Ex-Post Office executive says she does not recall email telling her Horizon terminals could be remotely accessed – UK politics live

• Angela van den Bogerd, a former Post Office executive who played a leading role in defending the prosecution of the post officer operators who are now recognised as innocent, has told the Post Office inquiry that she forgot about an email in 2010 saying that cash balances in subpostmasters’ branch accounts could be remotely accessed. (See 2.42pm.)

Emmanuel Macron has criticised migration policies that involve sending people to African countries as “a betrayal of our [European] values”, Jennifer Rankin reports. Macron’s speech coincided with the UK government’s Act doing exactly what he was criticising getting royal assent. (See 11.22am.)

Alex Salmond, the former Scottish first minister who now leads Alba, the pro-independence party he set up after he left the SNP, has delivered a withering assessment of how Humza Yousaf ended the power-sharing deal with Scottish Greens.

In an interview with Times Radio, Salmond also said that Ash Regan, the former SNP MSP who is now the only Alba member in the Scottish parliament, will be the swing vote in the no confidence debate on Yousaf.

Salmond, who ran a minority government himself between 2007 and 2011, said:

Humza Yousaf today has managed to insult every opposition party. If you’re going to run a minority government, by definition, you must try and not insult at least one of the opposition parties otherwise they’ll vote you out.

A much more sensible way to end the agreement, I would have thought, would have been to have told the Greens that the SNP, like the Greens, were going to put it to their membership and then nobody could have complained about that.

As it is Patrick Harvie and his colleague Lorna Slater are fizzing. [See 9.36am, 2.21pm and 2.31pm.] They seem even angrier with the SNP than the Tory party are. So I don’t think Humza Yousaf will get much support from that quarter in the future.

And of course, inadvertently … Humza Yousaf has managed to make Ash Regan, an Alba MSP, the most powerful MSP in the Scottish parliament because she now has the swing vote in the parliament.

If the Greens vote with the Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, then Yousaf will only be able to avoid defeat if Regan votes to support him. That would lead to a tie, but in those circumstances the presiding officer, Alison Johnstone, would have the casting vote, and by convention she would vote for the status quo – ie for Yousaf. (See 1.59am.)

Asked what Regan would do, Salmond said:

And I’m sure Ash Regan, who I spoke to just five minutes ago, will use that power very wisely indeed to progress the cause of independence and to protect the rights of women and to try and find a way to restore confidence within the Scottish government, which has been so badly lacking recently.

She is writing to the first minister setting out many of her concerns about the direction of the Scottish government recently and asking what he’s going to do to improve things and to sustain things, ie progress towards Scottish independence, protection of the rights of women and girls, and how he’s going to set about restoring some level of competence within the Scottish administration.

This morning Regan posted a message on X saying she was glad to see Yousaf abandoning “the extremly unpopular policies of the Greens”. (See 9.50am.)

Shoplifting offences recorded by police in England and Wales have risen to the highest level for two decades, according to the Office for National Statistics, PA Media reports. PA says:

A total of 430,104 offences were recorded in the year to December 2023, up 37% from 315,040 in the previous 12 months.

This is the highest figure since current police recording practices began in the year ending March 2003.

The number of offences involving theft from the person stood at 125,563 in 2023, up 18% from 106,606 in 2022, and is the highest level since 2004 (137,154).

Commenting on the latest crime figures for England and Wales, Nick Stripe from the ONS said: “In the past 12 months, police recorded crime shows notable increases in robbery, theft from the person and shoplifting.

“The latter has risen by more than 100,000 offences, while the police have been dealing with the highest levels of theft from the person offences recorded in two decades.

“While levels of headline crime measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales remain relatively stable, there are variations when looking at individual crime types.

“The survey indicates that incidents of fraud and criminal damage are both decreasing, but computer misuse has been on the rise.”

The ONS report out today includes figures for crimes recorded by the police and the results of the crime survey, which measures crime by asking people if they have experienced crime. The ONS says the overall crime survey headline figures “do not show a statistically significant change compared with the year ending December 2022 survey, although they do follow a long-term downward trend”.

Shadow care minister unable to say if Labour would give care system extra £8bn a year experts say it needs

Robert Booth

Labour’s shadow care minister has admitted he does not know if a Keir Starmer-led government will be able to find £8bn a year in extra funding which is widely estimated to be the minimum needed to stabilise England’s creaking social care system.

Andrew Gwynne MP told council social services directors today that the care system was “in crisis” after successive Conservative governments.

But he was unable to say how much extra money a Labour government could provide, and also cast doubt over how far Labour could deliver existing plans, announced by Jeremy Hunt, to cap social care costs to prevent people having to sell their homes to pay care fees.

Gwynne insisted that reforming social care is “one of the top priorities of the next Labour government” and said that by 2035 Labour would have created a new national care service.

But with over 150,000 care jobs vacant and real terms falls in funding over recent years, the Commons health and social care committee has estimated at least £7bn extra a year is needed, at a minimum, while the Health Foundation has said £8.3bn a year will be needed by the end of the coming decade.

Asked by the Guardian whether Labour could promise £8bn year, Gwynne said:

I am not going to put a figure on it, but we are making the case to Rachel [Reeves] that investment in social care, if you get it right, releases resources elsewhere in the system … You can invest in services that at some stage pay back to the public purse.

