Monday Summary
Here’s a summary the day’s major developments in UK politics.
The House of Lords voted 214-171 to delay prime minister Rishi Sunak’s flagship UK-Rwanda immigration treaty over safety concerns, with the major setback likely to enrage right-wing Conservatives and put Sunak’s administration on the back foot again.
Labour frontbencher Lord Vernon Coaker attacked Sunak for ‘lecturing’ the Lords, saying peers are doing their ‘proper constitutional role’ to analyse the Rwanda treaty.
Liberal Democrat Lord Tim Razzell said the policy’s irony was that the deterrence intended by offshoring to ‘hell hole’ Rwanda is now stopping the scheme being viable.
But home officer minister, Conservative Baron Andrew Sharpe, replied this interpretation was ‘offensive,’ as he unsuccessfully urged Lords to back to bill to ‘stop the boats as soon as possible.’
After the vote, right-wing figures attacked the move. Nigel Farage weighed in, provocatively saying “We must sack all current members of the House of Lords.” It was unclear what constitutional mechanism he was referring to when claiming the lawmakers must be “sacked.
Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has described the government’s free childcare plan as being in “tatters,” after reports that staffing and IT problems were hampering the rollout.
Sunak spoke to US president Joe Biden, discussing the military and humanitarian situations in Gaza, the Red Sea and Ukraine after US-UK airstrikes in recent weeks.
The train drivers’ union Aslef will stand down its five days of additional strikes at LNER, after the state-owned operator withdrew plans to impose minimum service levels during next week’s industrial action.
Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf has asked to speak to Labour leader Keir Starmer about Westminster-Holyrood relations if Labour is to form a government.
Meanwhile, Starmer is keen to show he’s not up for ducking a fight from the Conservatives, in response to critics that he has run away from key battles so far, as his electoral strategy continues to evolve.
That’s all from me, Jem Bartholomew in London, and from the UK politics blog for today. Thanks for following the Guardian’s live coverage. See you next time.
Right-wingers attack Lords after delay to Rwanda scheme over safety concerns
After the UK’s upper lawmaking chamber voted 214-171 to delay the passing of a UK-Rwanda treaty to provide offshore immigration detention – to provide further time for scrutinising safety concerns – right-wing politicians were quick to attack the House of Lords.
The hard-right, anti-immigration Nigel Farage, an ever-present worry over the right-shoulder of Conservative leaders, said provocatively on X/Twitter: “We must sack all current members of the House of Lords. It is beyond parody.” It was unclear what constitutional mechanism he was referring to when claiming the lawmakers must be “sacked.”
Meanwhile, the UK Independence Party, which former-leader Farage left in 2018, said on X/Twitter: “ABOLISH THE HOUSE OF LORDS!”
The comments are a taste of what prime minister Rishi Sunak can expect from backbenchers and other right-wing campaigners, who are urging him to begin sending asylum seekers to Rwanda – and seem prepared to topple him as leader if he can’t.
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More reaction to the government’s major setback on the Rwanda offshore immigration policy to come. But first, my colleagues Pippa Crerar and Patrick Butler have this great piece on Labour leader Keir Starmer’s evolving strategy – and willingness to fight. Read the full piece below.
In the coffee break after Keir Starmer’s speech on civil society on Monday, the mood among charity leaders was positive. Perhaps most of all they liked his defence of the National Trust and RNLI, beloved national charities that have, over the years, been demonised and demeaned by the right.
“It’s come to something when the Tories are at war with the National Trust,” the Labour leader had told them. “That’s what happens when politics of self-preservation prevail over commitment to service.”
His speech was also symbolic of a broader strategy from Starmer, who has been looking for opportunities to flip the narrative and show that he is not just ducking fights with the Tories to deny them electoral dividing lines, as some of his critics suggest.
This same strategy was on display earlier this month when he told reporters he was “up for the fight” of defending the “nanny state” as he announced plans to improve child health under a Labour government, including supervised toothbrushing in schools.
House of Lords kicks Rwanda offshore immigration treaty into long grass
The House of Lords has voted 214-171 to delay prime minister Rishi Sunak’s flagship UK-Rwanda immigration treaty, with the major setback likely to enrage right-wing Conservatives and put Sunak’s administration on the back foot again.
Tonight’s votes centred on delay motions from Labour peer Lord Goldsmith, chairman of the chamber’s International Agreements Committee, which presented a report identifying ten sets of issues where “significant additional legal and practical steps are needed in order to implement the protections the treaty is designed to provide,” Goldsmith said.
Goldsmith added: “We are not saying the treaty should never be ratified but we are saying that Parliament should have the opportunity to scrutinise the treaty and its implementing measures in full before it makes a judgement about Rwanda is safe.”
The UK’s upper lawmaking chamber joins a list of other institutions in the British constitution who have thrown doubt on the viability and safety of No 10’s immigration plan – the Court of Appeal in April last year, then the Supreme Court in November.
Sunak has framed these setbacks in a quasi-presidential way, as an assault on its ability to pass laws and on the “will of the people” – despite Rwanda offshoring not being included in the 2019 Conservative manifesto – whereas opponents say the separation of powers is performing its constitutional role in sinking an unlawful policy.
In this way, the treaty debate has also became a proxy for disagreement over the makeup of Britain’s unwritten constitution.
In a statement ahead of the vote, Labour frontbencher Lord Vernon Coaker said the chamber was doing its “proper constitutional role” to analyse the treaty further, attacking Sunak’s “lecturing.” In response, Home office minister Baron Andrew Sharpe said, “This begs the question, is Labour using the House of Lords to try to frustrate our plan to stop the boats?”
The Rwanda plan, initially launched by Boris Johnson as prime minister in April 2022, was struck down by the Supreme Court in November, declared unlawful over concerns the safety of people seeking asylum could not be guaranteed in Rwanda – particularly the risk of being returned to their country of origin.
Driven by critics on the right, Downing Street has tried to find a route around the ruling by ratifying a legally-binding treaty with Rwanda in parliament. The prime minister was able to dodge a rebellion from the Tory right earlier this month after last-minute crunch talks with 45 rebel MPs, sending the bill to the Lords with a majority of 44.
The policy has been also attacked by opposition parties, campaigners and human rights lawyers, for its impact on the lives of people seeking asylum, its expensiveness, and its risk for the UK to breach international obligations across a slew of human rights treaties. The government says it will help “stop the boats” across the English channel.
