‘Sunak has failed on the NHS’ says shadow health secretary as waiting list figures remain high – UK politics live | Politics

Having criticised the inquiry earlier for being a bit dull and technical about the corporate structure of the Post Office this afternoon, Sam Stein KC has now upped the pace considerably and has absolutely skewered Sir Michael Hodgkinson in a passage exposing his lack of curiosity about prosecutions by a company that he was chair of.

Stein, establishing that it was late in his term at the company that Hodgkinson even became aware that prosecutions were taking place, says:

Did you say to the people around you “Well, that’s a bit of a surprise. I’m a bit surprised that we prosecute our own staff. I’d like to know a bit more about it.”

Hodgkinson is forced to answer “No, I didn’t.”

Stein continues:

Well, you’ve suddenly been made aware that you’re the chair of a prosecution authority. That’s an unusual thing. What did you do to investigate that the Post Office was properly prosecuting its own members?

Hodgkinson replies “I didn’t do anything.”

Stein goes on to say:

So, by the time you learn that your chair of a prosecution authority, did you say to yourself, well, we need to make sure that these little people who work in the subpostmaster branches, that are running these places within the community are dealt with fairly, and properly by the Post Office of which I’m Chair. Did that occur to you?

Hodgkinson has struggled to answer during this passage, and been told to give vocal answers rather than just nodding or shaking his head for the purposes of the transcript.

Sam Stein KC has taken over questioning Sir Michael Hodgkinson at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry. Stein is acting on behalf of subpostmasters. He has set off at a brisk pace going through Hodgkinson’s work career, and after confirming each job, he is asked “Did it prosecute its own staff?”, and Stein has established that he had no experience of running a business which did so.

The Unite union has announced that about 1,500 steelworkers at Tata based in Port Talbot and Newport Llanwern have voted to take industrial action over plans to close its blast furnaces with the loss of 2,800 jobs.

Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham said: “This is an historic vote. Not since the 1980s have steelworkers voted to strike in this way.

“This yes vote has happened despite Tata’s threats that if workers took strike action, enhanced redundancy packages would be withdrawn. Unite will be at the forefront of the fight to save steelmaking in Wales. We will support steel by all and every means.”

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, the former chair of the Post Office, Sir Michael Hodgkinson, has been explaining what a dire state the business was in at the time he was there. He said that if it had been a normal business, it would have folded. It was only because of the government funding to support the rural post office network that it was kept viable.

He is being asked about the renegotiation of a contract with Fujitsu to reduce costs of the Horizon IT system for the Post Office. Hodgkinson insisted that it was a condition that it would not lead to a deterioration in quality. It was still, at this time, he seems to imply, the view of the board that this was a robust system.

Rishi Sunak has also been out and about today. The prime minister was visiting Woking community hospital on the day that new NHS England data showed that while they were falling slightly, waiting lists were higher now than when he pledged to reduce them in January 2023.

Keir Starmer has been in Blackpool today campaigning alongside Labour candidate Chris Webb ahead of the byelection there on 2 May. The Labour leader said the people of the town would not be “fooled” by gestures from the Conservative government.

PA Media reports that speaking to the media there, Starmer said:

They know we need real change and they will judge the government on whether it’s actually making material difference to them and their families on the ground.

You’ve got the seafront here, then go two streets behind here and I don’t think you’ll find many people who feel that their life is better now after 14 years of this government than it was in 2010. I suspect you’ll find quite a lot who say things are going backwards.

Webb has said that residential areas in the town felt “forgotten about” and that the local food bank was delivering 14,000 meals a week in the town, which has some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country.

Starmer said “Every time I’ve been here, I’ve been really struck by the pride and ambition that people in Blackpool have of their place. They have the pride and ambition. What they feel is the Government hasn’t invested in them and doesn’t match their pride and ambition.

“That’s the difference that we could make if we are able to form the next government, which is a government that understands that.”

Starmer again moved to dampen expectations of increased public spending, saying Labour could not “come in and turn on the money taps,” but that it would stabilise the economy, and make a significant change in the division of funding and services for councils.

The byelection is taking place after Conservative backbencher Scott Benton quit parliament after he was suspended for 35 days over his role in a lobbying scandal. The MP suggested to undercover reporters at the Times that he could lobby ministers on behalf of the gambling industry and leak a confidential policy document for up to £4,000 a month. Benton won the seat from Labour in the 2019 election with a majority of just under 3,700

I note that over at the BBC, their reporter Sean Seddon has said that this afternoon’s session at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is not “the most gripping evidence an inquiry has ever heard”, which is, if anything, an understatement.

A key things to have come out so far is that it appears there was a structural weakness in oversight in the Post Office at the most senior level.

Former chairman of the Post Office Sir Michael Hodgkinson has said he was “never” told about early concerns with the Horizon IT system raised by auditors in a 1999 letter.

He has said his interest in the system was mostly in how it could be developed to support new products. He also said that branches and subpostmasters were viewed as “highly motivated individual businesses”, perhaps a hint at the way the culture of the Post Office worked.

He has been read out a lengthy document which discussed the circumstances around a known bug in the system and said “it was difficult to answer” why this was never raised to the board.

There is a long silence when he is asked “Is there something in particular that you can pinpoint that you think went wrong in that reporting line to the board?” and he finally answered “I’ve just got no idea.”

Chair Wyn Williams is pointing out that some of the cases involved exceptionally high amounts of money, and surely these should have been escalated to board level. Hodgkinson says he agrees with Williams, they should have been, but they were not.

The inquiry is taking a break. As will I. I will back with you in a few minutes when they resume.

There are lots of reminders on social media today that the deadline to register to vote in May’s local elections in England (and there are some police and crime commissioner elections happening in Wales on the same day too) are rapidly approaching.

Sir Michael Hodgkinson is being asked at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry why he was so interested in the Horizon system.

He told them:

I, by that time, had formed, based on all the conversations and visits that I had, the view that in fact Horizon was a well-regarded, well performing system.

However, we were just about to launch a whole new array of new products, and it didn’t necessarily mean for me, coming into the business, that the system was first of all capable of adapting to those new products. And secondly was it suitable for those products?

So I said it would be very important for me to at least gain an impression as to whether people in the development of Horizon had actually thought through the future, rather than just today, so that was the purpose.

This is a theme that has come up throughout today, that the senior management at the time were extremely concerned about the viability of the business as a whole.

Earlier today former chief David Smith said his priorities had been preparing for restructuring the group and coping with the aftershocks of the global financial crisis, and Hodgkinson has repeatedly said in his testimony that the future of the company was considered to hang on the successful introduction of new financial products and services.

I detect the beginning of a spluttering outrage flurry as Deborah Haynes, security and defence editor at Sky News, has just reported that the Royal Navy is going to drop the requirement that applicants take a swimming test before being recruited into the service.

She writes that “a Royal Navy spokesperson pushed back on criticism, saying standards were not being lowered. It just means that non-swimmers or weak swimmers no longer need to take lessons in their own time before signing up – something that could have turned prospective candidates off.”

A source told her it was “a sign of true desperation to increase recruitment numbers”, and I can almost guarantee you that someone at some point in the next few hours is going to say that “the woke Royal Navy doesn’t even need you to swim now” or some such nonsense.

Anyway, it at least gives me an excuse to post a picture of a big boat, as in Leith today Rfa Stirling Castle was welcomed into the fleet after undergoing a significant conversion to become what is termed a “autonomous minehunting ‘mothership’”.

Sir Michael Hodgkinson has told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry that most of the feedback the Post Office board received about Horizon was “forward looking”.

Asked where he saw “oversight and accountability for issues relating to the Horizon system” lying, he said the board, and was asked if there was a specific feedback process to inform them about the system.

He said:

There were constant reports to the board on how the system needed to be developed going forward. And there were kind of three phases there.

There were lots of individual projects that would come up. Like for example, I remember the foreign exchange had been done on a separate terminal, and we wanted to get it onto the Horizon terminal, and so there was a project that asked for money to do that. And that was not unusual to get projects doing that.

There was then the two major projects which actually occurred during my period, one occurred and one was being planned. One was the next generation.

So there was a lot of feedback to the board generally about Horizon, but mainly on a forward looking basis. Because as I say, that there was a very strongly held view that Horizon was good.

