UK politics: ex-minister apologises for saying there are ‘no-go areas’ in UK cities – as it happened | Politics

• Henry Staunton, the former Post Office chair, has told MPs that he is the victim of a “smear campaign” by the government because he stood up for the victims of the Horizon IT scandal. (See 2.46pm.) He also implied that Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, misled MPs when she said Staunton was being sacked partly because he was the subject of a misconduct inquiry. Staunton told MPs that it was Nick Read, the Post Office chief executive, who is actually the subject of this inquiry. (See 2.58pm.) Kevin Hollinrake, the post services minister, subsequently told Politco:

We were very clear when we agreed to part company with Henry Staunton that we wouldn’t discuss those kinds of matters. So I think to talk about that, as a former chairman of a board, where you are bound by confidentiality, both while you’re in the role, and after, I think is entirely inappropriate.

As Politco points out, Badenoch herself did not seem too bothered about confidentiality when she told MPs that Staunton was the subject of bullying allegations.

• Downing Street has said Lee Anderson’s comment about Sadiq Khan was unacceptable because it was wrong “to conflate all Muslims with Islamist extremism”. The PM’s spokesperson provided this explanation after Michael Tomlinson, the illegal migration minister, was cut off in a radio interview after he repeatedly refused to say what was wrong with Anderson’s comment. (See 9.21am.)

Jeremy Hunt is reportedly considering cutting national insurance by 1p in the pound, Richard Partington reports.

But polling by DeltaPoll for Channel 4 News suggests that three quarters of voters want to see taxes retained where they are now, or increased, because they care more about funding public services. In its summary of the findings C4 News says:

The poll of 1,500 UK voters, conducted between 23-26 February is released today ahead of the spring budget 2024 next week.

The new data shows that more than four in ten respondents (41%) believed that taxes and public spending should be kept at the level they are now. A further third (34%) said they would like to see taxes increased with greater spending on public services, while one in seven (14%) believed that taxes and public spending should be reduced. Among Conservative voters, that figure rose only marginally to one in six (17%).

When asked to rank a list of economic priorities, voters placed cutting taxes fourth (11%), after growing the economy (23%), reducing inflation (22%), and investing in public service (12%), with 8% choosing to prioritise reducing the national debt, a cornerstone of shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’ economic policy.

Polling now regularly suggests that voters believe funding public services is a higher priority than cutting taxes. But Hunt seems all set to ignore these survey results. That is partly because politicians suspect people don’t tell the truth when they are asked by pollsters about tax cuts and partly because, even if voters as a whole are not obsessed about tax cuts, Tory MPs and newspapers are.

Shelter Scotland accuses SNP government of failing on housing and homelessness

Severin Carrell

The Scottish government has been accused of “gaslighting” voters by the housing charity Shelter after homelessness in Scotland hit record levels, despite ministerial claims it is properly funding for housing and local councils.

Several hours before Holyrood began voting on this year’s Scottish budget, official data showed Scottish councils had broken their legal duties to provide emergency housing nearly 1,600 times between May and September last year, while on 30 September 2023 there were 9,860 children in temporary accommodation, up 3 points since March, and 15,625 households in emergency accommodation – a new record.

Alison Watson, the director of Shelter Scotland, said the Scottish National party and Scottish Greens government pushed through progressive policies, boasting Scotland has the best housing rights in the UK, but had a very patchy track record on adequately funding them. She said:

The Scottish government’s strategies for housing and homelessness are failing and any attempt to say otherwise is starting to feel like an attempt to gaslight the Scottish public.

[It] can’t claim to be determined to fight poverty while presiding over record homelessness, repeatedly deprioritising housing in its spending choices, and ploughing ahead with a strategy which today’s figures once again clearly show isn’t working.

Shelter pointed to a 27% year on year cut in funding for the affordable housing supply programme, and a 5% cut in spending on housing support and homelessness, alongside real terms cuts to local council funding overall. That qualified ministerial claims that its £90m in discretionary housing payments were effective.

Shona Robison, the deputy first minister, told MSPs these financial problems were exacerbated by the UK government’s housing cuts and urged Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, to increase spending on housing and capital investment in next week’s UK budget.

She said ministers were setting up a new housing investment taskforce to help meet the goal of building 110,000 more affordable homes by 2032. This remained a “key priority”, she told MSPs. She went on:

If members today have alternative priorities, if they wish more investment to be made in one area, then I ask them to be straight with the people of Scotland, and say what they would cut to pay for it.

[I] cannot stress enough the danger to Scotland’s public finances from the decisions of the UK government at the spring budget next week.

Henry Staunton was not the only official sacked recently by the government from a prominent public post who has been giving evidence to MPs today. As Staunton was still speaking about how Kemi Badenoch terminated his contract as Post Office chair, David Neal started speaking to the home affairs committed about being dismissed as the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration.

Here are some of the main points from his evidence.

In my best judgment, I would suggest there is some way to go for the workings of Border Force – because that’s one of the areas we inspect – to work to its optimum level …

There’s a long, long way to go with the functioning of security at the border and the role that Border Force plays within it.

I’ve been sacked for doing my job. I think I’ve been sacked for doing what the law asks of me and I’ve breached, I’ve fallen down over a clause in my employment contract, which I think is a crying shame.

When he was sacked, the Home Office was sitting on 15 reports he had submitted that had not been published. Neal had started to reveal some of their findings to journalists, and the Home Office said he was sacked because he had given the Daily Mail false information about passengers on high-risk private jets not being subject to security checks.

For my high-performing team of 30 civil servants, the notification that I was sacked was in the media before my team or I had had the chance to speak to them, which is just shocking. Shocking leadership.

I now know that the Home Office, so the ministers, supported my reappointment, my extension, my reappointment. And the home secretary supported my reappointment.

That reappointment process was sent to the Cabinet Office and that was sent on to No 10 and it was turned down by No 10. So I’ve no idea why it was turned down by No 10.

Neal was due to leave his post in March because he had not been given a second term in office. But last week he was sacked with immediate effect after the Mail story appeared.

• He said that James Cleverly, the home secretary, was wrong when he told the committee recently Neal could have applied for a second term. “If I was offered to reapply, then I would have been delighted,” Neal said.

Labour has demanded an apology from Sadiq Khan’s Conservative opponent in the London mayoral election over comments and actions that led to her being accused of Islamophobia and racism. Ben Quinn has the story.

Peter Walker

The House of Commons library is one of the less showy but more useful branches of parliament, producing an endless stream of learned reports about political life – among them this new analysis of the number of female MPs.

Their spreadsheet shows that in the 106 years since women have been able to stand for the Commons, 564 have been elected, the most recent of whom is Gen Kitchen, the brand new Labour MP for Wellingborough. This is still less than the 650 total of all the MPs currently in the Commons.

The research does nonetheless show that things are moving more quickly. When Harriet Harman was elected in 1982, she was just the 114th woman ever. The halfway point to the current total of 282 female MPs was only reached at the 2005 election.

The library’s briefing points out that it was only in December 2016 when the combined total of all women MPs reached the number of men in the Commons at that time.

Caroline Johnson, who won the Sleaford and North Hykeham byelection, became no 455, matching the total number of male MPs then in the Commons.

The current gender balance is 226 women out of 650 MPs, the highest total ever. After the 2019 general election it was 220, but since then six female MPs have died, stood down or been removed via a recall petition, with 12 winning byelections.

Finally, while most people know of Nancy Astor as the first female MP, in 1919, she was simply the first to sit in the Commons. A year before, Constance, Countess Markievicz won a Dublin seat in the general election, but as a Sinn Féin’s representative she did not take the seat.

UPDATE: A reader has sent a link to this interactive graphic from the Pudding, which illustrates very well how long it took for the number of women in the Commons to increase. It might take a moment to load, but there is a lot of info there when you get to it.

Paul Scully, the former minister for London, has apologised for claiming yesterday there are “no-go areas” in parts of London and Birmingham. In an interview with the News Agents podcast, he said:

I think I do regret the use of the word “no-go areas’, because I think that actually has other connotations that are hadn’t really taken on board. And I’m slightly furious with myself, the fact that actually that’s allowed my message to be misconstrued.

What I was trying to say was that the kind of comments that we’ve heard from Lee Anderson and others in recent days and weeks, the populist approach, sometimes is fuelled by conversations that people have, and perceptions that people have, in cities around the UK.

I mentioned Tower Hamlets and Birmingham, where very small groups of people really misuse and abuse their doctrine in terms of Islamic gangs, but it can be black gangs, white gangs, etc. And then people write off a whole community because of the actions of mindless and slightly threatening small group of people. And so it’s areas that people feel uncomfortable in on occasion. But that’s the different from a no-go area in terms of the wider context, and for that I do apologise.