“Hopes are rising of deals to end months of strikes across the public sector after Rishi Sunak said an agreement with NHS staff showed he was “serious” about resolving pay disputes. More than a million NHS staff have been offered a pay rise and cash bonus in a breakthrough that ministers believe offers a path for ending months of strikes…Sunak said that a 5 per cent pay rise from next month plus a one-off payment of at least £1,655 for all nurses, paramedics and other frontline staff workers was “a fair deal” that would “put disruptive strike action behind us”. The NHS has been asked to fund the pay rises but there is widespread expectation that the Treasury will end up finding billions of pounds in extra cash, effectively re-writing the budget “before the ink is dry”.” – The Times
“The DUP has said it still has concerns over EU law applying in Northern Ireland before a vote on Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal on Wednesday. MPs will debate the “Stormont brake” after the legislation to give Northern Ireland Assembly members (MLAs) a say on new EU laws is published on Monday. Penny Mordaunt, Leader of the House, on Thursday announced the plans for a vote on the centrepiece of the Windsor Framework agreed by Mr Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president. The support of the DUP and Brexiteer Tories will be seen as key for the credibility of the deal, although Labour has said they will back it, meaning the vote is almost certain to pass..” – The Daily Telegraph
“Rishi Sunak is under pressure from his own ministers to set a timetable for reducing immigration after official forecasts were upgraded to predict that annual net migration will settle at 245,000 in the long term. The prime minister’s spokesman reiterated Sunak’s pledge to reduce overall migration, but refused to give a specific time frame or number. However, a minister speaking anonymously to The Times said that the Conservative Party’s next election manifesto should bring back the pledge to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. They said the party should commit to a “long-term aspiration” to reduce immigration to below 100,000 per year. However, the minister accepted that the goal would be a “tough task” given that net migration hit…504,000 last year.” – The Times
“Suella Braverman is set to fly to Rwanda in a bid to boost the UK’s controversial asylum deal which has so far failed to see anyone relocated out of the country. The Home Secretary is due to travel tomorrow to meet with her counterparts in a bid to keep up momentum for the Government’s stalled agreement, i understands. Her trip comes less than a year after former Home Secretary Priti Patel made a surprise trip to Kigali to sign the controversial deal, which will see people coming to the UK on small boats deported to the central African country. Since then, Government attempts to fly the first people to Rwanda have been stalled due to legal challenges and human rights concerns. So far, the UK has paid Rwanda an initial £140m for the scheme.” – The I
“Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has abandoned plans to make sovereign wealth funds pay corporation tax on property and commercial enterprises after cabinet warnings that the move would hit inward investment…Kemi Badenoch, business and trade secretary, led pressure on the Treasury to drop the proposals after warnings that SWFs, which include some of the largest global investors, might pull out of UK projects. “Kemi lobbied the Treasury very hard on this,” said one ally of Badenoch. “We fed into the Treasury review and argued that it would put off potential investors and hamper growth.” The decision to drop the proposals came as a surprise to tax experts… It would…have removed what some see as an unfair advantage over other institutional investors.” – The Financial Times
“Increasing the number of childminders will help ease the cost of childcare and allow working parents to get their children looked after during the school holidays, the Children’s Minister has told i. Claire Coutinho insisted that the childcare reforms announced in the Budget this week would prove to be a “really, really big moment” which would particularly help mothers who want to return to the workforce. She hit back at warnings that the scheme would not come with the funding needed to transform the UK’s childcare regime – and at the accusation made by Conservative MPs that the Government was discriminating against stay-at-home mothers. Ms Coutinho…will be in charge of implementing the reforms to childcare unveiled…on Wednesday…” – The I
>Today:
“Chancellor Jeremy Hunt was accused on Thursday of gaming his fiscal rules in a way that suggests the public finances could be in a worse shape than figures contained in his Budget. Harriett Baldwin, the Conservative chair of the House of Commons Treasury select committee, said Hunt was engaged in “fuel duty fiction” and “business investment allowance fiction” to flatter the public finances in the official forecasts that accompanied the Budget on Wednesday. Her complaints were echoed by Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank…Hunt’s main fiscal rule is to have underlying public sector net debt falling as a share of gross domestic product by the fifth year of the OBR forecasts in 2027-28.” – The Financial Times
“Decisions by businesses on innovation and investment and by multinationals on where to locate their Foreign Direct Investment, in turn crucial to local technological progress, are motivated by expected profit after tax. Hence productivity growth is endogenous. It is affected by government policies. It is not exogenous, falling or not like manna from heaven, even though this is how the Treasury and Office for Budget Responsibility are treating it conceptually. In the eyes of these institutions, business profits can be treated like a milch cow, without negative effects on productivity and growth… That this Budget is set to destroy growth prospects by pushing ahead with the plan to raise corporation tax is sad and tragic.” – The Daily Telegraph
“Only 6 per cent of voters believe that they will be better off because of the budget despite the popularity of many of the flagship measures. A poll by YouGov found that 56 per cent thought the budget — delivered on Wednesday by Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor — would not make much difference to their lives while 25 per cent thought they would be worse off. Just under a third of voters (31 per cent) thought the budget was fair, while 33 per cent said it was unfair. Voters’ perception of the government has improved since polling in the wake of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget last November, but only marginally. A quarter of voters think the government is handling the economy well, up from 19 per cent in November.” – The Times
