Nicola Sturgeon regarded Boris Johnson as ‘a clown’ because of his handling of Covid, inquiry learns – UK politics live | Politics

The British Polling Council (BPC) is looking into controversial YouGov polling used by Conservative plotters to call for Rishi Sunak to be ousted, Eleni Courea reports.

Outgoing Welsh FM Mark Drakeford urges UK Labour not to adopt ‘King Canute’ opposition to further devolution

Aletha Adu

The outgoing Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has hit back at UK Labour, urging his Westminster colleagues to avoid adopting a “King Canute” stance on devolution.

Drakeford said there were some in London who regard devolution as a “zero-sum game, that anything that is devolved elsewhere is a loss to them”.

He was speaking at an event at the Institute for Government, only days after the shadow Welsh secretary, Jo Stevens, rejected the Welsh administrations’s longstanding call for more powers over policing and justice.

Stevens said Labour would be focusing on the “things that matter” at the next election, listing “growing the economy, creating new jobs, getting cheaper bills, building an NHS fit for the future and breaking down barriers for opportunities for children and young people across the country”.

Drakeford said UK Labour had a “responsibility” to show the “journey has begun” on devolution if they won the election this year, and he said he hoped Keir Starmer would make an “early commitment” to adopting Gordon Brown’s report on the UK’s future, which urged a Labour government to “embark upon the devolution of youth justice and the probation service”.

Drakeford went on:

There are some colleagues in London who regard this as a zero-sum game, that anything that is devolved elsewhere is a loss to them.

All four police and crime commissioners in Wales are firmly in favour of the devolution of policing. So again, even people who are close to the operational end of all this share our view.

Drakeford who is due to step down as Welsh Labour leader in March, advised his successor to “be bold” and always “look for those radical changes that are necessary”.

Maintenance loans for students in England to rise by just 2.5% next year

Richard Adams

Next year’s university students in England will be left worse off after the government said it will increase their maintenance loans by just 2.5%, following this year’s rise of 2.8% during a period of high inflation.

The Russell Group of leading research universities said the 2.5% rise means that students will miss out on £2,000 worth of support they would have received if the loans had risen in line with inflation since 2021-22.

Joanna Burton, the Russell Group’s head of policy, said:

Once again, we are disappointed to see that there has been no move to correct the maintenance loan shortfall suffered by students in recent years. Inflation may now be slowing down, but today’s announcement fails to address the deficit that has been created across the last three years.

We know that a quarter of students regularly go without food and other necessities due to financial hardship, and it’s vital they are provided with adequate loan provision so they can afford the essentials and focus on their studies.

Russell Group universities have spent tens of millions from their existing budgets on additional support measures over the past year, but it’s not feasible for universities to plug the gap in maintenance provision on their own. The hardest hit will be the most disadvantaged students, who are most at risk of dropping out due to financial pressures.

Robert Halfon, the minister for skills and higher education, said the 2.5% increase “follows standard procedure to base annual increases in support on forecasted inflation”. Halfon added:

Decisions on student finance have had to be taken to ensure the system remains financially sustainable and the costs of higher education are shared fairly between students and taxpayers, not all of whom have benefited from going to university.

Yousaf says he wants to apologise to the inquiry, and to people who were bereaved during the pandemic, for the government’s “poor handling” of requests for messages.

He says there is a recognition in government that any record of important decisions should be recorded.

But, because government had that corporate record, there was a view that that was all that needed to be handed over.

He says there has been a gap in terms of what gets recorded. That is why he has ordered an inquiry into the use of unofficial message channels like WhatsApp, he says. (See 1.18pm.)

Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, and health secretary from 2021 to 2023, is giving evidence to the UK Covid inquiry in Edinburgh now.

He has rejected suggestions that cabinet was only a forum where decisions were rubber stamped.

But Jamie Dawson KC put it to him that Nicola Sturgeon preferred to take decisons in a small group. He flags up a message Yousaf received, on the day be became health secretary, from Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director, saying:

There was some FM ‘keep it small’ shenanigans as always. She actually wants none of us.

Yousaf said that was Leitch “over-speaking”.

Labour says crime figures out today, one set published by the Office for National Statistics and another set published by the Home Office, show knife crime and shoplifting getting worse. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said:

This disturbing further increase in knife crime in the last year shows how badly the Tories are failing on law and order and means that knife crime is now 77% higher than in 2015, with a devastating impact on young people, families and communities. Serious violence is rising with gun crime also increasing, yet the government just isn’t getting a grip.

At the same time shoplifting has soared by 32% in the last year alone, as criminals run rife in our town centres, and the number of cases dropped because no suspect was identified has reached record highs.

