Afternoon summary
The Treasury committee hearing has ended so that’s all from me for today. Thanks for reading and commenting. Here’s a summary of the key events covered today:
- The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was grilled on the budget by MPs on the Commons Treasury committee. He defended the decision to raise taxes as making a “progressive” improvement to people’s quality of life and essential to fix the problems caused by the pandemic. However, he insisted he would bring down taxes in future.
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The European Union called a meeting involving officials from the UK, France, Jersey and Guernsey as the fishing row escalated.
- There were fears of Brexit violence in Northern Ireland after armed and masked men hijacked a bus and set it on fire, citing the protocol as their reason.
- The Conservative party readmitted MP Rob Roberts after he was expelled for sexually harassing a staff member.
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The DUP will hold back on its threat to collapse Stormont over the Northern Ireland protocol for a few more weeks to enable negotiations between the UK and EU to continue, the party leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, has said.
PA reports:
Donaldson faced questions at to why he has not followed through on his ultimatum to withdraw ministers from Stormont at the start of November – thus collapsing powersharing – if major changes to the contentious Irish Sea trading arrangements had not been secured by that date.
There have been suggestions the hijacking and burning of a bus in a loyalist area of Newtownards, Co Down, on Monday morning was timed to mark the DUP’s missed deadline.
Condemning the “paramilitary elements” behind the attack, Sir Jeffrey insisted they would not influence his political strategy to remove the Irish Sea border.
He said it would be “churlish” to pull down Stormont at this point, claiming the UK government was making progress in efforts to slash the red tape burden imposed by the protocol.
His comments come as negotiations between the EU and UK remain deadlocked.
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Asked what levelling up means to him, Sunak said: “Levelling up is meant to be the golden thread that runs through the entire SR [spending review].”
The two areas he is most focused on are “pride in place”, in which people feel that their communities are becoming a “richer, nicer place to live in” through investment in culture and sports, as well as access to opportunity regardless of wherever you grow up. “That will manifest itself in different ways” depending on where you live, he said.
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More from PA on today’s Treasury committee:
Defending the scrapping of the triple lock on state pensions, Sunak said there was “lots of other support for pensioners that comes through the system”.
The chancellor pointed to winter fuel payments and free prescriptions as examples, and he said: “There’s lots of other support for pensioners separate to the state pension and, actually, pensions relative to earnings in this country are the highest they’ve been in over 30 years.”
He said that reducing the pension triple lock to a double lock for a year from 2022-23 was “a reasonable and fair thing to do in the circumstances”.
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Asked why the government was not acting to reduce train ticket fares to encourage more people to choose rail travel, Sunak said the government was currently subsidising it with “billions of pounds” to reflect the fact that “not that many people are travelling on it compared to pre-coronavirus”.
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Asked about why he had cut passenger duty on flights, Sunak said he had also created a new rate for ultra-long haul flights so that these travellers pay more.
He said: “If you look at the impact of those two things from a carbon emissions point of view they probably offset each other.”
He added that the government was putting investment into sustainable fuel research.
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Asked about OBR forecasts showing that trade with EU is 15% lower than it was pre-pandemic, equating to a 4% reduction in productivity, Sunak said: “Our trading relationship with the EU has changed post-Brexit, we have a free trade agreement but it’s not exactly the same as before and that means trade patterns take some time to adjust.”
But he added: “I think the trajectory is on an upward flow.”
More from PA on the Treasury committee:
Sunak said it was “slightly unfair” to focus on taxpayers’ cash lost to fraud during the emergency rollout of schemes during the coronavirus pandemic.
Labour’s Angela Eagle raised concerns about the £37bn spent on the test-and-trace scheme and the possible £27bn lost to fraud under Covid support schemes.
Sunak responded: “People should expect and demand their money is spent properly.
“I do think it’s slightly unfair to focus on Covid schemes that were put in place at a time of national crisis at enormous speed.
“On the Covid side, that is what it is, and I said it at the time when you’re in a crisis you’re going to end up casting the net wider than you would in peacetime.”
But “now we’re through that”, he added: “The state is taking a lot of money from people, we’ve talked about the tax rate being high, we’ve talked about the state doing a lot, it is absolutely right that that money gets spent really well.”