“Jeremy Hunt’s back-to-work drive is under threat as Labour prepares for a tax raid on up to two million pension pots. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, announced that the party would reverse Mr Hunt’s decision to scrap the cap on the amount people are allowed to put into their pensions before being taxed. But analysis showed that in two years’ time – by which point Labour could have won a general election – two million people could face paying taxes of up to 55 per cent on their pots as a result of Ms Reeves’ policy. Former pension ministers lined up to criticise Labour, saying the announcement could encourage people to “panic-buy” pensions for the next two years before taking early retirement if Labour wins the election.” – The Daily Telegraph
>Yesterday:
“We won’t know for a while where this latest mess ranks in the never-ending roll. But the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the disposal of two smaller US banks last weekend reminds me in one way of the calamity of 2007-08. That one initially featured a series of apparently isolated incidents, which the regulators patched up and then assured us everything was fine: the failure of a couple of small hedge funds in summer 2007; the run on Northern Rock that autumn; Bear Stearns’ collapse in March 2008. Every time we were assured the “fundamentals are sound”… I’m not suggesting a replay is happening. There are big differences between now and then…But it is a warning that these things are rarely over when the government wants us to believe they are.” – The Times
“Domestic abusers in England and Wales who kill their partners or ex-partners are to face tougher sentences under government plans after a campaign by bereaved families. The justice secretary and lord chancellor, Dominic Raab, will push for a change in the law after pressure from campaigners such as Julie Devey and Carole Gould, who have been calling since 2020 for a change to the minimum sentence for domestic homicide. An independent review of domestic homicide sentencing published on Friday found that sentencing does not take into consideration the fact that many domestic murders happen after years of abuse… Currently, a killer outside the home will face at least a decade more in prison than a domestic killer.” – The Guardian
“The public faces a rise in the BBC licence fee of £13 next year, with the Government under pressure to cancel the increase. The licence fee is due to rise in line with inflation in April 2024 after a two-year freeze, according to the Culture Department’s official policy. The Telegraph can reveal that the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) this week forecast that the inflation figure used would be 8.2 per cent. That would mean the BBC licence fee rising from £159 to £172, which would amount to the biggest increase in more than 20 years. Government ministers are under pressure to intervene and cancel the inflation-linked increase, which was unveiled as the official policy last year…Nadine Dorries… called for no further increases…until changes to BBC funding are considered.” – The Daily Telegraph
“A cross-party group of MPs and peers have asked the information commissioner to investigate whether the Chinese-owned TikTok’s handling of personal information is in breach of UK law. The letter from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) argues that TikTok cannot be compliant with data protection rules…IPAC believes TikTok could ultimately be forced to shut operations in the UK…Earlier on Thursday, Oliver Dowden, the Cabinet Office minister, said that following a security review by UK intelligence officials, the app would be banned from the government phones of ministers, advisers and civil servants “with immediate effect”. Dowden said TikTok required users to give permission for the app to access data stored on the device…” – The Guardian
“Boris Johnson has been re-selected as the Conservative candidate in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency. The Uxbridge and South Ruislip Conservative Association applauded the former prime minister’s commitment to the community and said it looks forward to ‘continuing to work alongside him.’ Mr Johnson’s re-selection comes following speculation that he might seek out a safer seat ahead of the next general election. While the 58-year-old holds a 7,000 vote majority, his seat is seen as a target for Labour at the next election. Mr Johnson, who first won the northwest London seat in 2015, will once again contest it in the next election – which can be held no later than January 24, 2025. – The Daily Mail
“President Macron performed a humiliating climbdown yesterday as his government bypassed parliament to implement his pension reform without a vote. In a move that infuriated the opposition and led to scenes of chaos in the National Assembly, Élisabeth Borne, the prime minister, said that an executive order would raise the retirement age for a state pension from 62 to 64. The measure denies MPs a say on legislation touted as the centrepiece of Macron’s second term. Opposition parties can block the bill only by toppling the government with a vote likely to be held next week. The move adds to political tension over a reform that has provoked weeks of strikes and protests, disrupting public transport across France and leaving rubbish to pile up on the streets of Paris.” – The Times
“Nicola Sturgeon has denied the SNP is in crisis as the party was forced to admit that more than 40 per cent of its members have quit and her self-ID gender reforms were blamed for a recent mass exodus. After weeks of refusing to provide the figure, the SNP said only 72,186 members were eligible to vote in the leadership contest – a drop of more than 50,000 on the 125,000 total the Nationalists boasted of in 2019. In an astonishing decline, the total is believed to have dropped by more than 10,000 in this year alone as Ms Sturgeon became embroiled in a toxic political scandal over her self-ID gender reforms. The membership tally also represents a drop of more than 30 per cent (31,698) on the last published count of 103,884 at the end of 2021, barely 14 months ago.” – The Daily Telegraph
“The Liberal Democrats will directly court Labour voters in “blue wall” swing seats to try to build a critical mass of tactical voting in advance of the next election, Ed Davey has said before the party’s first in-person conference since 2019. The planned campaign of letters in Conservative-held commuter belt constituencies where the Lib Dems are the main challengers will be intended to persuade Labour supporters to lend their vote – not just as a means to change the government but because “they feel an affinity with us”, Davey said. Speaking to the Guardian ahead of the spring conference beginning on Friday…Davey was at pains to not attack Labour, stressing that almost all seats the Lib Dems hope to win are Conservative held.” – The Guardian
>Yesterday: