands together ready to applaud him.
He asked them to refrain, saying that other witnesses would appear before the inquiry who would maybe not be so “attractive”, and he would not want to have to admonish people for the way they reacted in those moments. He said while it was not a court of law, it was a public inquiry, and asked those attending to behave accordingly.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak has responded on social media to a protest which appears to have been staged this afternoon outside Keir Starmer’s home.
In a post, Sunak wrote “I don’t care what your politics are, no MP should be harassed at their own home. We cannot and will not tolerate this.”
I don’t care what your politics are, no MP should be harassed at their own home.
— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) April 9, 2024
We cannot and will not tolerate this. https://t.co/w4YDtC0ZpO
Sunak was responding to a clip posted to social media which appeared to show activists unveiling a sign saying “Starmer stop the killing” outside the Labour leader’s home
In the clip the protesters say Starmer has “enormous power, enormous influence” and that he could “stop UK weapons being sent over to cause genocide” and stop “Tory oil and gas licences”. The activists appear to have lined up empty children’s shoes leading up to a house.
From the social media account the group appear to be the same as those who sprayed Labour HQ with red paint yesterday.
Alan Bates has said there is a “fundamental flaw” in government, in the way it deals with this kind of issue. He says since the ITV drama at the turn of the year it seems to him that this is a more widespread issue than people realised.
He was also asked about the future of the postal service, and said it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up, and maybe sold to someone like Amazon, with a huge cash injection coming from outside because otherwise it is a “dead duck”.
There is some laughter in the room as he initially misspeaks, and said it should be sold to “someone like Horizon. Sorry, not Horizon. The last thing I would ever say.”
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has heard that despite the government having told Alan Bates that it had a “hands off” relationship with the company, there was in fact back channel communication between the two parties.
A July 2013 email, sent from shareholder executive Mike Whitehead from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to Post Office staff, showed how the government requested a meeting with the Post Office to discuss how to respond to communications from Bates.
Bates said he was not aware of this at the time.
Bates has also accused the Post Office of simply trying to outspend campaigners legally to prevent their case making progress, and expressed surprise that in 2013 former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells had not offered to meet him to discuss what had been discovered by forensic accountants.
Alan Bates is continuing his evidence at the moment, and it is quite in the weeds of how the mediation scheme did not work. He has said that at one point it had become clear to him that the role of a new general counsel appointed by the Post Office was to try to find a way to wind up the scheme.
Downing Street has said that Rishi Sunak and the president of Rwanda Paul Kagame look forward to asylum seeker deportation flights departing from the UK to Rwanda in the spring.
In a read-out of the meeting today between prime minister Rishi Sunak and president of Rwanda Paul Kagame in London, PA Media quotes a Downing Street spokesperson saying:
Prime minister Rishi Sunak welcomed the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, to Downing Street today.
The prime minister reflected on the 30-year anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi people in Rwanda, noting the importance of this time of remembrance and that it is a reminder of just how far Rwanda has come. President Kagame thanked the prime minister for the UK’s continued support.
They discussed regional security and the deteriorating conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The prime minister underlined the importance of a political process to resolve the situation.
The leaders also discussed the pioneering UK and Rwanda migration and economic development partnership, which will break the business model of criminal gangs risking lives at sea, and the prime minister updated President Kagame on the next stages of the legislation in parliament.
Both leaders looked forward to flights departing to Rwanda in the spring.
The testimony of Alan Bates has begun again at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry. Before the break he was saying that one of the problems with the later mediation scheme was that it would only work if both sides had gone in with good faith. However, he noted that the secretariat and funding for the scheme came from the Post Office.
His written testimony is now being quoted where he said that as the scheme progressed the original intention to uncover the truth became replaced by a culture of blaming the applicant. He cited delays in document disclosure as an example of them not engaging.
Notably the Post Office has been criticised by Jason Beer KC the leading counsel at the inquiry for repeated late disclosure which has described as “highly disrupting”.
The Sun lost £66m last year and its online audience dropped by 4 million readers as the newspaper continued to grapple with the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal.
Total losses at the Murdoch-owned tabloid have now reached £515m over the past five years, amid declining print sales and the high cost of paying damages to victims of illegal information gathering.
The Sun is still facing a number of lawsuits including one brought by Prince Harry in a case that is due to go to trial before the high court next year.
Read more here: The Sun loses £66m amid costs from phone-hacking scandal
Updated
Update – a reader emails me to say that you may be able to watch the YouTube feed here. I can’t, as for some reason it is blocked on my YouTube account. Maybe it was Ed Davey’s doing, conspiring to stop me spelling his name wrong every two minutes.
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has broken now for another 15 minutes. Just to put you in the picture, I have got access to a video feed via Reuters, but they don’t seem to have put the live video on the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry which is why I haven’t embedded it, apologies.
Alan Bates has said that he had long contended that an intermediate third party should have been introduced, saying he had heard stories of subpostmasters with huge losses that they were not declaring to the Post Office because they were so scared of the reaction.
In the morning session he had been highly critical of the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP), which he said had been no help.