Before peers debated the bill, Sunak ratcheted up the pressure. “Will the opposition in the appointed House of Lords try and frustrate the will of the people as expressed by the elected house?” he said in a press conference. “Or will they get on board and do the right thing? It’s as simple as that.”
Since Sunak became prime minister on 25 October 2022, following Liz Truss’s resignation, the Lords has defeated the government 125 times, according to a count from the Constitution Unit at University College London. Since the 2019 election, the government has been defeated on 374 votes – though significant setbacks such as tonight’s are rarer. (Tonight’s vote will not be included in that count as it is a motion to delay, not kick out, the bill.)
Sunak’s difficulty passing the cornerstone policy led Labour’s shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, to tell MPs last week: “He’s in office but not in power. No one agrees with him on his policy. And the real weakness is that he doesn’t even agree with it himself.”
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Lords begin voting on UK-Rwanda treaty
“Voting is now open, clear the bar,” says the Lord Deputy Speaker, Baroness Garden.
And with that, peers go to cast their vote on whether to kick the prime minister’s landmark immigration policy into the long grass for further scrutiny…
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Lord Peter Goldsmith, Labour, weighs in again and picks up the constitutional jostling – between the government and the Lords, itself a continuation of fighting between the government and the courts – in saying the chamber has a right to vote for further scrutiny of the treaty.
Some peers “seem to be suggesting there was something improper in asking this house to do what I’m asking you to do tonight,” he says.
“The power – not to delay the treaty, not to block the treaty, because we can’t do that, that’s very clear – what we can do is pass a resolution, if we so agree, a resolution that it should not be ratified at the moment. That’s all I’ve asked.”
“It’s not right to say that that’s improper. “
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'Offensive' to say immigration plan based on Rwanda 'hell hole' deterrent – Home office minister
Defnding the government’s plan in the House of Lords a moment ago was Baron Andrew Sharpe, of Epsom, a Conservative and the home office parliamentary under-secretary of state.
He said there are “very significant protections” that are legally binding to ensure Rwanda is safe and the motions to delay the treaty, being voted on this evening, are “unnecessary and misguided”.
“It is vital we stop the boats as soon as possible,” he went on.
Sharpe said the idea that Rwanda was chosen because it was a “hell hole” intended to be a “deterrent” is an “offensive” way to frame the proposal, referencing earlier comments by Lord Tim Razzell, Liberal Democrat.
“It was never about Rwanda, or any other partner country, being a ‘hell hole,’ as described by Lord Razzell, which I find quite offensive,” Sharpe said.
“By sending the clear message that if you try to come here illegally and have no right to stay here, you will be returned home or removed to a safe third country, can we break the business model of the trafficking and smuggling gangs.”
Moreover, Sharpe ended his speech with a dig at Labour: “This begs the question, is Labour using the House of Lords to try to frustrate our plan to stop the boats?”
In a moment of comedy, Sharpe sparked laughs in the upper chamber when, introducing his speech, the government minister said: “I recognise my time here is limited…”
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Lords doing 'proper constitutional role' to analyse Rwanda treaty, says Labour frontbencher as he attacks Sunak 'lecturing'
As the House of Lords debate on the Rwanda treaty continues, Labour frontbencher Lord Vernon Coaker attacks prime minister Rishi Sunak for his approach to the upper chamber.
The debate is, of course, about the specifics of the treaty and what it means for the UK’s place in the world, and responsibilities under international agreements.
But bubbling under the surface, it has also led to clashes over the dynamics of Britain’s unwritten constitution and the balance of powers across the machinery of government.
“What we’ve seen today is not a House of Lords seeking to block, to act in an anti-democratic way, to actually do anything other than to do its job – which is to say to the government: where we believe that you should think again, where we believe that you might actually reflect on what you are doing,” Coaker said.
“That, as a revising chamber, as an advisory chamber, is absolutely what we should be doing. And nobody, least of all the prime minister, should hold press conferences, lecturing us about what our role is, when all we seek to do is to improve it, and to act in our proper constitutional role.”
Coaker referenced Sunak’s presser earlier this week urging the Lords to enact the “will of the people,” interpreted by some critics as a means of leaning on the upper lawmaking chamber.
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Prime minister Rishi Sunak spoke with US president Joe Biden on Monday, discussing geopolitical, military and humanitarian issues in the Red Sea, Gaza and Ukraine.
“They talked about what’s going on in the Red Sea and the need for a continued international multilateral approach to disrupting and degrading Houthi capabilities,” White House spokesman John Kirby told Reuters.
They also discussed bringing down civilian casualties and increasing humanitarian assistance in Gaza, as well as Ukraine war funding.
It came after the UK and US have taken part in joint airstrikes in recent weeks from warplanes, ships and submarines, hitting Houthi targets in Yemen in retaliation for attacks on shipping traffic.
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The statements in the upper chamber in this evening’s debate on the UK-Rwanda treaty have so far swayed towards concern and alarm at the government’s plan, suggesting the House of Lords might choose to delay the bill in the soon-to-come vote.
But there have been voices who said they are in favour of passing the treaty as it stands.
Conservative Lord Richard Balfe, in his statement, attracted headlines for questioning whether anywhere in Africa is “particularly safe” and said he could not think of “any country in Africa that I would wish to go and live in. But maybe it is safe. We don’t know.”
He added: “We need to realise that the whole international migration system... has got out of hand.
“If we’re going to cure it, we’ve got to do it as a European entity”, he said, adding “we’ve got to start off by rebuilding the countries of the Middle East that we smashed to pieces”. But he said he wanted to “support the Government in its attempts – which probably won’t work – to deal with this problem”.
Meanwhile, away from the House of Lords, Money Saving Expert and personal finances guru Martin Lewis has written urging the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to fix rules around child benefit which “unfairly” penalise some families with a single income or one dominant earner.
Lewis pointed out “the unfairness in the way child benefit gains start being withdrawn depending solely on one parent/guardian’s income hitting £50,000 (and wiped at £60,000).”
“The high-income child benefit charge unfairly penalises single-income families,” Lewis said, first reported by PA Media.
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Lord Alex Carlile, a crossbencher, puts his argument simply in the Lords: “At the moment, we have not proved to the requisite standard – and I would suggest it’s beyond reasonable doubt – that Rwanda is a safe country for a law founded on this treaty.”
