UK politics live: ‘My heart sinks … she has done more than enough damage’ – Starmer ridicules Truss comeback attempt

Magistrates have been ordered to stop issuing warrants allowing energy firms to force fit prepayment meters in England and Wales, my colleague Alex Lawson reports.

Faisal Islam from the BBC has posted on Twitter a copy of the memo sent to magistrates by Lord Justice Edis, the senior presiding judge for England and Wales.

In the Commons Suella Braverman, the home secretary, is taking Home Office questions. MPs have just reached the topical questions bit (when they can ask about anything, not a question tabled days in advance), and Braverman started by making a short statement about the Passport Agency.

She said that last spring there were “serious concerns” about its performance. When she took office, she was determined to address this, she said.

She said the system is now operating well, and that last week 99% of applications were being returned within the 10-week target deadline. And 97% of them were being returned within three weeks, she said.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, reprimanded Braverman for using question time to make a statement. He said that if she wanted to make a formal announcement, she should have scheduled a statement. He suggested he would be willing to grant an urgent question on this tomorrow.

Sturgeon publishes tax returns for her time as first minister, and says she is taking £27,000 less in salary than she could

Severin Carrell

Nicola Sturgeon has urged other Scottish and UK party leaders to publish their tax returns after releasing hers during her time as Scotland’s first minister.

At a press briefing on Monday morning, Sturgeon said she paid the full tax on her official total salary of £163,299 – a figure which includes her MSP’s salary and ministerial wage, even though she took the salaries paid in 2008.

She said Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader, and Anas Sarwar, should “follow suit”. She said: “The reason I do this today [is] it does help with transparency.”

As a political gesture announced by her predecessor Alex Salmond, Scottish National party ministers and MSPs have voluntarily forgone salary rises since 2009, donating the difference back to the government.

The SNP said that meant Sturgeon would forgo £27,000 in salary this financial year – a sacrifice which still leaves her with a gross salary of £136,299, which is five times the average wage in Scotland. The SNP said its ministers had refunded £1.3m in total since 2009.

Rishi Sunak, who is also due to publish his tax returns, is entitled to a salary of £80,807 as prime minister on top of his MP’s wage of £84,144; he only claims £75,440 as premier.

Nothing is more satisfying for an opposition leader than being able to speak up on behalf of the whole country. Downing Street did not have a great deal to say about the Liz Truss comeback this morning (see 1.01pm), and so Keir Starmer had the field to himself this morning when asked for his reaction to her return to frontline political debate.

My heart sinks when I hear more from Liz Truss. She’s done more than enough damage to our economy. And, frankly, when the whole country wants to move forward, we’ve got a cost of living crisis, we’ve got people really worried about being able to pay their bills, they’re looking for a government to take them forward, and all we’ve got is failed prime ministers arguing about who was the biggest failure. That’s the last thing the country needs just right at the moment.

Not everyone will agree, but there is almost certainly widespread support for Starmer’s take. Only last week a poll suggested just 6% of voters think Rishi Sunak is a worse PM than Truss, and even Conservatives have been telling journalists they wish she would shut up.

The Truss intervention is a godsend for the Labour party. Starmer’s leadership is well established and there is no faction in the party seriously arguing for a different approach.

But Rishi Sunak has to compete with two predecessors who are very popular with Tory activists and who have distinct policy agendas. (The Truss and Boris Johnson agendas overlap up to a point – they both want tax cuts and a hawkish foreign policy – but in other respects their brands of Conservatism are at odds.) Even if there is no realistic prospect of Truss being elected leader again (and only little chance of Johnson getting another go), the fact that they both have loyal supporters, and offer an alternative to Sunak, is hugely destabilising.

Interestingly, the Tory papers are also, to some extent, split in their allegiances. Of the three most important pro-Conservative titles, the Telegraph is sympathetic to Truss, or at least her ideas, the Mail is most pro-Johnson, while Sunak is probably getting most support from the Sun.

Eluned Morgan, the Welsh government’s health minister, has told PA Media that she hopes health workers in Wales will accept the revised offer tabled at the end of last week. She also implied that, if the dispute went on into April, the extra money for the deal might no longer be available. She explained:

Obviously the final decision will be by the members of these unions. But I think what’s important is that they understand that this is the only deal in town.

The end of the financial year is coming very soon, and obviously the money disappears at the end of the financial year so that there is an issue for people to consider there.

So I do hope that people recognise that we’ve worked really hard on this, that we are restricted in how much we can offer because of the money we get from the UK government.

Morgan also said the UK government should follow the example set by the Welsh government. She said:

I do think that there’s a lesson here for the UK government – UK government needs to understand that in order to get any kind of deal you need to sit down you need to talk and you need to listen.