During the lunch break the present chief executive of the federation said the testimony was “difficult to hear”.
Calum Greenhow said he could not address the individual issues raised by Bates as it was “a long time ago”, but said “Whilst we can’t go back and undo what has been done, the NFSP of today is committed to helping the inquiry in any way we can. I am sorry for what he and others experienced.”
Alan Bates has resumed giving evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey was specifically mentioned in the morning session at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, with Alan Bates saying that he took offence at the way his initial attempt to meet Davey when he bacame post office minister at the start of the coaltion government in 2010 was rebuffed.
The inquiry was read a briefing note given to Davey, which suggested the minister meet with Bates when there was the potential the story might gain more media traction, but advised him to avoid committing to any kind of investigation into the Horizon IT system and to regard the meeting as “sub judice”.
Since the morning session finished the Liberal Democrats have issued a statement, saying:
Ed has said that he’s sorry that he didn’t see through the Post Office’s lies, and that it took him five months to meet Mr Bates.
The Liberal Democrats are calling on the government to ensure postmasters get full and fair compensation urgently, and Post Office executives who lied for decades are held properly to account.
During the session Bates said he was more annoyed with the department and civil servants than individual ministers.
Updated
If you were wondering what the governor of the Bank of England was up to today, I can tell you that Andrew Bailey, alongside chief cashier Sarah John, have been at Buckingham Palace presenting King Charles with the first banknotes to feature his likeness.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak has hosted president of Rwanda Paul Kagame in Downing Street today. Sunak has spent month trying to unsuccessfully push through legislation that would allow asylum seekers who reach the UK to be deported to Rwanda to be processed and remain there, and the government is attempting to pass a bill that will declare Rwanda a “safe” country.
PA Media reports a Home Office spokesperson said: “As the government of Rwanda have made repeatedly clear, they stand ready to host thousands of migrants under the partnership.
“The scheme is uncapped and provisions are in place to provide accommodation as required. We remain focused on getting flights off the ground as soon as possible.”
Labour has demanded “urgent clarity” on the Rwanda scheme after the Times reported that most of the properties on a new housing estate earmarked for asylum seekers deported from the UK have been sold to local buyers.
Shadow immigration minister Stephen Kinnock said: “Now it seems there will be even less capacity to house those that are removed. The Tories’ so-called plan is unravelling by the day and taxpayers are footing the bill. It’s time for change.”
Former home secretary Suella Braverman had described the homes as “beautiful” when she visited them in March 2023, saying at the time “During my trip I have had the opportunity to visit housing projects supported through our partnership that people seeking refuge will come to call home.”
Striking junior doctors, consultants and specialists have suspended industrial action in Wales after agreeing to formal negotiations about pay with the Welsh Government.
The British Medical Association’s three branches of practice – junior doctors, consultants and specialist doctors – voted to suspend the strikes and begin talks with the Welsh government, PA Media reports.
Recently installed first minister Vaughan Gething said further funding had been identified to support the negotiations.
Here is an excerpt from Daniel Boffey’s article summing up the morning’s evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry:
Alan Bates, who has led the campaign to rectify what has been called the UK’s biggest miscarriage of justice, has accused the Post Office of spending two decades “denying, lying, defending and attempting to discredit and silence me”.
He also described the response of the former Post Office minister, and now leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey to his appeals for help as “disappointing and offensive”.
“[The government] should have been involved far earlier,” Bates said of the conduct of the Post Office’s sole shareholder while giving evidence on Tuesday morning.
In his first appearance at a public inquiry into the scandal, Bates, 69, whose battle over the injustice was the focus of a celebrated ITV drama, laid out the events that led to his campaign, including the termination of his own contract in 2003.
Bates, who took over his Post Office branch in Llandudno in 1998, told how he had repeatedly complained during his tenure that the Horizon accounting system could not be relied upon and that it was wrong that operators were being obliged to make good on shortfalls.
His contract was terminated without any reason being given in November 2003.
To laughter in the inquiry room, Bates was then shown internal documents unearthed by the inquiry’s lawyers in which Bates’s’ termination was said to be due to him being “unmanageable” and referred to him as someone who “struggled with accounting”.
Speaking at an inquiry session in Aldwych house in London, Bates responded: “It’s just they decided they were going to make a lesson of me.” He added that his determination to uncover the faults of the Horizon scandal was due to “stubbornness” and a sense of injustice after learning that hundreds of others had also been affected.
Read more here: Alan Bates tells inquiry Post Office spent decades ‘lying and trying to discredit me’
Away from the UK, Ireland’s Dáil has confirmed Simon Harris’s nomination as the new taoiseach.
Next, he will be formally appointed as Leo Varadkar’s replacement by Ireland’s president.
You can follow updates from that in our Europe blog.
Scotland’s first minister has warned that a vote for the Greens by Scots at the upcoming general election would be a “wasted vote”.
PA Media reports Humza Yousaf told the National newspaper that votes for the Greens would split the pro-independence vote. He said he has “a great amount of time” for the Scottish Greens, who entered the Scottish government in 2021, but cautioned:
In a Westminster election, particularly when we’re facing a challenge from Labour, the danger of voting Greens – who are not going to win a single seat in the general election in Scotland, I think they would be the first to admit that – is that would be a wasted vote.
