Minister says welfare budget ‘unsustainable’ amid reports Reeves has earmarked billions in cuts – UK politics live | Politics

Four former UK ambassadors to Washington, Dame Karen Pierce, Sir Peter Westmacott, Sir Nigel Sheinwald and Sir David Manning, have just starting giving evidence to the Lords international relations and defence committee about relations with the US.

There is a live feed here:

Lord de Mauley, the committee chair, said that the committee was meant to be looking at the long-term aspects of the relationship. But he accepted that topical issues might come up.

He started by asking if there was a special relationship.

Pierce kicked off the responses. Pointing out that she remains a civil servant, she said there is a special relationship, even if there is no agreed definition of it. The relationship was unlike any other – even if the Americans were not sentimental about it, she said.

She recalled visiting West Point, the US military academy. The young recruits there were very clear that the UK was “ally number one”, she said.

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said that despite announcing a record level of sitting days for crown court judges to tackle delays, the “sad reality” is the backlog of cases will “still go up”, PA Media reports. PA says:

Mahmood said that judges will sit collectively for 110,000 days in the next financial year, 4,000 more than allocated for the previous period, to help victims see justice done faster.
The move comes as the Victims Commissioner published a report yesterday warning that the record levels of crown court delays are deepening the trauma of victims and making many feel justice is “out of reach”.
The rising backlog in England and Wales has almost doubled in five years to 73,105 at the end of September last year.
Meanwhile, a report from the public accounts committee published today raised concerns ministers had “simply accepted” the record-high crown court backlog will continue to grow and they will wait for the results of the Leveson Review before planning changes to tackle it.
The major review led by Sir Brian Leveson is expected to report on reforms to the court system in the spring.
Announcing the extra sitting days Mahmood described it as a “critical first step” but there is more that “we must” do.
Asked about how long it will take to clear the courts backlog, she told Times Radio: “We will be making progress.
“But the sad reality is that even sitting to this unprecedented amount, the backlog will still go up.
“Because the demand of cases coming into the system is very, very large, and that’s why I announced some weeks ago that Brian Leveson will be carrying out a crown courts review for us to look at once-in-a-generation reform of the sorts of cases that go into our crown courts, so that we can actually bear down on that backlog in the longer term.”
Changes on which cases go to jury trials as crown courts buckle under the “sheer number of cases” coming in will be among the measures being considered in the Leveson Review, she told LBC.
“He will also be considering whether we should do more with our magistrates’ courts and the sorts of cases that they can hear, or whether there is a case for a court that sits between the magistrates and the crown,” she said.

In an interview last week Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, was evasive when asked if the crime and policing bill she was publishing would lead to more people going to jail. The interviewer said that the legislation created 18 new offences, and suggested that, if the Home Office was locking more people up, that would undermine the Ministry of Justice’s efforts to reduce prison overcrowding.

Cooper said there were some measures in the bill that would reduce offending. But it sounded as if she was reluctant to answer the question because she did not want to admit that the interviewer had a point about prison numbers.

But the government has now published its impact assessment for the bill. And this suggests Cooper was being coy because the government will actually have a very limited impact on prison numbers. Because rightwing papers assume that any criminal justice measure that does not lead to more people being locked up must be ineffective, Cooper may have decided silence was the best policy.

In a story for the Times, Matt Dathan says the bill will result in only a few dozen extra people going to jail every year. He says:

Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, said the bill would address an “epidemic of street theft”, including a rise in phone and bag snatching and shoplifting.
However, an impact assessment of the bill published by the government last week revealed that the new offences would lead to 5,000 additional police-recorded crimes each year. This would lead to more than 400 prosecutions and 300 convictions, resulting in an extra 13-55 additional people going to prison each year.

Dathan also quotes Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, claiming these figures show the bill won’t work. Jenrick told the Times:

Yvette Cooper’s own assessment shows her bill is a total gimmick. Labour’s attempts to con the British public they’re tough on crime have been exposed. There were 84,000 phone thefts last year. Locking up 12 more people a year isn’t going to do anything to end the theft epidemic.

