Starmer claims government can reach new carbon target without people’s everyday lives being disrupted
Q: [From the Times] Is it really realistic to think you can hit your new carbon target without any change to how people live their everyday lives?
Starmer said this was realistic. He replied:
Yes, of course it is. And the target is my target, and the plan is my plan. I’m not borrowing from somebody else’s plan.
I don’t think that as we tackle this really important issue, the way to do it is to tell people how to run their lives and instruct them how to behave. I’m not going to do that.
I made a commitment before the election and shortly after the election that we’d be a government that trod lightly on people’s lives and I’m not going to now go around telling people how to live their lives.
I do think that the single most important milestone in hitting the target we’ve set out today is clean power 2030 which I know is tough … I’m absolutely sure we can do it.
Key events
Government whips have urged Labour MPs to be careful when using mobile phones near Westminster after “a number” reported having their devices stolen, Tom Scotson reports in a story for PoliticsHome.
‘Much more’ needed in spending review to ensure ‘meaningful’ improvement in services by next election, says thinktank
The Institute for Government thinktank has published a report today on what the budget will mean for public services. It welcomes the extra funding they are getting, but it says that more will have to be done at the spending review if people are going to notice a significant improvement in service delivery by the time of the next election.
Here is an extract.
Given the poor state of many services, growing demand and the cost of meeting higher wage bills (including hikes to national insurance contributions and the national living wage), this budget was never going to return public services to full health. But the largely deliverable spending plans it set out should start to address the most serious wounds – for example, with the extra money for prisons and schools’ special educational needs funding.
The government has also made a start on its long-term objectives with a meaningful boost to capital budgets – another area of weakness long identified by the Institute for Government – while other measures will provide some breathing room for ministers to think more radically in the spending review next spring.
There is a lot of potential in the government’s plan to take a mission-led approach to that spending review and in its nascent reform agenda of creating more local and preventative services. While the budget could have done more to make a start on these changes, it is reasonable to save the bulk of this work till the spring. But the pressure to get these reforms right is high: on current plans, spending is due to grow much more slowly beyond 2025/26 and in fact implies substantial cuts to unprotected areas such as local government and criminal justice.
Summing up the report’s verdict, Nick Davies, programme director at the IfG, said:
The outgoing Conservative government left public services in an appalling state and returning them a decent standard will take at least this parliament. The budget should stabilise most services in the short-term and made the first tentative steps on the long road to recovery. Much more will be needed in the spending review from Labour’s reform plans if they are to deliver meaningful improvements by the next election.
Mandelson says he could combine being US ambassador to Washington with being chancellor of Oxford University
Lord Mandelson, the former Labour cabinet minister, is now described as favourite to be the next UK amassador to Washington. He is also down to the final five in the election to be next chancellor of Oxford University.
The two cities are 3,600 miles away from each other, but Mandelson told the Times’s How to Win an Election podcast that he did not think he would have a problem combining both jobs at the same time. He explained:
If by some chance these two things were to happen, they are not, you know, incompatible with each other. And the university has made that clear to me. They’re not incompatible.
Look, if I was in the United States, I would be promoting Oxford as a great, iconic premier university that is revered in the US. And if I was in Oxford as its ceremonial figurehead, I would be helping to bring in the best of American philanthropy. So they’re not incompatible. And I think anyone who thinks for one moment will realise that.
There are few people in British public life who have been as accomplished as Mandelson at accumulating titles and so it is quite possible he will end up with both jobs. William Hague once mocked this trait in a speech when Mandelson was in government. He said:
[Mandelson’s] title now adds up to, “The right honourable the Baron Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, First Secretary of State, Lord President of the Privy Council and Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills”. It would be no surprise to wake up in the morning and find that he had become an archbishop.
Hague may have been ahead of his time. There is now a vacancy for one of those too …
Tim Farron, the former Lib Dem leader, is one of the MPs who has said they will vote against the assisted dying bill. He posted this on social media.
Given that we know that coercive control is something insidious and manipulative and that people often don’t realise they have been victims until years later, the Assisted Dying Bill is an enormous threat to vulnerable people. There are no adequate safeguards here.
More from my colleague Jessica Elgot on the assisted dying bill.
A lot of MPs are also trying to work out the numbers for assisted dying, without committing themselves. Suggests two things to me – a) people trying to work out if they can abstain b) trying to pick the “winning” side.
While MPs are debating the final stages of the House of Lords (hereditary peers) bill, peers are holding a general debate on Lords reform. As my colleague Henry Dyer points out, one chamber is a lot more interested in the topic than the other.
House of Lords is pretty packed for a debate on… House of Lords reform. The Commons is simultaneously debating at committee stage amendments to the government’s bill to abolish hereditary peers, but one house is clearly more interested than the other! pic.twitter.com/7JzhJm3PYa
— Henry Dyer (@Direthoughts) November 12, 2024
SNP calls for hereditary peers bill to be amended to ban political donors from getting peerages
Ellie Reeves, the Cabinet Office minister, has told MPs that amendments tabled to the House of Lords (hereditary peers) bill suggest there is no principled objection in the Commons to the government’s plan to remove the right of hereditary peers to sit in the Lords.
The last Labour government removed most hereditary peers from the Lords, but 92 were allowed to stay as a compromise. Under a peculiar rule, the legislation said that when any of them died, there would be byelctions to replace them, with only peers voting and only hereditary peers able to stand as candidates.
The new bill will abolish this system, and remove the right of the remaining hereditaries (currently 88 in number) to be in the Lords because of their hereditary peerage. Some of them may be offered life peerages.