If you want to advance the cause of independence, if you want a party that aligns with your values – whether that’s social justice or on the climate or wellbeing economy – then the SNP is the party that you need to be voting for.
Former armed forces minister Heappey: both Labour and Tories should commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence
Former armed forces minister James Heappey has said the Conservatives and Labour should commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence in their election manifestos.
He told listeners to the Today programme this morning:
The UK should step up and show some leadership within the European parts, or even the non-US part of Nato, and should commit 2.5% of GDP on defence spending at the Nato 75th anniversary summit in Washington this summer.
And I would hope that both of the parties that hope to form the government after the next general election would have a 3% commitment in their manifestos for delivery in the next parliament.
On 15 March, Heappey announced he was to step down as armed forces minister, and would leave the House of Commons at the next general election
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has broken for lunch for the day. Here’s a video clip from earlier when Alan Bates explained the harm he thought the Post Office had done.
Alan Bates is saying that he holds the civil service more responsible for the lack of progress than ministers. He says:
I do think a lot of the ministers, a lot of them come in for the stick in the inquiry, and all the rest of it. I’m sure some of it’s deserved, but I actually hold the department, and I hold the civil service more to blame in a lot of these instances, why things never progressed at the time. Because I’m sure between them and Post Office briefing ministers that were briefing them in the direction they wanted to brief them.
He suggests that the department must get “nagged” on a lot of issues, and he suspected that civil servants just tried to stall all of them until they saw which ones were getting more traction. He repeats that he blames officials more than minister.
Jason Beer has read out a briefing to Ed Davey which essentially suggested he meet Alan Bates because there might be a Channel 4 news item about the campaign, and to essentially have the meeting for presentational reasons. Bates says he doesn’t recall the meeting he had with Davey.
Bates was asked if Davey appeared engaged at the meeting, and Bates says he doesn’t recall.
The cautionary briefing goes on to suggest Davey was told his best course of action was to adopt a “sub judice approach”. Davey is advised to “Demonstrate you’re prepared to hear their side of the story. But make it clear you’re not in a position to offer substantive comment and avoid committing to setting up an independent or external review of Horizon.”
Of the meeting Bates keeps saying “I don’ recall” and that “I can’t think of anything that came out of it otherwise I’d probably recall it but, I suppose.”
This is the first time that Bates has appeared uncomfortable giving testimony.
Updated
The inquiry is now seeing a letter Alan Bates sent to Ed Davey in response in the July of 2010, saying he found Davey’s first letter “offensive”.
Bates added:
It seems that though there are new politicians in post, the government hasn’t changed. The letter you sent is little different to the one I received seven years ago from the Minister responsible for post offices at that time, and so many more lives have been ruined in the interim, because of that same attitude.
It’s not you can’t get involved or cannot investigate the matter, after all you do own 100% of the shares, and normally shareholders are concerned about the morality of the business they own.
It’s because you’ve adopted an arms length relationship, that you have allowed a once great institution to be asset-stripped by little more than thugs in suits. And you’ve enabled them to carry on with impunity, regardless of the human misery and suffering they’ve caused.
The room has fallen very silent while Beer reads this letter out at length.
Updated
Jason Beer KC is now showing a letter sent to Ed Davey, the current Liberal Democrat leader, in May 2010, when he had become minister for post office affairs in the new coalition government.
In the letter Alan Bates said:
In every instance, the Post Office acts as judge, jury and executioner, and the individual is deserted by their reputedly representative organisation the National Federation of subpostmasters.
Invariably, these cases all stem from the flaws of the Horizon system that the Post Office introduced and which they refuse to admit it has ever suffered from a single problem.
The evidence is there to be found by anyone in a position of being able to unlock doors instead of placing barriers in the way of those pursuing the information.
Our organisation has access to a number of specialists who could provide the questions and analyse the resulting data if required though an independent external investigation instigated a ministerial level would be most appropriate and will, without doubt, easily find evidence of the error ridden system.
I’m sure you will appreciate that there is not a single computer system that does not from time to time suffer from errors.
The Post Office blindly state that there are not nor have there ever been any system errors. So subsequently anything wrong is entirely the responsibility of the subpostmaster as that is what they’ve agreed to when signing their contracts.
This is a contract that was produced in 1994 and does not address nor identify new technology, but they’re still using it to intimidate and prosecute subpostmasters over the page.
Davey’s reply states:
The Royal Mail which includes Post Office Ltd was set up as a public limited company with the government as its only shareholder. Government has adopted an arm’s length relationship with the company so that it has commercial freedom to run its business operations without interference from the shareholder.
The integrity of the Post Office system is an operational and contractual matter for the Post Office and not government. And whilst I do appreciate your concerns and those of alliance members, I do not believe that a meeting would serve any useful purpose.
Beer says to Bates that he took particular offence at the idea the government held the Post Office at arms length, and Bates agrees, telling the inquiry:
Because of the structure, the government was the sole shareholder, they were the owners as such of all of this, and how can you run or take control or take responsibility for an organisation without having some interest in trying to control? In fact the government werre pumping huge amounts of money into Post Office year after year. So they need to be held responsible.