Lord David Alton, of Liverpool, a crossbencher, invokes Winston Churchill in defending the international human rights framework he warns passing the current treaty would threaten.
“It was Winston Churchill who promoted so much that we now take for granted including the European Convention on Human Rights. He rightly believed that such international architecture, based on the rule of law, democracy, human rights, security and economic recovery, represented our best hope for the future.
He also says, “The government rightly insists that the criminal mafia like gangs, who make their fortunes by preying on the desperation and misery of the vulnerable, must be hunted down and jailed.”
But, he goes on, “the question today is simply whether we can honestly say that Rwanda is a safe country”; and it’s also about “the separation of powers between judiciary and parliament”, as Sunak tries to get around the Supreme Court’s unlawful ruling.
He raises concerns about Rwanda’s human rights record, political oppression and treatment of LGBT people.
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Lord Tim Razzell, Liberal Democrat, provokes chuckles in the upper chamber as he argues the government’s immigration policy is based on an irony:
“If we go back to the beginning, the whole reason for the proposals to send people to Rwanda was because it was going to be such a hell hole that nobody will would want to get on a boat if they thought they were going to go to Rwanda.
“But of course, the dilemma that the government now faces, is because of the Supreme Court [striking it down in November for being potentially unsafe], they have to demonstrate what a wonderful, safe place Rwanda is. And I do wonder whether that might just be a moment for them to reflect on the purpose of their policy.”
He added that the policy is “a classic case of two and two adding up to make five.”
We’re an hour away from the scheduled vote on the treaty. Rishi Sunak will be hoping more peers take their feet to argue in favour of the treaty as the minutes tick down.
Speaking a moment ago in the Lords was Labour’s Baroness Ruth Lister, who is emphasising, among other things, the potential impact on vulnerable children if the treaty is rushed into existence.
For children arriving int he UK whose ages are in dispute, she says, “there is a very real possibility that they will be removed to Rwanda, and if subsequently found to be under 18, sent back to the UK in a cruel human pass-the-parcel, which is likely to be very distressing for children who almost certainly have gone through considerable trauma.”
This, Lister points out, would be in breach of the UK’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. She says it would be irresponsible to call for the ratification of the treaty now.
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Summary of the day so far …
The House of Lords is currently debating the UK-Rwanda treaty, and the House of Commons is currently debating the second reading of the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill. Here are today’s headlines …
Rishi Sunak’s UK-Rwanda treaty faces its first hurdle in the House of Lords, as they debate a motion that suggests it should be delayed after a committee report. In just over an hour’s debate so far, all but a couple of people have spoken in favour of postponing ratification.
Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has described the government’s free childcare plan as being in “tatters” after reports that staffing and IT problems were hampering the rollout. Sunak admitted there were “some practical issues”, but Downing Street said the government remained “confident” of delivering the policy. Children, families and wellbeing minister David Johnston said in parliament that no parents would miss out.
Ofsted school inspections in England resume this week after a two-week pause to allow inspectors to undergo mental health awareness training.
More than 40 Conservative MPs – including seven former cabinet ministers, some with responsibility for local authority funding – have threatened Sunak with a fresh rebellion after writing to demand more funding for councils in England to avoid deep cuts to services.
Eleven Conservative MPs – including former ministers Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick – are reported to have been called in by government’s chief whip Simon Hart to explain themselves over last week’s rebellion against the Rwanda bill.
David Frost, the influential Conservative peer who has been criticised for claiming that rising global temperatures could be beneficial to the UK, is being appointed to a key parliamentary committee on the climate crisis.
The train drivers’ union Aslef will stand down its five days of additional strikes at LNER after the state-owned operator withdrew plans to impose minimum service levels during next week’s industrial action. It would have been the first test of enforcing “minimum service levels”.
Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf has written to Keir Starmer, inviting him to his official Edinburgh residence Bute House, to discuss how relations between the Scottish and UK governments might be improved in the event of Labour winning the next general election.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said his party has not yet reached an agreement with the government over post-Brexit trading arrangements.
That is it from me, Martin Belam, for today. I will be handing over to Jem Bartholomew.
David Frost, the influential Conservative peer who has been criticised for claiming that rising global temperatures could be beneficial to the UK, is being appointed to a key parliamentary committee on the climate crisis.
The appointment showed that “wacky, fringe views on climate” were no longer confined to the Tory party’s extremes, Labour said.
Frost, who was Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator, will be appointed at the end of the month to the House of Lords select committee on environment and climate change.
The former diplomat, who became a peer in 2020, is also a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which opposes a number of net zero environmental policies and which is funded by wealthy Tory donors. He describes the foundation as an “educational charity in this area”.
Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary of state for climate change and net zero, said Frost’s appointment showed that Sunak was trying to keep those seeking to oust him onside.
Read more of Ben Quinn’s report here: Peer who praised rising temperatures appointed to climate crisis committee
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Here is part of what Lord Goldsmith said in the House of Lords about the UK-Rwanda treaty as the debate there opened:
In total our report identifies at least 10 sets of issues where on the basis of the government’s evidence significant additional legal and practical steps are needed in order to implement the protections the treaty is designed to provide. The difficulty is that the government has already presented a bill to parliament asking it to make a judgment that Rwanda is safe now.
And yet on the home secretary’s own evidence it cannot be so. because the measures are not in place and have not been shown to be effective. The treaty is held up by the government as the justification for the measures in the bill and yet the treaty cannot at present provide a basis for parliament to judge that Rwanda is safe while so many aspects of the treaty remain unimplemented and untested.
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Paula Barker, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, has issued a statement to say that her Instagram account has been cloned, and that today she has found out that her family, friends and followers are being targeted with scam messages as a result.
She states that she has reported this to Instagram’s owners, Facebook’s parent company Meta.
— Paula Barker MP (@PaulaBarkerMP) January 22, 2024
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I’ve not been doing a minute-by-minute of the House of Lords debate about the UK-Rwanda treaty, but suffice it to say that it will not have made welcome listening for Rishi Sunak and his government, as so far every speaker has been against the immediate ratification of the treaty.
Here is a bit more of what the childcare, children and families minister, David Johnston, said in parliament after an urgent question was granted. He told MPs:
We want parents to be able to access the offers as soon as they can, delivering that ambition has included us increasing childcare funding rates with an additional £204m this financial year and an additional £400m in the coming financial year.