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The European Commission has called a meeting involving officials from the UK, France, Jersey and Guernsey as Emmanuel Macron’s deadline for action to resolve the dispute looms, PA reports.
A spokesman said: “A meeting, convened by the commission, is taking place this afternoon bringing together senior officials from the commission, France, the UK, as well as from Jersey and Guernsey, to allow for a swift solution on the outstanding issues.”
Downing Street said the talks were part of the “regular, technical, ongoing engagement”.
“We will continue to work with them to grant licences where the evidence and data can be presented to back up the application for a licence,” a No 10 spokesman said.
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Asked whether he raised taxes to cut them shortly before the next general election, Sunak said: “The last thing I would do is voluntarily raise taxes.”
Instead he said this had been to fix the damage caused by Covid, solve the NHS backlog and fund “landmark reforms” to social care.
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More from PA on the committe:
Sunak has insisted he will aim to bring taxes down in future.
He said: “That’s very much my goal, my mission, over the remainder of this Parliament, and we took a step in that direction at budget.”
After giving the example of the new tapering rules for Universal Credit, Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh interrupted to say: “That’s not a tax cut, that’s a benefit change.”
Sunak said it was a “combined approach” but McDonagh said: “That really isn’t a tax cut. You’re just desperate to find a tax cut.
“We’re sitting in the Margaret Thatcher room and you hope to emulate her. But the British Prime Minister and the British Tory government that you are most emulating at the moment is Ted Heath’s, low growth and therefore high tax. Is that not the case?”
Sunak replied: “Actually, we’re forecast this year to grow at, well, historically very high rates as we recover from the pandemic.”
A VAT cut on energy to help ease the pressure of increased costs on households would “not be a sustainable thing to do”, Sunak said.
“It means the bulk of that very expensive tax cut would go to the wealthy,” he said
He said the £500m household support fund for the most vulnerable families was “a lot better use of cash”.
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Downing Street said “robust” measures were in place should the French authorities carry out their threats over the fishing dispute.
PA reported a No 10 spokesman as telling reporters: “As you would expect, we have robust contingency plans in place. I’m not going to get into the detail of them here.
“It is the French that made these threats and we are continuing to call for them to step back from those threats.”
The spokesman said it was down to the French whether they carried out their threats in the row over post-Brexit fishing rights.
He said: “It is entirely up to France if they choose to go ahead with the threats they have set out. We continue to hope that they step away from the threats they have made.”
The spokesman said meetings were continuing with the French and with authorities in Jersey and Guernsey on the issuing of individual licences.
“We are happy to continue with the work to assist them getting the evidence that is needed as they seek more licences,” the spokesman said.
More on the treasury committee from PA:
Other organisations and governmental departments are interested in moving to the Treasury’s northern hub in Darlington, the chancellor has said.
Rishi Sunak told the Commons Treasury committee his department was set to be “joined by several other departments ... either related to government or other bits of government”.
But he said the names of the organisations were not public yet.
The report also cites Sunak as acknowledging that hitting the targets in his new fiscal rules would be a challenge but saying it was “better than a cat in hell’s chance”.
Commons Treasury committee chair Mel Stride said the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) charts put Mr Sunak’s fiscal headroom looking “rather pale by comparison” to his predecessors.
Stride said that while the OBR “didn’t say not a cat in hell’s chance” of hitting his targets, it does appear there is a “strong risk those targets will not be met”.
The committee heard OBR modelling put the likelihood of meeting the targets as being 55-60%.
“Which I probably describe as better than a cat in hell’s chance, but the numbers are the numbers,” Sunak added.
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The education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, has pledged to look at lengthening the school day.
PA reports that Nadhim Zahawi told MPs there were some “excellent examples” that he would examine, before he urged all schools to ensure they moved to the average school day length of 6.5 hours.
It has been suggested an extension to the school day will help children prosper after the coronavirus pandemic and catch up on lost learning.
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Asked about tax increases as a result of the budget eroding people’s living standards, Sunak said “quality of life is influenced by the quality of public services”.
He added that the government had taken a “high progressive approach” in which “those on lowest income are benefiting disproportionately more than others”.
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Asked about how the government plans to address stagnating real wages, which are being further eroded by increases in inflation, Sunak said the government’s focus was on improving those at the “lower end of the spectrum” since in previous years “a lot of wage growth wasn’t evenly shared”.