Updated
Alan Bates said he didn’t expect to be mounting this campaign for 20 years, “but it got more and more complex, and harder and harder to share out, to work as a bigger group.”
He said it felt like “banging your head against a brick wall to try to get everything out, because [the Post Office] were determined to protect the brand at any cost. And they didn’t want anything coming out or being disclosed that might cause damage to Post Office.”
Bates says he hasn’t done any other work since being dismissed as a subpostmaster in 2003.
There’s been a lengthy passage where Alan Bates has been highly critical of the National Federation of SubPostmasters (NFSP), describing it as just a separate branch of the Post Office itself. He said to his knowledge the NFSP had never helped any member facing prosecution due to Horizon errors.
He described someone being excluded from a meeting after they began to explain they were losing their branch due to the Horizon system’s faults.
“The Federation always seem to try to manage any of the problems around Horizon,” Bates said.
Jason Beer has just made the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry laugh. Alan Bates had started talking about something out of the chronological of his statement, and Beer complained “I’m the one who is supposed to bowl the fast balls.”
Beer is defintely bowling the legal equivalent of underarm at Bates today, just coaxing him through his story. It is likely to be a very different wicket when senior Post Office management figures appear later this week.
My colleague Jane Croftm, who has been covering this story since 2018, yesterday published this piece setting up what we can expect at Aldwych House this week.
Asked why he says in his statement that at the time “the Post Office would do anything and everything to try to keep the failures of Horizon hidden”, Alan Bates says:
I think a number of reasons. First off, I think the field personnel didn’t understand it to any great depth. And they just seemed to follow the corporate mantra, that Horizon is robust and that’s it, and everyone else is wrong.
I had some experience of those types of systems. And it was obvious it was extremely poorly designed, and it didn’t really do the job it was meant to, and there are a huge amount of problems. I kept on hearing problems, little problems from all sorts of people, other subpostmasters.
Because I used to go to regional federation meetings as well, and you did sit and chat, and everyone had a moan and a whinge about it.
And you heard stories of where people were literally taking the computers and the whole systems and leaving them on the pavement outside and telling the Post Office to come and collect it. Those are the sorts of stories that were running around at the time.
“Are you aware of what anecdotal evidence there might be, which demonstrates your unsuitability to be a postmaster?” Alan Bates is asked, after the idea that he had been unsuitable was floated in Post Office a document.
“They appointed me in the first instance,” he noted. “This was just them flexing their muscle and just decided they were right and I was wrong,” he says.
At another point in the documents it is suggested that Bates was “flaunting” the way he was acting against instruction in the way he was rolling over what he considered to be the inaccuracies introduced by the Horizon IT system. Bates said:
I just pointed out what I was doing and the reasons why I was doing it, but they never respond to me, they’d never discuss the issue about data, and data access, and liability, and how long that liability lasted for and all the rest of it.
When I went into Post Office, it was sold to me at the time as you were in partnership with the business. But you very soon learned that this was a very one-sided partnership. I mean, basically you do whatever you’re told was your side of the partnership, and they just didn’t seem to like it if you raised any queries, even no matter how justified they were.
Alan Bates has said in his evidence that everybody he turned to for help with his campaign were being “shut down or fobbed off” by the Post Office, which repeatedly sought to justify its decision to terminate his contract, and told people “No evidence was found which in any way substantiates the various claims being made by Bates.”
Bates is disputing that “further training and support” was given to him. With an element of sarcasm he says “Well, it’s true if that’s what it says” about a Post Office claim to that effect.
A little bit of extra background on what is happening at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today. Alan Bates, perhaps the best known victim and campaigner in the scandal is giving evidence. He is being taken through a 58-page witness statement he submitted to the inquiry by Jason Beer KC.
Post Office chief executive Nick Read is in attendance. Bates told the inquiry he has spent 23 years campaigning to expose the truth.
More than 700 subpostmasters were prosecuted by the Post Office and handed criminal convictions between 1999 and 2015 as Fujitsu’s faulty Horizon system made it appear as though money was missing at their branches.
There has been a somewhat wry reaction in the room as a letter from the Post Office was read out in which they said to Alan Bates “I am confident that the various teams concerned in the events have worked hard to provide support and assistance to you in a consistent and sympathetic manner.”
Alan Bates is saying that he hoped a letter about his circumstances in August 2003 would have been read by senior leaders at the organisation. He said “I can’t do more than draw their attention to it. I can’t force them to read it, but if you don’t write to them, then they’ll never know.”
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is back under way. Jason Beer KC is asking Alan Bates about 2003 when his contract had been terminated. You can watch it here …
One thing I wanted to draw your attention to while there is a pause in the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry hearing, is that earlier today veterans of the last Labour government have called on Keir Starmer to put a new Sure Start-style programme at the heart of his election manifesto after research showed its transformational impact on poor children.