We are providing grants to help new childminders into the sector, and making changes to the early years foundation stage that the sector has asked us to make it easier for them.
We will be issuing letters with temporary codes to any parents whose tax free childcare reconfirmation date falls on or after 15 February and before 1 April, this will ensure that any eligible parent who needs a code to confirm their funded childcare place with their provider will have one and no parents should worry that they will lose out.
The shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, described the plan as being in “tatters”, telling the Commons:
Crumbling school buildings, botched school budgets, and now the hat-trick – a childcare pledge in tatters because of Conservative bungling, and it’s not ministers opposite but families across this country paying the price for Tory incompetence.
And how did we get here? A litany of failures, a pledge without a plan, a department without a grip, led by minsters without a clue. Families without the certainty of a childcare place they were promised by the Chancellor last March and meanwhile the department is facing another £120m shortfall because of yet another miscalculation.
Families are facing a rolling wave of Conservative chaos which wrecks all before it. Providers, an utter fiasco, where their income after April still a state secret. When will providers be told about their funding rates? How many families does he estimate will now not be able to access new hours because of this shambles?
In an answer that may come back to haunt him, Johnston told her: “She asks how many families won’t be able to access the childcare offer as a result of these two issues, the answer is none.”
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The House of Commons has an urgent question on measles, which was declared a UK national health incident last week. You can watch that here:
🔴 Shadow Minister for Primary Care and Public Health @PreetKGillMP is asking an urgent question.
— UK House of Commons (@HouseofCommons) January 22, 2024
Watch live ⬇️
My colleague Nicola Davis had a good explainer here: UK measles outbreaks – why are cases rising and vaccination rates falling?
This is the key passage from the House of Lords international agreements committee report on the UK-Rwanda treaty, which gets to the heart of what the Lords are discussing this afternoon:
On paper the Rwanda treaty improves the protections previously set out in the memorandum of understanding, but there are a significant number of legal and practical steps which need to be taken before the protections could be deemed operational such that they might make a difference to the assessment reached by the supreme court. Evidence that these arrangements have bedded down in practice is also needed. In short, the treaty is unlikely to change the position in Rwanda in the short to medium term.
We recommend that the treaty is not ratified until parliament is satisfied that the protections it provides have been fully implemented since parliament is being asked to make a judgement, based on the treaty, about whether Rwanda is safe. The government should submit further information to parliament to confirm that all the necessary legal and practical steps and training which underpin the protections provided in the treaty have been put in place, and then allow for a further debate before proceeding to ratification.
The full 21-page report is available here.
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DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson said his party has not yet reached an agreement with the government over post-Brexit trading arrangements.
PA Media reports that speaking to in Belfast, Jeffrey said:
To date no agreement has been reached in our negotiations with the government and there remains a number of important issues that have to be finalised if we are to see a restored assembly and executive. To be clear, we want to see the re-establishment of the executive and assembly and we’re working towards that objective.
The DUP wants to secure an agreement that provides the basis for the institutions to function with stability and in a way that is meaningful for everybody in Northern Ireland. Building sustainable foundations is vital to allowing Northern Ireland to move forward and to secure support from both unionists and nationalists.
Factually, we have made further progress on many of these issues since Christmas and have worked constructively with the secretary of state and his team on the issues which include matters relating to the Windsor framework and those elements where we need to see significant improvements.
Donaldson said he would be meeting with the government again this week in an attempt to “close remaining gaps”.
He was also defiant about reports there had been a “make or break” DUP meeting on Friday, telling reporters:
We will not be giving a detailed and running commentary on our internal meetings … on Friday I provided our party officers with a detailed update on the contacts and discussions we have had with the government.
I’m afraid the so-called senior DUP sources who made this claim are ill-informed, they are not people who are around the party officer table, they are not people who are privvy to all of the detail that the party officers have been dealing with. None of this spooks me, fazes me. I am focused on the job I have to do.
In May 2022, a DUP abstention prevented the assembly electing a speaker, and Stormont has been unable to meet since.
House of Lords begins debate on UK-Rwanda treaty
The House of Lords has begun its debate on the UK-Rwanda treaty. You can watch it on this blog. You may need to refresh the page for the play button to appear.
Robert Booth is social affairs correspondent of the Guardian
The housing ombudsman in England is calling for an independent royal commission “to reimagine the future of social housing” and re-establish the link between housing and health.
Richard Blakeway, who handles thousands of tenants’ complaints about mistreatment, disrepair, discrimination and squalor, said that parts of the social housing sector had reached breaking point, with residents desperate and neglected.
“The system in some areas is really close to being overwhelmed,” he told the Guardian. “The scale of the challenge hasn’t been grasped.”
About 4 million households live in social housing in England, but 380,000 households are in homes classed as “non decent” by the government. About 88,000 households are believed by the regulator of social housing to be living with serious damp and mould problems, which can, at worst, cause serious illness and death.
Blakeway, a former Conservative deputy mayor of London under Boris Johnson, has been in post for more than four years, during which time public outrage erupted over the death from mould of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in social housing in Rochdale.
He said a dramatic growth in casework had “turned the ombudsman into something like an emergency service”.
Read more of Robert Booth’s exclusive here: Housing ombudsman in England calls to re-establish link between housing and health
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David Johnston, the children, families and wellbeing minister, is on the receiving end of this question. He has also been admonished by the speaker, who suggested to him he could maybe have come forward with a ministerial statement on the issue, rather than waiting for an urgent question to be granted.
His reply is that no parents will miss out, and he finishes by attacking Labour, saying they have “no plan, no policy and no idea” on how to help children in education.
In December, Labour announced that former Ofsted head Sir David Bell was advising on preschool provision, with “detailed policies set out nearer the election”.
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“A rolling wave of Conservative chaos which wrecks all before it” is how the shadow education secretary has just described the current government performance in the education sector. “This isn’t a market,” she said of the childcare rollout plan. “This is an almighty mess.”
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Labour’s Bridget Phillipson has asked an urgent question on funded childcare, after the reports that the proposed extension of free hours was in chaos.
The Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, is giving MPs a reminder of the rules of bringing up topics relevant to a constituency and visiting another constituency. He is doing so, he says, because it is an election year, and that MPs may be anticipating boundary changes or standing for election in a different constituency to the one they currently represent. “Boundary changes do not take effect until the next election,” he says, and that MPs should not concern themselves in the house with the direct business of another member’s constituents. He reminds MPs – and ministers and shadow ministers – that they should make their best efforts to notify any MP whose constituency they are visiting.
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The Labour deputy leader and shadow levelling up secretary, Angela Rayner, has spoken in the Commons this afternoon about the lack of economic growth since David Cameron became Conservative prime minister 14 years ago.
Data revealed by the Centre for Cities today shows that after 14 years towns and cities in every corner of our country have been levelled down and left behind and left out of pocket. People are on average over £10,000-a-year worse off as a result of the sluggish growth since 2010.
Analysis of the country’s largest cities and towns reveals that every place is out of pocket, north and south, from former industrial towns to major cities.
Rayner said the government should listen to Labour’s proposals to “reform planning, reinstate housing targets and get Britain building again”.
Our economics correspondent Richard Partington reported on this earlier: Average UK person has lost out on £10,200 since 2010, thinktank says
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Gwyn Topham is the Guardian’s transport correspondent
The train drivers’ union Aslef will stand down its five days of additional strikes at LNER after the state-owned operator withdrew plans to impose minimum service levels during next week’s industrial action.
LNER, which runs trains on the east coast main line from London to Scotland, had told Aslef it intended to use the controversial new laws to run trains during the strikes.
The minimum service levels legislation passed by the Conservatives has not yet been tested until now. Ministers have been privately lobbying train operators to use the new powers during rolling strikes across all of England’s train operators next week and the LNER U-turn throws doubt over how workable the new law is in practice.
While LNER has not confirmed it planned to compel some drivers to work during the strike to run a minimum 40% of the usual timetable, it is understood that its plans prompted the Aslef escalation of action announced last week, which is now to be withdrawn.
Read more of Gwyn Topham’s report here: Train drivers call off extra strike days after LNER minimum service law U-turn
Scotland’s chief medical officer quizzed over WhatsApp deletion at Covid inquiry
Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent, based in Glasgow
Scotland’s chief medical officer, Sir Gregor Smith, has been giving evidence at the UK Covid inquiry, which is taking evidence again this week in Edinburgh.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the bracing attitude to deletion of informal messages that was revealed last week, much of the questioning was on WhatsApps.
Smith was asked about an exchange where a colleague messaged “Hope this isn’t FoI-able” to which Smith replied “delete at the end of every day”.
Smith clarified that the Scottish government advice at the time was not to keep WhatsApp messages for security reasons, but that he ensured all messages relevant to decision-making were captured by email and thus placed on the corporate record.
Over the weekend, the former first minister Nicola Sturgeon rebutted the inquiry’s suggestion that all her WhatsApps had been lost. She said they were not retained on her phone but she had obtained copies for the inquiry.
Nonetheless, the relaxed attitude to record-keeping – and those who may wish to view records in the future – has been apparent, with the clinical director Jason Leitch recorded as joking about his nightly “pre-bed routine” of WhatsApp deletion.
This comes as Scotland’s information commissioner said today the revelations suggested FoI rules were being “subverted” and threatened to launch an investigation, and as Covid bereaved families prepare to lodge police complaints about the apparently wholesale deletion by Sturgeon and others.
Sturgeon will give evidence herself next week.
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Just a note that these are the provisional timings for the Commons this afternoon, via PA Media:
14.30 Levelling up, housing and communities questions
15.30 An urgent question on funded childcare
16.15 An urgent question on measles
17.00 Offshore petroleum licensing bill – second reading
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Government communications strategy had a bit of a retro look about it this morning at Westminster, where a town crier was wheeled out to announce that the UK government had launched a new official WhatsApp channel.
A Cabinet Office press release to accompany the launch said: “The channel will be a publicly run information service, similar to gov.uk or official government social media accounts. It will not be used for political or campaign purposes and will be managed by government officials.”
You can sign up to it here if you want to check that is the case, and there is a video of the town crier Alan Myatt in action here.
And of course, feel free to insert your own “government by WhatsApp” and awkward “data retention” punchlines.
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More than 40 Tory MPs, including former cabinet ministers, threaten rebellion over English council funding
Richard Partington is the Guardian’s economics correspondent
More than 40 Conservative MPs – including seven former cabinet ministers – have threatened Rishi Sunak with a fresh Commons rebellion after writing to demand more funding for councils in England to avoid deep cuts to services.
Warning that urgent action was required to ensure they would back the government in a crunch vote next month, the MPs from all wings of the party said extra financial support was needed to prevent more councils going bust amid a £4bn funding shortfall.
Growing numbers of councils across England warn they face effective bankruptcy amid soaring costs and rising pressure on services, compounded by years of austerity-driven cuts and local missteps. Among the biggest casualties so far are Birmingham and Nottingham, as well as Woking in Surrey and Thurrock in Essex.
Senior figures who have signed the letter include the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick and the former cabinet ministers Priti Patel, Thérèse Coffey, Damian Green and Brandon Lewis.
As a local government secretary under Boris Johnson, Jenrick had been responsible for council funding before he was replaced by Michael Gove in 2021. Four former local government ministers were also signatories, including Jake Berry, the former Tory party chair.
Ministers are now consulting on a financial settlement for local government funding, which will determine how much support councils in England will receive for 2024-25, with a vote due in parliament in early February.
Read more of Richard Partington’s report here: More than 40 Tory MPs threaten rebellion over English council funding
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Downing Street has been forced to clarify comments the prime minister made earlier today about media regulation and impartiality. In the wake of a government review which suggests Ofcom should have greater oversight of the corporation’s output, and the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, asserting during her media round that the BBC had “on occasion” been biased [See 9.20am], Sunak was asked about the BBC and impartiality.
Visiting the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, Sunak said impartiality was an “important tenet of our media industry”.
He went on to say:
I think all elements of the media industry have to be subject to the same impartiality rules. I think that’s what people would expect and that’s what makes our media institutions so great. We have a free and fair press and impartiality is at the heart of what makes the BBC a strong institution.
That phrase “all elements of the media industry have to be subject to the same impartiality rules” has raised eyebrows, as that would appear to encompass print and digital publications as well as broadcast media.