We are determined that we have a once in a generation opportunity to fix health and social care. We are very realistic of the timescales and we are also realistic about the resource implications.

Social care leaders have been having to ration care because of tightening budgets and rising demand and the president of the Association of Directors of Social Services , Melanie Williams, said they have endured “a decade of disappointment”.

James Cleverly, the home secretary, is the speaker at a press gallery lunch this afternoon. (The guest is normally expected to give a short speech, but the most interesting part is when they take questions; it’s like a press conference, only with food, wine and table service.) According to Adam Payne from Politics Home, Cleverly had a blunt message for Tory MPs who are considering triggering a no confidence vote in Rishi Sunak after the local elections.

Speaking at the lobby lunch, James Cleverly says having another Tory leadership contest before the general election is a “catastrophically bad idea”.

Asked by @GeorgeWParker for his message to Tory MPs who are considering sending no confidence letters post-local elections, Cleverly says: “If you’re going to jump out of the aeroplane, please make sure you have a parachute and don’t say ‘we will work it out on the way down’…”.

A former top Post Office executive has claimed she forgot about an email in 2010 saying that cash balances in subpostmasters’ branch accounts could be remotely accessed, PA Media reports.

Angela van den Bogerd had earlier told the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry in central London on Thursday that she never “knowingly” did anything wrong in the scandal. (See 12.47pm.)

However, van den Bogerd, was asked if she had “airbrushed” from her mind the fact that Horizon developer Fujitsu had remote access to accounts, PA reports.

A December 5 2010 email sent to her by Lynn Hobbs, the organisation’s general manager of network support, said she had “found out that Fujitsu can actually put an entry into a branch account remotely”.

But van den Bogerd said to the inquiry: “I don’t actually remember receiving these emails.”

Jason Beer KC, lead counsel to the inquiry, asked: “Is what truly happening here is that you’re telling us that you don’t recall it because you know the email of December 5 2010 presents you with a problem?”

Van den Bogerd responded: “No not all – I wish I had remembered that information.”

As PA reports, in her witness statement, van den Bogerd insisted she was not aware of remote access to accounts until 2011.

The inquiry heard that while giving evidence in the Mr Bates vs the Post Office High Court case in March 2019, van den Bogerd said she first knew about remote access “in the last year or so”.

Beer asked: “That’s false isn’t it?”

She replied: “At the time I didn’t think it was.”

Beer said there were also emails in January 2011 and April 2014 telling her about remote access.

As PA reports, the inquiry was shown a 2014 email sent from communications worker Melanie Corfield to several Post Office bosses including Angela van den Bogerd. It read: “Our current line, if we’re asked about remote access being used to change branch data or transactions, is simply ‘this is not and has never been possible’.”

Van den Bogerd said she does not remember if she challenged the “false lines”, despite knowing this was the case.

She said she “must have missed” the email, saying: “If it had registered with me, I would have challenged it.”

She insisted it was not a “cover-up”.

Patrick Harvie, co-leader of the Scottish Greens, refused to say in an interview with Radio 4’s the World at One whether or not he would support Humza Yousaf in the no confidence vote. Harvie said:

That will, of course, be put to our entire parliamentary group for decision. That’s the way we do things in the Greens. We don’t have one or two individuals that [decide matters].

At this press conference this morning Humza Yousaf went out of his way to thank and praise Harvie and Lorna Slater, the other Green co-leader, for their contribution as ministers to his government.

But Harvie was not so complimentary about this former government colleague. He told the World at One:

Over the last while there’s been a small and mostly fairly marginalised rightwing faction on Humza Yousaf’s backbenches who’ve been starting to throw their weight around.

And I think what’s clearly happened now is that Humza Yousaf has decided to capitulate to that rightwing, socially and economically conservative agenda within his own party.

I think that’s tragic for Scotland, it’s bad for the government and I’ve no doubt it’ll be bad for Humza Yusuf as well.

Harvie said he and Slater were intended to advise Scottish Green party members to vote to continue the power-sharing agreement with the SNP in the ballot the Greens were planning to hold. He and Slater wanted cooperation “to go further”, he said.

But the first minister, I’m sorry to say, has decided to dump a lot of progressive values in the Bute House agreement. And I’ve no doubt that we’re now going to see a raft of policy decisions that water down, delay or ditch altogether some of the progressive measures that we were committed to, things like rent controls and a whole host of other measures.

As Alistair Grant from the Scotsman reports, Labour and the Liberal Democrats will back the Conservative no confidence motion in Humza Yousaf.

The Greens and Ash Regan, a former SNP MSP who now represents Alba, are undecided, he says.

– Labour confirms it will back the vote of no confidence in Humza Yousaf.
– Liberal Democrats will back it.
– Greens meeting later to discuss.
– Ash Regan (Alba) says she’s writing to the FM and her support will depend on his answer to that.

Extraordinary day.

The SNP has 63 MSPs.

There are now already 57 MSPs lined up to vote against Yousaf: Conservatives (31), Labour (22) and Lib Dems (4).

The Greens have 7 MSPs and Alba just one (Ash Regan).

A UK deposit return scheme for recycling drinks bottles has been delayed to 2027, meaning it will not be in place until almost a decade after it was proposed, Helena Horton reports.