In its report on crime in England and Wales in the year ending September 2023, the ONS says:

Police recorded theft has increased by 9% (to 1.8 million offences) compared with the year ending September 2022. This rise was predominantly the result of increases in shoplifting offences. The year ending September 2023 saw a 32% increase in the number of shoplifting offences recorded compared with the previous year, with 402,482 offences compared with 304,459 offences in the year ending September 2022.

Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, has announced an externally-led review into the use of WhatsApp and other unofficial technology in the Scottish government.

Speaking during first minister’s questions, he told MSPs that Covid inquiry revelations about official communication processes being sidelined had been embarrassing. He said:

I do believe that there are challenges in relation to our use of WhatsApp. It has not been frankly the government’s finest hour in relation to handling those requests [for WhatsApp messages] and I put my hands up to that, unlike of course other governments.

That’s why I have commissioned officials to deliver an externally-led review – not a government review but an externally-led review – into the use of mobile messaging apps and the use of non-corporate technology in the Scottish government, and that should take particular account of our interaction with statutory public inquiries.

When it comes to being transparent, the government handed over 28,000 messages, 19,000 documents. I myself as first minister of the government have handed over my WhatsApp messages.

Yousaf will appear at the Covid inquiry this afternoon.

Some £9.9bn of the £13.6bn spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) has been written down because it was unusable or its value has crashed since the pandemic, PA Media reports. PA says:

The Department of Health and Social Care’s accounts published today said some items were defective or not suitable, while others will not be used before their expiry date.

The accountability report by the National Audit Office (NAO) said that the department plans to dispose of “nearly all” of its current PPE stock held in warehouses and containers.

Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said the majority of the PPE recorded was of “insignificant value”.

He said that “ongoing efforts to detect, prevent and recover fraud must continue, improving public confidence that this drain on the public finances is being tackled effectively and efficiently”.

Downing Street defended the losses by stressing the havoc that Covid-19 wreaked.

The prime minister’s spokesperson said: “It’s important not to forget the circumstances in which the UK and countries globally found themselves during a pandemic when globally PPE was in extremely short supply. The costs as a result increased significantly and the government took the decision very transparently to do everything possible to secure protective equipment for frontline health and care workers, that was right.”

No 10 has brushed aside a warning from the president of the European court of human rights saying it would be against international law for the UK to ignore injunctions blocking flights to Rwanda.

At a news conference this morning, Síofra O’Leary, president of the court, said there was a “clear legal obligation” on states to obey injunctions, known as rule 39 orders, from the court.

The government’s first attempt to send a deportation flight to Rwanda in 2022 was stopped by an order from the court. The government’s new Rwanda bill, which is still going through parliament, says it is for ministers to decide whether or not to obey any future injunctions in these cases, but Rishi Sunak has angered some of his MPs by not firmly stating that injunctions will definitely be ignored.

Instead, he has just said that in some circumstances he would ignore them.

At her news conference, O’Leary said:

There is a clear legal obligation under the convention for states to comply with rule 39 measures.

In a speech proceeding her Q&A, O’Leary said injunctions were only issued “in exceptional circumstances where there is a real and imminent risk of irreparable harm”.

She also said the UK “has always complied with rule 39 measures”, except in one very particular case, and has “publicly declared the need for other states to comply with rule 39 indications” – including urging Vladimir Putin’s Russia to abide by a 2021 measure in relation to the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Asked to respond to O’Leary’s comment, the PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the No 10 lobby briefing that the government did not think rule 39 orders would be justified in relation to Rwanda given changes made to the policy. He also restated the PM’s willingness to ignore them.

The spokesperson said:

I think, firstly, we are confident our legislation is compliant with our international obligations. We’re clear the bill and the treaty address the supreme court’s concerns. There should be no need for Strasburg to intervene to block flights in the way they did in 2022.

We’ve also drafted the bill to give ministers the power not to comply with those rulings if necessary. And obviously every case is assessed on its individual facts, but the prime minister has been clear repeatedly that we will not let a foreign court block flights from taking off.

The spokesperson also said it was “bizarre” to compare the UK ignoring rule 39 orders to Russia. He said:

I think it would be bizarre to draw any comparison between Russia’s cruel treatment of Alexei Navalny, who was a victim of an attempted assassination, and our plan to protect and deter vulnerable migrants from making perilous crossings across the Channel.

The Home Office has now published a news release with details of its ban on zombie-style knives.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said the new ban “goes nowhere near far enough and it is also too little, too late”.

Speaking on a visit to a police station in Milton Keynes, she said the penalties were not strong enough, and the new ban was not going to take effect until the autumn.

She also said it was still too narrow. She told journalists:

It doesn’t include ninja swords, it doesn’t include a whole series of dangerous weapons …

We need much faster action, at a time when knife crime has gone up by a further 5% this year, 77% increase since 2015. This is an epidemic, we need action.