Rishi Sunak has said the “stop the boats” slogan during his time as UK prime minister was “too stark”, PA Media reports.

Good morning. Three weeks today Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, will present her spring statement. Originally this was not meant to involve budget-scale changes for plans to tax or spending (Reeves says she is only going to have one proper budget a year, in the autumn, to ensure stability), but changes to the country’s economic situation mean this statement is going to be more consequential than originally intended and this morning the BBC is running a story that looks like classic Treasury pitch rolling. The markets don’t like surprises and, while exact details of budget announcements are kept secret until the chancellor speaks to MPs, the Treasury invests a lot of effort in ensuring that people have a rough idea of what’s coming.

According to a report by the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam, Reeves is going to announce cuts, worth several billions pounds, particularly affecting welfare. He says:

The Treasury will put the proposed cuts to the government’s official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), on Wednesday amid expectations the chancellor’s financial buffer has been wiped out.
Sources said “the world has changed” since Rachel Reeves’s Budget last October, when the OBR indicated she had £9.9bn available to spend against her self-imposed borrowing rules.
The OBR’s forecast is likely to see that disappear because of global factors such as trade tariffs, as well as higher inflation and borrowing costs in the UK.
The Treasury will on Wednesday inform the OBR of its “major measures” -essentially changes to tax and spending in order to meet the chancellor’s self-imposed rules on borrowing money.

Islam quotes a “government insider” saying:

Clearly the world has changed a lot since the autumn budget. People are watching that change happen before their eyes.
The Office for Budget Responsibility will reflect that changing world in its forecasts later this month and a changing world will be a core feature of the chancellor’s response later this month.

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has been giving interviews this morning, promoting an announcement about extra funding for courts to allow judges to hear more criminal cases, as a means of reducing the backlog. In an interview on the Today programme, she was asked about the BBC spring statement story. She could have said it was all nonsense, but didn’t. Or she could have just refused to speculate on forthcoming Treasury announcements, which would have been the usual answer. Instead she not only endorsed the broad thrust of Islam’s report, saying that welfare spending is “unsustainable”, but also argued that there is a “moral case” for getting people off welfare and back into the labour market.

Asked if it was right to target the welfare budget when looking for savings, she replied:

This is the Labour party. The clue is in the name. We believe in work. We know that there are many people who are currently receiving state support for being out of work who want to be in work. We know that we have too many of our young people currently out of work, not in education, employment or training.
It is right that a Labour government strains every sinew to make sure that the support is available to prevent people from leaving the labour market or, if they have left the labour market, to help them get back.
The welfare secretary has been very clear that this has got to be a clear focus for our government. There is a moral case here for making sure that people who can work are able to work.
And there’s a practical point here as well, because our current situation is unsustainable.
So on both of those measures, I think the welfare secretary is looking at the right area of policy.

Asked again if it was right to focus on welfare, if government spending had to be cut, she replied:

We’ve seen a huge rise in that welfare budget. We know that there are millions of people who are out of work in our country who want to be in work. It is absolutely morally the right thing to do to support people, to make sure either they don’t leave the labour market, or if they have, they’re supported to get back into it.

Here is the agenda for the day.

10.30am: Four former UK ambassadors to Washington, Dame Karen Pierce, Sir Peter Westmacott, Sir Nigel Sheinwald and Sir David Manning, give evidence to the Lords international relations and defence committee about relations with the US.

Noon: Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs.

After 12.30pm: MPs begin a debate on the “estimates” (government spending allocations), covering the Depatment of Health and Social Care, the Foreign Office and the Department for Business and Trade. MPs are likely to discuss the plan to cut aid spending, although there will be no specific vote on this.

2.30pm: Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee.

5.30pm: The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign holds a protest outside the US embassy in London.

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