No 10 says Sunak would ‘strongly support’ review of whether former Post Office boss should keep her CBE – UK politics live

Keir Starmer said the government’s response to flooding is not “good enough” and vowed he would take pre-emptive action as he toured streets being cleared up after last week’s deluge, PA Media reports. PA says:

Starmer was speaking after Ian Clements, 68, showed him around his drenched semi-detached house in Loughborough, Leicestershire, on Monday morning.

Clements described how water from the nearby canal surged down Bottleacre Lane on Wednesday, reaching more than a foot deep in his lounge.

The Labour leader explained how he would set up a flood resilience taskforce to make sure preventative measures were in place before the winter flooding season.

He said: “The response wasn’t quick enough. So I just don’t think it’s good enough for the government to come after the event again and express empathy. Get ahead of this with a taskforce. That’s what I would do.”

Asked if Labour would provide more money for flood prevention, Starmer said: “Of course it does need money but the taskforce is not just about money. It’s about getting the basics done. Getting those drains cleared. Getting the local authorities together. Having a plan.”

Sir Vince Cable, the former Lib Dem leader and business secretary from 2010 to 2015, when concerns about the safety of the Post Office Horizon convictions were mounting, has given an interview to the World at One about the scandal. Here are the main points.

• Cable accused the Tories of trying to scapegoat Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, over the Post Office scandal. (See 10.33am.) Asked if Davey had questions to answer, Cable said:

All ministers who dealt with this, under the previous Labour government, and even more under our successors, the Conservative government, had dealt with this problem in the same way that Ed Davey did. He is now being highlighted. I suspect the reason is that this is election year and it’s quite good for somebody to try to make a scapegoat of a Lib Dem minister. I don’t think this is a party political matter at all.

There is a there obviously is a terrible failure of governments in general and of the criminal justice system. And that’s why the independent investigation is taking place …

Trying to find a scapegoat is a understandable, human reaction. But it’s not actually the heart of the problem.

• He backed Keir Starmer’s call for a system to be set up to allow all convictions to be overtuned en masse. (See 10.57am.) Cable said this would be justified even if it meant some guilty people being exonerated.

• He said as business secretary he did not have the power stop the Post Office prosecutions. Ministers only had the right to make requests, he said.

Parliament had given the Post Office enormous powers not just to operate commercially, but to run a kind of private police force, a bit like the railways. There was mounting concern, I think, in the department about this, but it wasn’t at all clear what we could do to intervene.

He said the Post Office was given considerable independence so that decisions closing individual post offices would not be matters for ministers.

• He said he was only once approached by a delegation of sub-post office operators about miscarriages of justice when he was business secretary. “It wasn’t something that was constantly on the radar of me, and probably other ministers,” he said.

No, I wouldn’t be so arrogant. I think any minister who’s involved in this, as I said, before our government and after it, has some responsibility … I’m very happy to apologise, as all ministers who are involved in this I think should …

I feel a sense of responsibility that I and a lot of other people, had we known how to do it, would have intervened more actively.

Sky’s political editor, Beth Rigby, who went to the PM Connect event at Accrington but did not get called to ask a question (memo to No 10 – that’s a bad idea), says she has been told that Harry Cole’s story about Rishi Sunak wanting to advocate scrapping the Rwanda policy when he was running for Tory leader in 2022 is accurate. (See 11.48am.)

As per @MrHarryCole story, I have also been told by a campaign insider the PM “wanted to scrap the Rwanda scheme” and “had no serious in interest” in illegal or legal migration “until he was persuaded otherwise during the campaign” (PM today said he didn’t say GOING to scrap…

There will be a Commons statement on the Post Office Horizon scandal today, but it won’t start until quite late. There are three other items first after defence questions ends at 3.30pm. Here they are, with rough timings.

3.30pm: Urgent question on Gaza, tabled by David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary.

Around 4.15pm: Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, makes a statement on how the NHS is handling winter.

Around 5.15pm: Robbie Moore, the minister for water and rural growth, gives a statement on the flooding.

Around 6.15pm: Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for postal services, gives a statement on the Post Office Horizon scandal.

Downing Street has hinted that it would like the honours forfeiture committee to remove the CBE awarded to Paula Vennells, the former Post Office boss.

Normally, when asked about the prospect of someone being stripped of an honour, No 10 just says it is a matter for this committee, which operates in a relatively secretive manner.

But today No 10 said Rishi Sunak would “strongly support” the committee if it decided to look at revoking Vennells’ CBE in the wake of the Horizon scandal.

The prime minister’s spokesperson said that Sunak would “strongly support” the forfeiture committee “if they were to choose to investigate”.

More than one million people have signed an online petition organised by 38 Degrees saying:

Having been handed a CBE for services to the Post Office, and moved out into other senior positions in government and healthcare, it is only right that this award is now withdrawn through the process of forfeiture.

Paula Vennells has subsequently refused to answer questions from these staff as well as the media and has refused to apologise for the cover-up, misery and trauma caused which has brought not only herself but the Post Office, the honours system and government into disrepute.

UPDATE: The PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing:

The prime minister shares the public’s feeling of outrage on this issue. He would strongly support the forfeiture committee if it chose to review the case.

It is a decision for the committee, rather than the government.