A Downing Street spokesperson denied Sunak misspoke, and said: “I think you’re getting into the semantics of which regulator oversees which section of the media. He was making a general point about the importance of the media landscape.”
Here is the clip from this morning of the culture secretary, who said “I think that on occasion it has been biased, yes” about the BBC, but then declined to name specific examples beyond the corporation issuing an apology over its reporting of one attack on a hospital in Gaza.
Govt says there’s evidence of bias at the #BBC ?
— Kay Burley (@KayBurley) January 22, 2024
But Culture Sec @lucyfrazermp can't quite find the words or examples…#KayBurley FC pic.twitter.com/I0Xocpf7PK
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Adding to Rishi Sunak’s earlier comments that he wanted to reassure parents over reports of problems with the rollout of the expansion of free childcare provision, Downing Street has said it was “confident” that childcare places would be available for those eligible.
PA Media quotes the prime minister’s spokesperson saying: “We are confident that the provision and capability is there, we are confident in the strength of the market place.”
“We’ve been working very closely with the sector,” they added, as the policy entails “switching from parents paying for this care to effectively the government stepping in to ensure that provision is there”.
My colleague Alexandra Topping has just filed her report on the issue, with the top line:
Ministers have found an 11th hour “workaround” to address parents’ concerns around accessing new free childcare hours, in an attempt to get a grip on chaos surrounding the pledge’s rollout.
The Guardian understands that after a week of frantic discussions in the Department for Education (DfE), charities and groups representing the early years were called to an emergency meeting on Monday morning to hear the department’s attempts to solve the crisis.
Parents of two-year-olds who qualify for free childcare in April are now to be given an automatic code to allow them to access funded hours. But early years providers said it would do little to address a staffing crisis that would limit the number of places available to parents.
The government workaround comes after a flash survey from the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed revealing that only one in 10 eligible parents had the code they needed to get the free hours.
Read more of Alexandra Topping’s report here: Ministers attempt to rescue free childcare rollout with last-minute ‘workaround’
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Sally Weale is the Guardian’s education correspondent
School inspections in England resume this week after a two-week pause to allow inspectors to undergo mental health awareness training [see 11.14am], but education unions have called for more far-reaching reform, including the scrapping of single-word judgements in Ofsted inspections.
Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “The initial steps Ofsted has taken ahead of resuming inspections this week, are welcome – but NAHT believes it would have been better for inspections to be ungraded while more fundamental, far-reaching reform takes place.
“That means not just enabling school leaders to raise concerns and pause inspections, but also to tackle the root causes of the intolerable pressure they pile upon school leaders and their staff, which can have such a dangerous impact on their wellbeing.
“It also means reforming inspections to ensure they provide a fairer, more reliable assessment of a schools’ strengths and weaknesses, including scrapping single-word judgments.”
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Chris Mason at the BBC is reporting that 11 Conservative MPs – including former ministers Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick – are being called in by government’s chief whip Simon Hart to explain themselves over last week’s rebellion in the Commons against Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda bill. The report suggests it is for an informal warning.
Mason says: “Senior government figures say the meetings, which are often standard practice after a high-profile rebellion, are ‘about sending a message that rebelling is not going to be tolerated going forward’.”
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Sunak: 'some practical issues' with rollout of increased free childcare plan
A little bit more from Rishi Sunak’s broadcast appearance this morning. As well as criticising Keir Starmer’s speech this morning [See 11.09am], Sunak responded to the news that was the main splash in the Times today, that the government policy on offering free childcare was running into problems. Sunak admitted there were “some practical issues” with the plan.
The prime minister insisted the project would go ahead as planned in England despite reports of problems with the allocation of funding, staff shortages and IT issues. He told the media:
We are excited about our plans to expand childcare in a way that has never been done in our country before. This spring, everyone with two-year-old kids will be able to get 15 hours, that will be expanded to all those with nine-month-olds later this year and then obviously next year 30 hours for all of those, completing the biggest expansion of childcare in our country’s history.
Now, many families have been able to sign up and it’s all working fine, but there are some practical issues that certain families are facing. I just want to reassure all of those people that those issues are being resolved as we speak, all of those families will get the childcare that they are eligible for.
Oliver Wright and Aubrey Allegretti had reported overnight that the policy was being undermined by what the Times described as a “funding fiasco”:
Senior Whitehall sources said lights were “flashing red all over the board” over the £4bn plan as nurseries warned that they will not be able to start the scheme in time. They have not been told how much they will be paid for each of the places on offer despite the fact it is due to be up and running in less than three months.
Many nursery chains have told existing parents that they cannot guarantee that their children will be entitled to the new free hours while others have said that it will be “impossible” to extend the offer to nine-month-olds in September.
At the same time IT complexities with HMRC systems mean that up to 25,000 families will need to re-confirm their status with the taxman in March or face delays in accessing the new payments.
In addition, the department for education is also facing a £120m budget shortfall after miscalculating the cost of the scheme in its first year.
Ofsted school inspections in England to resume this week after two-week pause
Sally Weale is the Guardian’s education correspondent
School inspections in England resume this week after a two-week pause to allow inspectors to undergo mental health awareness training, after an inquest into the suicide of Reading primary head teacher Ruth Perry ruled that the schools inspectorate Ofsted had contributed to her death.
Perry’s school, Caversham primary, was downgraded from outstanding to inadequate over safeguarding issues during an Ofsted inspection, that the inquest heard had triggered a fatal deterioration in Perry’s mental health.
The mental health awareness training was ordered by the new chief inspector, Sir Martyn Oliver, who said he would do everything in his power to prevent any future tragedies after taking over in January.
From today, schools across England could receive a call from the inspectorate, ahead of a visit. Under new Ofsted arrangements, however, once the inspection is under way, the lead inspector or the school can request that an inspection be paused for up to five days in exceptional circumstances.
Headteachers remain concerned however. Executive principal Vic Goddard, of Educating Essex fame, posted on social media: “Knowing that the @ofsted call could come tomorrow for up to 4 of our schools certainly changes how I feel and not for the better. I’m an experienced and generally robust leader. It’s not right is it?”
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Rishi Sunak has been asked by the media for his reaction to Keir Starmer’s speech, which the prime minister said he hadn’t heard. He went on to say “it does sound to me like a distraction from the fact that Keir Starmer, who has been leader of the opposition for four years, can’t actually say what he would do differently to run this country”.
Telling broadcasters that Starmer “doesn’t have a plan”, Sunak said:
[He] can’t say how he’d bring the number of small boat arrivals down, can’t say how he would fund his £28bn green spending spree, which just means higher taxes.
And the contrast is clear. Our plan is working. The boat numbers are coming down, the longest waits in the NHS have been virtually eliminated and this month we’re cutting people’s taxes.
So if we stick with the plan, we can build a brighter future. The alternative is just to go back to square one with Keir Starmer, he doesn’t have a plan and he can’t tell you what he would do differently.
On the claim that “the longest waits in the NHS have been virtually eliminated”, about 6.39 million patients across England were waiting for routine hospital treatment in November, down slightly from 6.44 million in October, but the NHS in England is still failing to hit most of its key performance targets. 11,168 people had been waiting more than 18 months to start routine hospital treatment at the end of November, and A&E times have also worsened in England, with 69.4% of patients seen within four hours in December, against a target set for March this year of 76%.
Health has been a primarily devolved matter for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland since 1999.
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Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent
Scotland’s first minister Humza Yousaf has written to Keir Starmer, inviting him to his official Edinburgh residence Bute House, to discuss how relations between the Scottish and UK governments might be improved in the event of Labour winning the next general election.
It’s no secret that relations between Westminster and Holyrood have been turbulent over the past few years – a cursory glance at evidence from the UK covid inquiry will tell you that.
But this is an interesting move from Yousaf, as he attempts to counter Scottish Labour’s appeal to independence voters to defect from the SNP in order to secure Starmer in Downing Street.
It’s also puts Starmer in a tricky position – not wanting to alienate those very independence supporters whose votes he is relying on, but also well aware of previously successful Tory attacks about Labour’s relationship with the Nationalists – remember the 2015 image of tiny wee Ed Milliband poking out from Alex Salmond’s pocket?
It is interesting too that, in his letter, Yousaf sets out specific policy areas he wants to discuss with Starmer – child poverty, just transition, the ongoing cost of Brexit – rather than going straight for the section 30 jugular.
When Yousaf succeeded Nicola Sturgeon as first minister, he asked for a S30 order to grant Holyrood the powers to hold a second referendum at is first meeting with Rishi Sunak. Perhaps this is an acknowledgment that voters are increasingly turned off the endless process-driven back and forth on independence and are keen to see both Scottish and UK governments concentrate on what they consider more pressing concerns around cost of living.
Keir Starmer has finished his appearance at the Civil Society event. He praised the voluntary sector, and said they would be a vital part of Labour’s plan for a “decade of national renewal”.
He attacked the Conservative party, saying: “The Tory party has undertaken a kind of weird McCarthyism, trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.”
He said the Tories seem set on “sabotaging civil society to save their own skin”, adding: “It’s desperate, it’s divisive, it’s damaging.”
He did at one point raise a small – possibly wry – laugh from the audience by saying that Rachel Reeves won’t allow him to make funding commitments at events like this when he was being asked if a Labour government would devote more funding to a particular cause.
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Starmer has said in this Q&A that the current government after 14 years is going to leave the country worse off than they found it, and that is unforgiveable for a political party, any political party, he says. He stresses again he is talking about a “decade of national renewal” because it isn’t just about fixing things but fixing them and then improving them, and it has to be sustained over more than five years.
Starmer says that he is convinced that among the main problems of the last 14 years has been “sticking plaster” politics which “mask the problem for a short period of time” but then when they come off they usually reveal an even bigger problem. During his speech he said that real and lasting change takes longer than the election cycle, and talked about a decade of work that needed to be done.
Clare Moriarty, managing director of Citizens Advice, is now doing a Q&A with Keir Starmer at the Civil Society event. You can watch that here.
My colleague Mark Sweney has more dismal news on the economy this morning:
More than 47,000 UK companies are on the brink of collapse after a 25% jump in businesses facing “critical” financial distress in the final three months of 2023, according to a new report.
It marks the second consecutive quarter-on-quarter period when critical financial distress has risen by a 25%, the latest “Red Flag” report by insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor found.
The construction and property sectors accounted for 30% of all businesses facing critical financial distress.
Eighteen of the 22 sectors covered by the report recorded double-digit percentage growth in the number of firms whose finances have reached critical condition.
Julie Palmer, partner at Begbies Traynor, said the tough macroeconomic conditions have created a “perfect storm” for UK businesses.
“After a difficult year for British businesses that was characterised by high interest rates, rampant inflation, weak consumer confidence and rising and unpredictable input costs, we are now seeing this perfect storm impact every corner of the economy,” she said.
Read more of Mark Sweney’s report here: More than 47,000 UK businesses on ‘brink of collapse’, warn insolvency experts
Keir Starmer has started this talk by praising the work of community groups and volunteers, saying that they are the people that “bind government, business and community together” and that they are able to reach the places that the public and private sectors can’t reach.
He has criticised the Conservatives for failed idea of “no society” and rampant individualism during the Thatcher years, and David Cameron delivering not the “big society” he talked about, but a “poor society” through austerity.
You can watch a stream of it here.
Keir Starmer making speech at Civil Society summit
Keir Starmer has just started speaking at the Civil Society summit. You can watch that live here.
Some of the content has already been trailed, including that he is planning to defend the National Trust and the RNLI, accusing the Conservatives of attacking them to stoke a “desperate” culture war.
My colleague Kiran Stacey previewed this overnight, writing:
“The Tories seem set on sabotaging civil society to save their own skins,” Starmer will say. “They got themselves so tangled up in culture wars of their own making, that instead of working with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution – an organisation the late queen was patron of for 70 years – to find real solutions to stop the small boats, their rhetoric has helped demonise them.”
“Instead of working with the National Trust so more people can learn about – and celebrate – our culture and our history, they’ve managed to demean their work. In its desperation to cling on to power, at all costs, the Tory party is trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect.”
In 2019, the RNLI was criticised by Conservative backbenchers for spending money on anti-drowning charities abroad. It then came under fire in 2021 from Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, who accused the institute of acting as a “taxi service for illegal immigration” because of its work helping distressed asylum seekers in the Channel.
The National Trust, Britain’s largest charity, has been torn apart by an internal battle over its stance towards rewilding Britain’s countryside and how to depict the links between the properties it oversees and the UK’s colonial legacy.