“It could possibly have made a difference,” to the Horizon IT scandal, Sir Michael Hodgkinson has told the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, if he had been full-time in his role as chair of Post Office Ltd. The inquiry has established that Hodgkinson, as well as his Post Office role, had multiple roles at other companies and organisations during the period.

My colleague Jane Croft has also been watching the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry today, and this is her write-up of the morning’s proceedings.

Earlier at the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, former Post office boss David Smith acknowledged the “substantial distress” he had caused after telling the Post Office staff the result of Seema Misra’s trial was “brilliant news”.

Misra began running a Post Office in West Byfleet, Surrey, in 2005, but was suspended in 2008 after being accused of stealing £74,000. She was handed a 15-month prison sentence on her son’s 10th birthday in November 2010 and was eight weeks pregnant when jailed.

After her conviction and sentence, Smith sent an email to managers, including Paula Vennells, asking to “pass on my thanks” to the legal team. His email read: “Brilliant news. Well done. Please pass on my thanks to the team.”

He told the inquiry:

Looking at it through their eyes rather than mine, you can see that it may have caused substantial upset and I really do apologise for that.

At the time, what I’m doing here is what I would do generally with lots of things in business – I’m saying to the team ‘thank you for all your hard work, it’s terrific you’ve got the result that you’ve got and I’m really happy that we’ve progressed’.

It’s nothing more or less than that – and in the context of probably receiving 200-300 emails a day, which would have been typical at that time, I would literally have gone ‘brilliant news, well done, thanks very much, send’ and that would have been it.

Misra’s conviction was quashed by the court of appeal in 2021.

In his witness statement to the inquiry he elaborated further, saying:

My comment of ‘brilliant news’ was in relation to me thinking that it was brilliant news that, in my mind, Horizon had been proved to be robust following the testing of the expert evidence in the trial.

Even if this had been a correct conviction, I would absolutely never think that it was ‘brilliant news’ for a pregnant woman to go to prison and I am hugely apologetic that my email can be read as such.

In another passage of questioning, it was put to Smith that the Post Office legal team working on the case knew there were bugs in the Horizon software discovered prior to Misra appearing in court. He denied any knowledge of this.

PA Media is carrying another little bit of news about Reform UK, with the party apologising after it transpired that one of the candidates it removed due to “inactivity” – Tommy Cawkwell – had in fact died.

A Reform UK spokesperson said: “Having it being suggested that we had rescinded Cawkwell’s candidacy for inappropriate social media messages by a local paper, I suggested that he was one of those candidates that had been removed for inactivity.

“The process, if we have not heard from a candidate in a while we try to get in touch, a number of phone calls and emails are made, then if no response a final email is sent suggesting that if the candidate does not respond then they will be removed.

“Reform was not aware that Mr Cawkwell had passed away. Naturally, I am mortified that through ignorance I did not realise the reason for his inactivity, it must have been ghastly for his family to read about it in the way it was presented in the press.”

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry this afternoon we will hear from Sir Michael Hodgkinson, who the inquiry lists as former chair of Post Office Ltd and former senior non-executive director of Royal Mail Holdings plc. The inquiry spent some time this morning going over the somewhat arcane set of companies and holdings that made up the Post Office group in the early 2010s. In fact at one point chair Wyn Williams had to intervene to make sure that former boss David Smith was being clear about which bit of the group he meant when he was using the word “we”. The session has started again. You can watch it here:

Streeting: ‘longer the Conservatives are in power, the longer NHS patients will wait’

The fallout from Reform MP Lee Anderson’s declarations of political friendship continues.

Now Rishi Sunak is facing calls to withdraw the whip from Don Valley’s Nick Fletcher, one of four Tory MPs that Anderson said were his friends and that he would not stand against.

In the wake of his former colleague’s endorsement, Fletcher posted a thread on X calling Anderson Ashfield’s “greatest champion”.

In response, the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader, Daisy Cooper, has called on the prime minister to kick Fletcher out of the party, saying that a failure to do so would show he is “too weak” to control his MPs. “It seems even Conservative MPs don’t want the Conservatives to win. Voters are sick to the back teeth of this never-ending circus of infighting,” she wrote.

“Rishi Sunak needs to find his backbone and kick Nick Fletcher out of the Conservative party.”