In sales you have to sound enthusiastic and, if anyone landed in Accrington this morning after a four-year holiday on the planet Mars and listened to the prime minister, they might assume that all was going rather well. Rishi Sunak sounded upbeat, cheery, and positive (even though he does not have the exuberance of Boris Johnson, or urbane self-confidence of David Cameron). He came over as well briefed. And he did not get booed, as he was last week.

But Sunak is not addressing a country with its memory wiped clean. Voters already have a largely settled, and extremely negative, view of what Sunak’s government has achieved, and this year’s election campaign will be decided by whether Sunak can find anything to shift that. There was nothing this morning that would do the trick.

This was an event organised by CCHQ, not the government, which meant that Sunak had free rein to be party political. And he did attack Labour, and Keir Starmer. But, whereas CCHQ has ceaselessly been trying to make the case that Labour’s £28bn green investment plan means Starmer would have to put up taxes (Starmer says that’s nonsense), Sunak did not make that argument with any gusto and instead just settled for the rather limp attack line that Starmer “doesn’t have a plan” and just “snipes from the sidelines”. (See 11.17am.)

There are three problems with this: a) Starmer does have lots of plans (whether they are inspiring or effective is another matter); b) even if he didn’t, not having a plan is not hardly worst thing that can be said about an opposition; and c) sniping from the sidelines is, literally, Starmer’s job as leader of the opposition. Labour HQ will have been watching that this morning thinking: ‘Is that it?’

Sunak was contrasting Labour’s stance with his own “long-term plan”. This worked for Cameron in 2015 but, as Matthew Holehouse from the Economist points out in posts on X, there are good grounds for thinking it won’t this time.

Sounds a lot like the campaign 2015. The challenge is that in 2010-15 enough people accepted the grand Cameron story: of when and what the “square one” was, and that there was a “long-term plan”. Hard to say the same today…

Sunak’s telling appears to date “square one” as Oct 2022, when he replaced Liz Truss. But it is not hard to see why this may be less resonant with voters than in 2015, when “square one” referred to the GFC [global financial crisis] and the last time the opposition were in power.

Jason Groves, political editor of the Daily Mail, says Keir Starmer was much better at taking questions from the press during his Q&A last week than Rishi Sunak was today.

Partly that might be because the format was different; Sunak was meant to be taking questions mainly from members of the public, whereas Starmer’s event last week was just media-focused. But for some time now Sunak has been more likely to limit the number of questions he accepts from journalists at events like this than Starmer. Being more open to scrutiny tends to be a sign of confidence.

Harry Cole from the Sun says that, although Rishi Sunak dismissed the story Cole published this morning saying that he considered advocating scrapping the Rwanda policy during the summer Tory leadership campaign in 2022 (see 11.33am), he did not deny what the story actually said.

NEW: Sunak offers carefully worded response to our revelation that he discussed scrapping Rwanda during the 2022 leadership race.

Tells PM Connect event: “I did not say I was going to scrap it”

As the story made clear – he was convinced not to do it.

No denial of discussions.

Sunak says he is open to changes that would make the Rwanda bill more effective. But he says dozens of legal experts have said that the bill as drafted will do what it is meant to do.

The entire Conservative party is supportive of the bill, he says.

(That’s not true. Around 30 of them deliberately abstained at second reading.)

And that’s the end of the Q&A.

UPDATE: Sunak said:

If people have bright ideas about how we can make this more effective whilst complying with our international obligations and retaining Rwanda’s participation in the scheme … then of course, I’m open to having those discussions.

But I have worked on it for a very long time, so I’m confident that it is a good deal and it will do the job for us.

Sunak claims the government is taking steps to improve school attendance. Making sure that children have the chance for a world-class education is the most important thing you can do, he says.

That is one of the things that brought him into politics, he says.

And he says children in England are the best readers in the western world as a result of the government’s reform. Education is one area where he is most proud of the government’s record over the past 13 years, he says.

Q: If you are so committed to the Rwanda scheme, why did you consider scrapping it when you were running for Tory leader in 2022, as the Sun reports? (See 9.57am.)

Sunak says he never said that.

I didn’t say I was going to scrap it. I mean that’s completely false. Of course I didn’t.

(The report did not say that he ever advocated that position – just that he privately considered it as an option.)

He says he addressed this in his BBC interview yesterday; he supported deterrent, but as chancellor had to scrutinise the plan.

He says the questions are for Labour; you will only tackle this with a deterrent, and so why are they not supporting the Rwanda bill? He says it has to be the government that decides who comes to the UK.

UPDATE: See 11.48am and 1.17pm for more on this.

 

Sunak is now taking questions from the media.

Q: Why did it take an ITV drama to get your government to focus on the Post Office miscarriage of justice? And will you now quash all convictions?

Sunak says this is a scandal. But he says he predecessors started the process of putting things right. They set up the inquiry, and approved compensation. But he wants to speed up the process, he says.

What happened was wrong.

Q: What can you do to show us you are offering business certainty?

Sunak talks about full expensing. He says no other big economy in the world offers business such a generous tax break.

And it is now permanent, he says.

He concedes policy did change on net zero. But he says he did that because he felt people were being forced to change too quickly. He wanted a pragmatic and proportionate approach. The UK will still get to net zero faster than other countries, he says. He says he was criticised for this, but the move was right.

He says we can now get to net zero “in a way that saves you money”.