Sure Start was first announced in 1998 and saw the development of hundreds children’s centres across the UK. Our community team would like to hear from people – or parents of people – who were helped by the scheme. You can contact them here.
There will now be a twenty minute break in the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry.
Bates said he was maybe described as “unmanageable” because:
A) They didn’t like me standing up to them in the first instance, B) they were finding it awkward and C) I don’t think they could answer these questions. And I think they had a feeling I was going to carry on in a similar vein going forward.
At the moment Jason Beer KC is getting to the nub of the employment dispute between Alan Bates and the Post Office.
The Post Office was trying to get Bates to repay money it claimed had been lost by the branch, and said Bates was liable due to his contract. Bates was making the point that since he could not audit or interrogate the information in the system, he was not contractually obliged as it could not be proved it was his negligence causing the issue. He put it to the Post Office that if the system said he owed them £1m would they try to be claiming that back.
With some considerable understament, Bates said he was “annoyed, to put it mildly” when the Post Office moved to terminate his contract.
He said to the inquiry that he said to the Post Office “if you’re unhappy with the way that I’m providing your service, then pay us back our initial investment and take the Post Office away. I would have been quite happy for them to do that. And I probably wouldn’t have been here today on that basis.”
He went on to say “I felt they were going to make a lesson of my case, because a number of other people knew what was going on at that time, and I think it was something like the Post Office trying to give a lesson on how they were in charge.”
There is a ripple of laughter in the room when Jason Beer asks Bates whether he had become “unmanageable”.
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, Alan Bates has recalled how he overheard the phrase “Oh, it’s another one of the Horizon losses” at one point. He told the inquiry:
It was just one of those little things that, you know, sticks in the back of your mind.
The phrase was said when he overheard a retail manager speaking on the phone while they were trying to process an issue with Bates’ branch.
Bates has gone on to agree with Beer that the Horizon system could make mistakes in both directions, “overs and unders” as he termed them.
Updated
Alan Bates has now been talking about the letter he wrote in which he set out what he believed were the issues with the Horizon system, to which he never received a reply. He is keen to stress that he wasn’t negative about electronic sales systems at all, and had previously worked with systems like Horizon quite happily.
He is very comfortable giving evidence and is quite personable. This is a very gentle questioning by Beer, taking Bates through his written submission to the inquiry to tease out the key points. It is not at all adversarial as we have previously seen with other witnesses at the inquiry representing Fujitsu or the Post Office.
Updated
Alan Bates: once I saw 'harm and injustice' I had to dedicate part of my life to this cause
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, Alan Bates has said that he has dedicated a large part of his life to campaigning about the scandal because of the “harm and injustice” that he saw.
Appearing at Aldwych house in London, Bates, who was featured as a character in the ITV drama that drew so much focus to the scandal, said:
Once I’d started my individual little campaign and we found others along the way, and eventually we all joined up. It has required dedication, but secondly, it is a cause. I think it’s also stubbornness as well. But it’s … I mean, as you got to meet people, and realise it wasn’t just yourself. And you saw the harm, the injustice that had been descended upon them, it was something that you felt you had to deal with.
He told the inquiry, which has been running for three years, that he had spent four times as long campaigning about Horizon as he had being a subpostmaster, although that had been the decision of the Post Office. He believed they terminated his contract because of his frequent complaints about the Horizon system.
Having used computerised sales software in other roles, Bates said he found the reporting aspects of the Horizon system limited.
Today’s session began with lead consul Jason Beer KC issuing a lengthy criticism of the Post Office for its repeated late discloure of documents to the inquiry, which he said had been “highly disruptive”.
Inquiry chair Wyn Williams said he was determined to continue the hearings on the present timetable, despite the difficulty of the Post Office failing to produce documents in a timely fashion, because the alternative, an adjournment, would be worse. He said he believed the inquiry should not last a day longer than necessary,
Updated
At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, Alan Bates has been talking about how he did his due diligence before taking over the branch he ran
In his statement he said a key attraction to working with the Post Office was that it would provide secure employment, based upon the fact that it provides a community service, and has an established brand. He also looked forward to the opportunity to run a secondary retail business alongside the branch.
Beer is asking him about when the Horizon IT system was installed in his branch.
Bates says:
I expected to be able to track down any transaction that I’d undertaken – myself or my staff had undertaken – at the branch, one way or another. There are a variety of ways of interrogating systems, and the data on the systems, and I presumed that the system would enable you to do that at the outset.
There was very little flexibility in Horizon, as I saw it at that time, for reports that you could control the parameters of your searches. There were a set of reports, don’t get me wrong, there were a set that were already built into the system, but they were quite restrictive. It did seem to cause problems.
Updated
Away from the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry for a moment, here is a video clip put out by Rachel Reeves from her media round this morning, where the shadow chancellor promised a Labour government would deliver two million more NHS appointments, emergency dental appointments and primary school breakfast clubs funded by a crackdown on tax avoidance.
I will crack down on tax avoidance to fund more NHS hospital and dentist appointments, and free breakfast clubs for all primary schools. pic.twitter.com/OzGsiC6rS0
— Rachel Reeves (@RachelReevesMP) April 9, 2024
Beer has noted that Alan Bates has spent four times as long campaigning on the issue as he spent being a subpostmaster.
Bates says that:
Well, initially it was because Post Office terminated my contract. Gave me three months notice, and not giving me a reason for doing so. Purely because, in my belief, it is that I kept raising problems and concerns over its Horizon system, due to a number of faults I’d found over the years.
He’d said because of previous experience with electronic point of sales systems (Epos) he had looked forward to Horizon being installed, but found it to be disappointing and full of shortcomings.
There is some laughter at the inquiry as Beer good-naturedly asks Bates to say twice the name and location of his branch in Craig-y-Don in Llandudno, and chair Wyn Williams interjects to suggest he is being teased about Welsh names.
Updated
Alan Bates has taken his oath and is now giving evidence to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry.
You can watch it here:
Horizon inquiry to continue on present timetable despite 'disruptive' Post Office document disclosure issues
Lead counsel for the inquiry Beer has described the Post Office’s late disclosure of documents as “highly disruptive”.
Retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, who is chairing the inquiry, also sounds exasperated about the disclosure process, but says adjourning the inquiry is a worse option rather than witnesses sometimes running ahead of the document trail. He has decided to continue the inquiry on its present timetable.
He says he maybe set too tight a timetable for the hearings but says he is “unshakeable in his belief” that the inquiry, already three years old, should not last a day longer than needed
Updated
Post Office Horizon IT inquiry: Post Office criticised for persistant late disclosure of documents
Beer is saying that the Post Office is continuing to uncover thousands of documents – presumably mostly emails – relevant to the inquiry due to ongoing reviews. He has said:
We in the inquiry team wish to inform you and the core participants of these developments without delay. They present issues with which the inquiry has become extremely and unfortunately familiar with over the past three years.
I should also put the developments in a wider context. Since the end of the phase four hearings alone, so that is since the closing submissions on the 2 February 2024, the Post Office has disclosed 73,720 documents to the inquiry of which the inquiry legal team have characterised 67,210 documents as possibly relating to phases five and six of the inquiry.
He is scathing about the Post Office, adding:
The obligation of disclosure to the inquiry is of course ongoing. The inquiry had expected and anticipated ongoing disclosure from providers of documents. In certain instances documents can be found late, hard copies or electronic files or messages may turn up in unexpected devices.
But the issues that the Post Offices disclosure to this inquiry have presented have been much more than minor ad hoc or additional disclosure.”
He says there may now need to be a recall of some witnesses because of the late disclosure of documents.
He says “The alternative, further delay to allow the Post Office to get its disclosure house in order, is not one which is acceptable.”
Updated
Jason Beer KC, lead counsel for the inquiry, has effectively issued a very long legal dressing down to the Post Office for a track record of disrupting the inquiry with late disclosure of documents, despite the fact “the Post Office [said it] aspired to eliminate disruption wherever it was possible to do so.”
He is now saying that on 28 March the Post Office submitted another tranche of 1071 late documents that “make reference to 19 specific individuals within the Post Office.”
Beer says “15 documents were said to be, quote, of high relevance, and 44 documents were said to be documents of interest.”
The Post Office said some of these documents might be duplicates.
Today’s session at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has started with criticism of the repeated “late and problematic disclosure of evidence” from the Post Office, which has necessitated postponing some hearings in the past. This discussion is delaying the appearance of Alan Bates.
If you want to watch the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today, then there is a live stream here. I will be following along and will bring you any key lines that emerge. It is Alan Bates giving testimony and so we are expecting to hear about his experience as a victm and then a campaigner.
He has already arrived at the inquiry.
Campaigner Alan Bates to appear before Post Office Horizon IT inquiry
At 10 o’clock the next state of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal inquiry starts, and I will be following it closely here. Alan Bates – the real life character featured in the ITV drama that did so much to focus attention on the scandal will take the stand at Aldwych House and tell his story. Our First Edition newsletter today featured Rupert Neate talking to our colleague Jane Croft, who has been covering the story since 2018, about it. Here is a snippet:
“The impact this scandal has had on thousands of people’s lives has been truly devastating,” Jane says. “These are ordinary people, without money and connections that have been caught up in this real David and Goliath battle.”
In personal impact statements to the inquiry, the victims have spoken about losing everything. “It’s not just their money,” Jane says. “It’s their liberty, their partners, their families, their homes. Some spoke about their children being bullied at school, being shunned by their local community, and being referred to as ‘the postmaster who stole old people’s pensions’.”
“They want justice and for the truth to come out,” Jane says. “It feels like the Post Office knew the Horizon IT system wasn’t working properly, but they continued to prosecute these innocent people anyway.”
In 2015 the Post Office told a House of Commons inquiry: “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it has been recorded in a branch’s accounts.” This was untrue, a high court judge ruled in a landmark court case four years later.
A recording from 2013, unearthed by Channel 4 News, shows Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s head lawyer, confirm that former chief executive Paula Vennells had been briefed about a “covert operations team” that could remotely access the Horizon system and adjust branches’ accounts. In 2015 Vennells told the Commons business select committee that “we have no evidence” of miscarriages of justice.
Vennells, who has handed back a CBE awarded to her for “services to the Post Office and to charity”, will give evidence, live-streamed here, for three days from Wednesday 22 May.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor who was one of the MPs questioning Vennells in 2015, has called for a “thorough police investigation”.
“I don’t think it’s good enough that we keep falling back on ‘let the inquiry do its work’ – this is much more serious,” he said. “There needs to be an investigation into corporate manslaughter and individuals at the Post Office.”
Read more here: Tuesday briefing: What to expect from the next phase of the Post Office inquiry
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves also repeatedly attacked Conservative plans over non-dom tax status. Having defended the status against calls for abolition for years, in March Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt announced it would adopt Labour’s policy and scrap the status. However, the way they are planning to do so has been criticised for including a significant number of loopholes.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast this morning, Reeves said:
The government’s plans that they announced in March about non-doms, they said they were taking our policy, well it turns out they’ve taken it but left a load of loopholes in it. And so if you are a non-dom you can still get out of paying inheritance tax: in the first year of their policy there’s a 50% discount, we don’t get 50% discounts on our taxes.
People who go out and work today – teachers, plumbers, doctors, they don’t get a 50% discount – why should some of the wealthiest people in the country get that discount? We would abolish that and we would put that money into frontline public services, where it belongs.”
Shadow cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson said ahead of the March budget that it would be an “abject humiliation” for the Tories if they implemented Labour’s policy.
Non-dom status allows foreign nationals who live in the UK, but are officially domiciled overseas, to avoid paying UK tax on their overseas income or capital gains. Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, has previously enjoyed non-domiciled status. In April 2022 she agreed to pay UK tax, saying her arrangements were not “compatible with my husband’s job as chancellor”.
Back with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves for a moment, one other theme she picked up in her media round this morning was that by investing in HMRC she expected a Labour government would do a better job of bringing in tax revenue than under the current administration. Labour has said it will invest up to £555m a year in boosting the number of compliance officers.
She told viewers of BBC Breakfast:
You can ramp it up pretty quickly. At the start you might need to bring in extra resource but then you need to train people up within the government to do this work.
This isn’t rocket science, previous governments have managed to close that tax gap, as it’s called.
Labour’s shadow financial secretary to the Treasury James Murray also touched on the topic when he was on Sky News this morning. He said:
We’ve got to invest in and improve the customer service at HMRC because, you know, we had this urgent question in parliament just before the recess, which was about HMRC closing its phone line for six months a year. Because the service was so bad, they just decided to close the phone line. And we say, look, you have to invest in digital solutions and modernise HMRC.
Braverman: Conservatives are heading for an election defeat
Former home secretary Suella Braverman has said that the Conservatives are heading for a certain defeat in the next election, but appeared to rule out standing against Rishi Sunak in a leadership contest in the short-term.
Speaking on LBC, PA Media reports Braverman said:
I’m very concerned, I’m very concerned about what poll after poll demonstrates, and it’s my job – and I sought to do this as home secretary – to speak honestly, to speak the truth, even if it may be uncomfortable.
I owe that to the people who have sent me to parliament, and I owe that to you, and so the honest truth is that we are heading for a defeat, to put it mildly, at the general election.
I very much hope that we change course and that we improve the offer to the British people. Ultimately, measures on tax cuts, measures on migration, measures on national security and social cohesion are insufficient by this government.
We need to go further, we need to demonstrate to the British people that we’re on their side, that we’re serious about stopping the boats, that we’re actually serious about curbing unprecedented levels of illegal migration, and unfortunately we haven’t managed to do that.
She added “I’m not thinking about any kind of leadership campaign. Rishi Sunak is our prime minister, I fully expect him to lead us into the next general election.”
Braverman departed as home secretary during Liz Truss’s short term as prime minister for causing a security breach by sending official documents from a personal email account. Rapidly reinstated into the same job by Rishi Sunak when he formed his first cabinet, she was sacked by him in November for writing an article criticising London’s police which had not been agreed in advance by No 10.
My colleague Martin Pengelly in Washington has had an early sight of the new Liz Truss book, the apocalyptically titled Ten Years To Save The West from the woman who had 49 days in Downing Street. Here is a snippet from his piece:
When the queen died so soon after Truss had become her 15th and final prime minister, Truss writes, the news, though widely expected after the monarch’s health had deteriorated, still came “as a profound shock” to Truss, seeming “utterly unreal” and leaving her thinking: “Why me? Why now?”
Insisting she had not expected to lead the UK in mourning for the death of a monarch nearly 70 years on the throne and nearly 100 years old, Truss says state ceremony and protocol were “a long way from my natural comfort zone”.
Other prime ministers, she writes without naming any, may have been better able to provide “the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary”.
Read more here: Liz Truss says in book Queen told her to ‘pace yourself’, admits she didn’t listen
Labour’s shadow financial secretary to the treasury James Murray was also on the media round this morning, and while on Sky News, that David Cameron visit to meet Donald Trump led to an awkward exchange where Kay Burley was pushing him to say whether shadow foreign secretary David Lammy should also be making overtures to the presumptive Republican nominee for the US election in November.
Murray said:
I know David’s been to America quite a bit. He’s got colleagues on both sides of the aisle. There’s Republicans as well as Democrats. You know, he’s built those bridges because I think he recognises that we need to have an alliance. I don’t know his diary. But you know, if we get into government, if president Trump is reelected, we need to have a relationship with the US whoever is in the White House.
David Cameron has held talks with Donald Trump in Florida. In a statement on Monday, a Foreign Office spokesperson said: “Ahead of his visit to Washington, the foreign secretary will meet former President Trump in Florida today. It is standard practice for ministers to meet with opposition candidates as part of their routine international engagement.”
Cameron’s counterpart, US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, met with people from the opposition Labour party on his last visit to the UK.
Cameron will head on to Washington where he is expected to hold talks with Blinken, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. He is also hoping to meet the House speaker, Mike Johnson. We are expecting at least some public words from Cameron during the day.
Labour figures continue to be asked in the media about Angela Rayner’s housing arrangements from a decade ago. Speaking on BBC Breakfast, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said Rayner was “a good friend and a colleague of mine and I have full faith and trust in her.”
Speaking on the Today programme when asked about the issue, Reeves told listeners:
I think she was on this programme and answered questions about the sale of her house almost a decade ago now, when she was married to her former husband.
So these allegations are from something that happened a decade ago. She has sought legal advice since Michael Ashcroft wrote this book.
She’s confident and I’m confident that she has paid her tax, but today is about asking the wealthiest in our country to pay their fair share of tax to fund our public services.
Reeves: Labour spending plans will make 'massive difference' to the lives of people
Rachel Reeves has said Labour’s spending plans will make a “massive difference” to the lives of people, promising two million additional appointments a year in the NHS, 700,000 emergency dental appointments, free breakfast clubs in all primary schools as well as investment in scanners and new technology in hospitals.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, despite cautioning that should it form the next government, Labour would face “the worst economic inheritance since the second world war.”
She said:
I’m under no illusions about the scale of the challenge that I would inherit if I become chancellor. Both the economic inheritance that I’ve spoken about with debt, living standards and taxes, but also the inheritance in terms of the state of public services on their knees after 14 years of Conservative government, particularly our NHS.
That is why the focus today is about how we can raise that additional £5bn by the end of the parliament. Numbers that don’t just come from me, but which come from the National Audit Office, and a speech given in January this year about the money that is on the table that we could bring in through cracking down on tax avoidance by properly resourcing HMRC.
Nick Robinson suggested the figures were insignficant compared to the total government budget, descrbing them as a “rounding error” and “loose change down the back of the treasury sofa”.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has said an incoming Labour government would launch a £5bn crackdown on tax avoiders to close a gap in its spending plans exposed by Jeremy Hunt scrapping the non-dom regime to finance tax cuts.
Warning households and businesses that Labour was prepared to adopt tough measures to tackle tax fraud and non-compliance, Reeves said the funding would be used to pay for free school breakfast clubs and additional NHS appointments.
Labour’s plan will reduce “the tax gap” – the difference between the amount of money HMRC is owed and the amount it actually receives – to previous levels after it increased by more than £5bn over the past year.
Reeves will also raise £2.6bn over the next parliament by closing what she described as loopholes in the government’s plans to abolish exemptions for non-doms – people who are not “domiciled” in the UK for tax purposes.
The government reforms will allow non-doms to use family trusts to avoid inheritance tax and to have a 50% discount in the first year of when new rules apply. Reeves said she would ban the use of trusts to avoid the tax and scrap the 50% discount.
It comes a month after Labour’s spending plans were thrown into question by Hunt adopting two of the party’s top revenue-raising policies at the budget to fund a cut in national insurance.
Read more of Phillip Inman’s report here: Labour plans £5bn crackdown on tax avoiders to close non-dom spending gap
Welcome and opening summary …
Good morning. Labour has been setting out plans to try to recoup more money from tax avoidance in an attempt to show that it has the money on hand to fund its pledges without breakign the fiscal rules it has set for itself. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has been doing the media round today, more on that in a moment. Here are your headlines today …
Labour plans £5bn crackdown on tax avoiders to close non-dom spending gap.
William Wragg resigns from two Commons roles after divulging MPs’ phone numbers while embroiled in a sexting scandal. He retains the Tory whip
Foreign secretary David Cameron is in the US and has met with Donald Trump
Ministers are facing calls to abandon the “cruel and nonsensical” fines levied on tens of thousands of unpaid carers for unwittingly breaching earnings rules by just a few pounds a week
Rats and cockroaches are among thousands of pests found at English hospitals
Veterans of the last Labour government have called on Keir Starmer to put a new Sure Start-style programme at the heart of his election manifesto after research showed its transformational impact on poor children
Westminster, the Scottish parliament and the Senedd are in recess, but there is some business scheduled at Stormont.
The main event today though will be when the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry resumes in London. Alan Bates, former subpostmaster and founder of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance appears. The inquiry, chaired by the retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, began in 2022.
It is Martin Belam here 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.