Opening today’s debate, which will deal with its committee and remaining stages in the Commons, Reeves said:
This bill is a matter of principle. In the 21st century it cannot be right for there to be places in our legislature reserved for those born into certain families.
Having now seen all of the amendments tabled from parties from across the house, it is clear there is no principled objection to the aim of this bill, which is to remove the right of people to sit and make laws in our legislature by virtue of an accident of birth.
Alex Burghart, Reeves’ Tory shadow, said the bill was “an attempt to gerrymander the membership of the House of Lords undercover of a reform”.
Pete Wishart, the SNP’s deputy leader at Westminster, said the bill did not go far enough. He said he hoped there would be a vote on an SNP amendment banning anyone who has donated more than £11,180 to a political party (the threshold at which a donation must be declared) from getting a peerage. He said:
114 years since the Labour party first promised to abolish the House of Lords and the best they can do is this quite frankly embarrassing bill. Unlike the Westminster parties, our position in the SNP is unequivocal – get rid of the House of Lords now.
At the very least Labour MPs must now back my amendment to end peerages being dished out to party donors – this murky practice should have ended with the Cash-for-Honours scandal. The only possible reason Labour MPs could have for not backing this amendment is that they want to keep stuffing the House of Lords with their millionaire donors.
Other SNP amendments, include one saying the Lords should be abolished and another saying peers should have to pay income tax on the daily allowance they receive, were not allowed because they were outside the scope of the bill.
MPs will vote on amdendments to the bill later this afternoon or early this evening.
My colleague Jessica Elgot says MPs are completely in the dark as to how the Commons will vote when Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill gets it second reading a fortnight on Friday.
Talking to a lot of backbench MPs today about assisted dying and absolutely no one I have spoken to has any idea how to vote. Have no idea how this is going to go…
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, considered plans to introduce road charging in the capital ahead of this year’s mayoral election, according to a report by Jim Waterson on his new London Centric Substack blog. But he says Khan dropped the idea in the face of Tory claims that he was anti-motorist. Waterson says:
The pay-per-mile scheme, known as Next Generation Charging but codenamed internally as “Project Gladys”, was expected to be introduced in September 2026, as a flagship policy of the mayor’s third and final term. In highly confidential internal documents seen by London Centric, TfL’s own modelling set out how the move would lead to a collapse in the number of cars on the roads.
Khan now insists he will never introduce a pay-per-mile scheme. He pulled the plug on the project ahead of his re-election campaign following claims by political opponents that Labour was pursuing a “war on the motorist”. This is despite huge pressure to reach the ambitious green targets he has set himself, which will require a substantial decrease in the number of vehicles on London’s roads.
A reader asks:
@Andrew – does Justin Welby keep his seat in the House of Lords?
It appears that it is very difficult to revoke a peerage, although I’m not sure if the ones given to the clergy are treated any differently.
There are 26 bishops in the House of Lords (including the two archbishops). Unlike other members of the House of Lords, bishops aren’t there for life. Their right to sit in the Lords is tied to being a bishop, and once they retire from that, they are out.
The situation is a different for archbishops because normally they get offered a life peerage when they stand down (just as a few other people with VIP establishment jobs do, like former cabinet secretaries, Met police commissioners and Speakers of the House of Commons). Given the circumstances of Welby’s resignation, he might have to wait a bit for a life peerage, or he might not get one at all. But I suspect it is more likely than not that he will get the customary peerage at some point.
Nandy scraps David Cameron’s National Citizen Service programme, as she unveils plan for national youth strategy
National Citizen Service (NCS), a flagship volunteering idea promoted by David Cameron when he became prime minister, is finally being scrapped, Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, has told MPs.
In a statement to parliament, Nandy confirmed the move as part of announcement about developing plans for a new national youth strategy.
Cameron originally proposed national citizen service when he was opposition leader as a modern version of national service – compulsory military service for young people, phased out in the UK in the early 1960s but still a popular concept with rightwing Tories.
Cameron’s version involved teenagers volunteering. Originally he suggested that all young people might take part, in an initiative that was part of his “Big Society” vision and that he hoped would break down class divisions. But when his government did launch the scheme after 2010 it was voluntary.
The government eventually passed legislation making the scheme permanent. But by then Cameron was out of office, and subsequently the scheme had its budget slashed. Nandy told the Commons today that from March next year NCS will be wound down for good.
She told MPs:
In 2011 when the National Citizen Service was established, Facebook and X had only 700 million users. Now they have over three billion. And TikTok had not even been dreamt of.
In 2011 an estimated one in eight 10 to 15 year olds had a probable mental health problem. Now that’s one in five. The world has changed and we need a youth strategy that reflects that.
Nandy also told MPs that the government would be developing a new national youth strategy, and that this would be backed by £85m from government, and a further £100m from the dormant assets scheme.
In a news release, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport says:
The strategy will prioritise delivering better coordinated youth services and policy at a local, regional and national level. It will make sure decision-making moves away from a one-size-fits all approach, handing power back to young people and their communities, and rebuilding a thriving and sustainable sector. This will help deliver on the government’s missions, spreading opportunities, making our streets safer and taking pressure off health services.
To kickstart the process, the government is inviting young people to take part in a series of face-to-face engagements to ensure their perspectives and aspirations are at the heart of decision making. They will then be asked to share their views as part of a ‘Today’s Youth, Tomorrow’s Nation’ conversation on how best to help the next generation of young people …
More than £85m will be allocated in recognition of the urgent need for more youth facilities. This will include £26m of new funding for youth clubs to buy new equipment and undertake much needed renovations via the Better Youth Spaces programme.
