Minister says Sunak will meet small boats pledge ‘in fullness of time’ as Labour defends its plan – UK politics live | Politics

Labour has criticised the government for holding up the passage of the renters (reform) bill through parliament.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, published the bill in May, but it still has not had a second reading in the Commons. Housing campaigneres are strongly in favour of the legislation because it will ban no-fault evictions (also known as section 21 evictions, under the Housing Act).

Angela Rayner, Gove’s Labour shadow, told the Financial Times:

Renters are currently facing a desperate situation, and urgently need greater security and better rights, yet this zombie government has failed to lift a finger to progress that legislation.

Rayner was commenting on a report in the paper saying some government whips are holding the bill up. Gove reportedly wants the bill to have a second reading before the end of the current parliamentary session (the new session will start with the king’s speech on 7 November) and for the bill to be carried over into the next session of parliament, but there is some doubt as to whether this will happen.

In their story George Parker, Anna Gross and Jim Pickard report:

Some supporters of the bill claim that its crucial second reading in the House of Commons is being held up by vested interests in the government whips office, where five of 16 whips own rental property.

“There are a number of landlords in the whips office who are amplifying the level of concern among Tory MPs and holding things up,” said one Whitehall official, speaking on terms of anonymity.

But the FT also quotes a sources in the government whips’ office denying this, and sources claiming Gove has not yet done enough to assure colleagues that the bill will pass without a big Tory rebellion.

The government is poised to announce a £500m support package for Tata Steel to secure the future of the Port Talbot steelworks, in an agreement that could lead to as many as 3,000 job losses, Mark Sweney reports.

Yesterday Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, said the decision by the Labour government in Wales to impose a default 20mph speed limit on residential roads (coming into force from this Sunday) was “absolutely insane”.

This morning Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister, defended the plan, saying it would save lives. Referring to an estimate that it would make car journeys a tiny bit longer, he told the Today programme:

Even if you add a minute to every journey, I say to people – and when I’m speaking to people, I think people understand this – it’s going to take you a minute longer to make your journey, and we will save 10 people’s lives in Wales every year as a result of that one minute contribution that you are making. It doesn’t seem a bad or unfair bargain.

Drakeford said a similar cut to the speed limit in Spain had reduced road deaths in urban areas by a fifth, with cyclist fatalities down by 34%. He went on:

Driving more slowly in built-up urban areas saves people’s lives.

I think the evidence is incontrovertible. It’s why we had this in the Labour party manifesto at our election in 2021 and this weekend we will deliver that promise.

Good morning. Conservative commentators believe that Keir Starmer took quite a risk yesterday when he announced a new, or newish, approach to small boats, suggesting Labour would have a returns agreement with the EU that might involve the UK accepting a quota of asylum seekers. Our overnight story, by Rajeev Syal, Peter Walker and Diane Taylor, is here.

Whatever the reaction, Labour is not giving up. This morning Labour has set out more details of what it is proposing, claiming that by speeding up the processing of asylum applications it could end the use of hotels for migrants. In a news release, Labour says it would:

– Hire over 1,000 new caseworkers on an expedited process (a 50% increase on current asylum casework levels) to bust the backlog and get through cases efficiently.

– Implement targets and standards to ensure decisions are made well and productivity increases. New staff will be recruited at a higher grade than recent Home Office casework recruitment to improve productivity after the Tory downgrade of staffing in 2013 led to productivity falling.

– Create a returns unit to triage and fast-track removals of those such as failed asylum seekers with no right to be in the UK, with 1000 staff to ensure enforcement.

– Invest in temporary Nightingale-style courts to ensure appeals can be quickly heard, and removals processed

Under Labour’s plans, once the backlog created by the Tories is cleared, it should no longer be necessary to accommodate asylum seekers in hotels, barges or former military sites, like RAF Scampton, which are currently costing the taxpayer over £2bn a year.

Instead, a Labour government will rely on long-standing, cost-effective asylum accommodation, which has space for 58,000 asylum applicants at any one time. This has been sufficient in the past, but the Tory government’s failure to tackle the record backlog has made them reliant on costly hotels once this asylum accommodation reached capacity.

This chart, from a Home Office report, shows how the number of people waiting for a decision on their asylum application has soared over the past decade.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has been giving interviews this morning promoting Labour’s policy. The government has had Chris Philp, the policing minister, making its case, and he has been restating the Tory claim (which Labour denies) that its policy would lead to 100,000 migrants being admitted a year. He defended the government’s approach, but did not sound confident about the government being able to “stop the boats” before the general election, as Rishi Sunak implied he would when he made this pledge. Philp said this might happen “in the fullness of time” – which in some contexts can mean over years, decades, or never. He told Sky News:

Let’s start with the small boats. So, the number this year compared to last year, the same time last year, is around about 20% down. Now, we’d like to go a lot further, obviously, but it’s a good start.

Asked if Sunak would meet his pledge, Philp replied:

I’m confident in the fullness of time, yes, we will stop those boats. We must stop those boats. They’re illegal crossings of the Channel, they’re dangerous. They’re also unnecessary because France is a safe country, it’s not a war zone.

I will post more on this row shortly.

The Commons is not sitting today, and there is not much in the diary, but we’ll manage for politics news.

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