In 2022 a group headed by a Conservative donor and including two “anti-woke” historians launched an attempt to gain control of the charity, while the Tory MP Andrew Murrison set up a parliamentary group to “scrutinise” its work.
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Just a quick note that one of the ministerial statements due to be made in the Commons on Monday includes an update on the measles situation. The UK declared a national health incident over the disease on Friday.
There is continued chatter about potential spring tax cuts ahead of the election later in the year, but as my colleague Graeme Wearden reports, Britain may well have slipped into recession at the end of last year.
Martin Beck, chief economic adviser to the EY ITEM Club said this morning “there’s a good chance” the economy may have shrunk slightly in the final three months of 2023.
That would mean two negative quarters in a row – after the 0.1% fall in GDP in July-September – meaning a technical recession.
Beck told Radio 4’s Today Programme “We know that GDP shrunk in the third quarter and looking at the high frequency numbers for Q4, there’s a good chance that it may have shrunk slightly again.”
The official GDP data for the October-December quarter are due on 15 February.
Beck points out “it doesn’t make a massive amount of difference to the person on the street” if the economy shrank by 0.1% or grew by 0.1%, but headlines declaring the UK in recession would not be good news for the government, as the Conservatives try to plot a tricky path to another election win.
Read more here: ‘Good chance’ UK may have fallen into technical recession – business live
A quick scoot around the front pages. The Guardian’s main UK story lead was Robert Booth’s exclusive that modern slavery exploitation in the social care sector has soared with more than 10 times as many potential victims as in 2021 since visa rules eased.
The Guardian: Surge in modern slavery in social
— George Mann (@sgfmann) January 21, 2024
care sector since visa rules eased #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/seAp290KaQ
The lead for the Telegraph is that report from the government on the BBC which promises more oversight for Ofcom over the corporation’s output. The Times leads with the government’s free childcare policy being in chaos.
Daily Telegraph: BBC faces tougher scrutiny over bias #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/QBqwNu5xxN
— George Mann (@sgfmann) January 21, 2024
The Express, Mail and Sun all lead with the news that Sarah Ferguson has been diagnosed with malignant melanoma. The Mail also wanrs of an NHS heart care “crisis”. The Mirror has England captain Harry Kane joining a campaign about mental health.
Daily Mail: Worst heart care crisis in memory #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/26g4vSYRvG
— George Mann (@sgfmann) January 21, 2024
Culture secretary: not appropriate for BBC to have 'criminal tools in its armoury' to enforce licence fee payment
The Post Office Horizon IT scandal has placed into sharper focus the number of bodies that can bring prosecutions, and the TV Licensing authority is one of them. Possibly not for much longer, if the words of the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, this morning carry any weight.
She said it was not appropriate for the BBC to have “criminal tools in its armoury” to prosecute people for not paying their TV licence fee.
Asked about a series of cases brought against people by TV licensing, PA Media reports Frazer told Times Radio: “I don’t think it’s appropriate for the BBC to have criminal tools in its armoury in relation to prosecutions.”
She said she would look at the prosecutions in an upcoming review.
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Culture secretary: BBC has 'on occasion' been biased
During the morning media round the culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, said she believed the BBC had “on occasion” been biased.
She told Sky News that “evidence” suggested there was a “perception amongst audiences” that there was some bias at the BBC.
Frazer said: “There are only perceptions and perceptions are important. What’s important about the BBC is that it’s funded by the public, so the perception of audiences of the public are important.”
She added: “I think that on occasions it has been biased,” citing its reporting of a hospital attack in Gaza.
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Sunak's Rwanda treaty to face first test in Lords
The first test of Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda immigration policy in the House of Lords will come on Monday afternoon with a debate on a motion seeking to delay it.
Monday’s debate will centre on a report by the Lords international agreements committee recommending parliament should not ratify the Rwanda treaty until ministers can show the country is safe.
The government agreed the legally binding treaty with Kigali in December, saying it addressed concerns raised by the supreme court about the possibility of asylum seekers deported to Rwanda then being transferred to a country where they could be at risk.
But the committee said promised safeguards in the agreement are “incomplete” and must be implemented before it can be endorsed.
The treaty underpins the government’s safety of rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill which compels judges to regard Rwanda as safe.
The motion in front of the Lords today is:
This House resolves, in accordance with section 20 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, that His Majesty’s Government should not ratify the UK-Rwanda Agreement on an Asylum Partnership until the protections it provides have been fully implemented, since parliament is being asked to make a judgement, based on the agreement, about whether Rwanda is safe.
The bill is likely to receive its second reading in the Commons by the end of January, with a third reading possible around the middle of March.
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Welcome and opening summary …
Good morning. Rishi Sunak’s immigration policy faces its next hurdle today as the House of Lords debates a motion seeking to delay the proposed new UK-Rwanda treaty. Sunak, who was appointed prime minister by Conservative MPs, and is yet to face an election as party leader, has made much of the fact that the Lords are unelected and are opposing a policy which he claims has broad public support. Voters appear to think differently, with a YouGov survey earlier this month suggesting a narrow majority is in favour of scrapping the plan altogether.
Here are the headlines
The culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, has said she believes the BBC has “on occasion” been biased in the wake of a government report which recommends more oversight from Ofcom – including oversight of digital offerings such as the BBC News website.
Every vote counts – the Conservatives have hired a coordinator to get expat supporters to vote in the general election.
The UK’s fruit and flower growers face an “existential threat” from new post-Brexit border checks, the country’s biggest farming body has said.
Aberdeen suffered the worst growth in the UK over the last decade, with a study finding that the average UK person has lost out on £10,200 since 2010.
There is a “good chance” the UK may have fallen into technical recession.
On the NHS, figures show one in 20 patients in England wait at least four weeks to see a GP.
In Westminster the Commons is sitting this afternoon, with oral questions on levelling up and then a debate on the second reading of the offshore petroleum licensing bill. The Lords, as mentioned, will be debating the proposed UK-Rwanda treaty. In Wales the Senedd has committee meetings. The Scottish parliament is not sitting.
It is Martin Belam with you today. I will try to dip into the comments if I get the chance, but if you want to draw my attention to anything – especially if you spot an error or typo – it is best to email me at martin.belam@theguardian.com.
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