They’re not doing any of that, and I would encourage them to do that.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson said the government wanted pay talks with the health unions to focus on next year’s pay offer, not the 2022-23 pay offer, which is what the current dispute is about.

Steve Barclay, the health secretary, said the same thing to journalists while on a visit to Kingston hospital in south-west London. He said:

We have been discussing this coming year, from April, pay with the unions.

We have this process through the pay review body, it’s an independent process and we’re keen to get the evidence so that that reflects the pressure that the NHS has been under and the wider context in terms of inflation.

I don’t think it’s right to go back to last year, to last April, retrospectively, we should be looking forward to the pay review body that is taking evidence now and working constructively with the trade unions.

Rishi Sunak is fond of reading long and detailed government reports. But No 10 was unable to say this morning whether or not he had ploughed through Liz Truss’s 4,000-word Sunday Telegraph article, which has been much criticised for its suggestion that almost everyone was to blame for the failure of her disastrous mini-budget apart from herself.

Asked if Sunak agreed with Truss’s claim that Britain was being held back by “economic orthodoxy” that was anti-growth (she implied in the article Sunak was part of that, but did not say so explicitly), the spokesperson declined to engage with the argument.

But he did implicitly slap down Truss over one aspect of her argument. In her article she criticised the Office for Budget Responsibility, saying that the way it modelled economic policy “tends to undervalue the benefits of low taxes and supply-side reforms for economic growth, and overvalue the benefits of public spending”.

She said this was one reason why taxes kept going up.

This [the bias in the OBR approach] inevitably puts pressure on a higher-tax and higher-spend outcome – hence the inexorable tax rises we are now seeing.

At the lobby briefing, without even being asked specifically about the OBR, the spokesperson said:

In broader terms, we value the scrutiny of independent bodies like the OBR. The chancellor is working closely with them in the lead-up to the spring budget, as you would expect. And they will have a role in providing independent, credible and high quality analysis.

We are making the fiscal decisions to get inflation down, which in turn will help us grow the economy. And you will hear from the chancellor in more detail shortly. The prime minister at the least was I haven’t actually been able to ask him that question. So see widespread coverage. You read it I don’t ask questions about myself.

Asked if the PM welcomed his predecessors contributing to the public debate, the spokesperson said: “Of course the prime minister will listen to all former prime ministers.”

At the morning lobby briefing Downing Street insisted that the bill due to be published soon intended to stop people arriving illegally in the UK on small boats from ever claiming asylum in the country would be compliant with the European convention on human rights.

Asked if the government was planning to withdraw from the convention, the PM’s spokesperson said:

I think there’s been a great deal of speculation. I think you’ve heard from the prime minister himself where he said, first and foremost, he wants to put an end to the exploitation of our laws through reform of that system.

We will, of course, comply with all our international obligations, and we are confident the measures being worked through will tackle the problem while being compliant with the ECHR [European convention on human rights].

But none of the reports about what the proposed bill will do (like yesterday’s – see 11.20am) say the legislation will propose withdrawal from the ECHR. Instead what is being claimed is that, if the courts do subsequently block the Sunak plan on human rights ground, at that point he would consider proposing withdrawal – possibly as a pledge for the next general election.

Asked about this, the spokesperson said he did not want to get into “unsourced speculation on future plans”. Asked if there were any circumstance in which Sunak would recommend withdrawal from the ECHR, the spokesperson said:

As I say, I think you will see, when we set out our plans fairly shortly, that we seek to be compliant with our international obligations.

Some Tories think the proper answer to this question is: No. (See 11.20am)

Asked a second time if he could rule this out, the spokesperson said:

There are no plans for the government to take that approach. The policy, both in terms of this and elsewhere, is to be compliant with our international obligations.

On Friday the Royal College of Nursing and several other health unions called for strikes planned for Wales this week after the Welsh government made fresh proposals on pay. But Unite, which represents some ambulance staff, said it was not calling off its strike because it was still negotiating.

Today Sharon Graham, the Unite general secretary, said her union was “tantalisingly close” to a deal with the Welsh government. She said:

The reason that we’re still out in Wales is that it would be disingenuous for us to put an offer to pause the strike in the full knowledge the offer was going to get rejected.

What we want is not a sticking plaster – we want to have a deal on the table that will be accepted.

I spoke to the health minister in Wales on a number of occasions yesterday; we’re tantalisingly close.

The sticking point really is [of the] the extra 3% – half of it is on non-consolidated, so therefore it’s a one-off payment.

And what we’re simply asking is to put more of that on the wages, so that people have that forever, it’s in their pay packet, because that will address some of the concerns.