However, he acknowledged: “Wages more generally since financial crisis here and in other countries it’s been a struggle to reach the growth rates we saw previously.”
He said the government’s view was that the best way to address this was to improve opportunities for skills and retraining, including those outlined in the budget.
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Asked whether the social care plans went far enough given the increasing level of demand, Sunak said the £1.6bn that had been allocated represented “historically very high level of social care spend in general”, describing the reforms as “landmark”.
To address recruitment and retention challenges in the social care workforce, there needed to be a “real sense of career progression and qualifications people can get”, he said, adding that £500,000,000 would go towards “improving the quality of the training”.
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Asked why the government had opted not to cut taxes further, Sunak said he was constrained by the lack of fiscal headroom as well as the government’s broader plans to invest in future growth, skills and infrastructure as well as levelling up left-behind regions.
“We’ve got a bunch of commitments we want to deliver and we’ve done that across the board with what are historically generous settlements across all departments,” he said.
The education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, said “there is no place for anti-vaxxers harassing or coming anywhere near school leaders” as he insisted the vaccine programme for secondary school pupils “continues at pace”.
PA reported Zahawi as telling MPs: “It was the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation [JCVI] that did not initially make the decision and then went further and asked the four chief medical officers to then make that decision.
“So, as we have done throughout the vaccination programme, we’ve operated by taking the advice of the JCVI, by taking the advice of the chief medical officers and we moved swiftly the moment that advice was made available to vaccinate 12- to 15-year-olds, and of course through the holiday period that was expanded to out-of-school vaccination and now that they are returning back into school that continues at pace.”
Responding to Labour, he said: “He is right to highlight the dangerous behaviour of some anti-vaxxers, there is no place for anti-vaxxers harassing or coming anywhere near school leaders and I have the reassurance of the home secretary that she’ll make any resources available that the sector needs to make sure those people in our schools are protected and are able to get on with the job of teaching children and protecting them.”
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Asked about why the government had abandoned its £2bn target for science and research spending, Sunak said: “It’s just the balance between all these things.”
He said the government had spent the “largest amount that any government’s spent on the key priorities of science and innovation community”. This includes ensuring the UK can remain part of the EU’s Horizon funding programme, “generous settlements” for core research and a doubling of Innovate UK’s funding to £1bn to fund later-stage research and development.
He said that part of the reason the UK compared poorly with similar countries on science spend was that it funded more research through tax credits than other countries, which rely more on direct investment.
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On supply chain problems, Sunak said “we can ease the bits that government is responsible for”, such as testing requirements for HGV drivers and regulatory easement. He added that the government announced last week extra funding to improve the quality of facilities for HGV drivers.
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Asked about whether immigration could represent a potential risk, Sunak said: “As it relates to particular supply chain challenges, the government has made flexibility available on HGV side, agricultural side.”
He added that there had been work on scale-up visas to make it easier to recruit staff for fast-growing companies. “On that side we’re making quite a lot of progress,” he said.
Asked whether there was a political barrier to relaxing immigration rules, he added that “in the short term there is an obvious desire for pragmatism”.
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Pressed on what other risks there were ahead in delivering plans outlined in his budget, Sunak cited higher inflation and interest rates.
“In general, as the OBR have pointed out, the public finances are quite sensitive on the debt side to changes in [the Retail Price Index] RPI because we have a relatively large stock of inflation-linked debt, which is about double the G7 average,” he said.
But the government’s objective was for “low and stable inflation” he added.
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The chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is being questioned by MPs on his spending commitments and tax measures announced in the budget.
Asked about his “pale” fiscal headroom, Sunak agreed that “if you look historically there is slightly less headroom than previous chancellors would have had”.
He added that the fact the government had fixed budgets for the next three years “gives us an enormous amount of certainty compared to previous fiscal events”.
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Here’s the full report on the events in Northern Ireland early this morning from the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent Lisa O’Carroll.
The chancellor is set for a “wild ride” in order to reduce his deficit under new rules announced at the budget, according to the government’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
PA reports:
Officials from the body warned that the amount of wiggle room for chancellor Rishi Sunak to cut the deficit in the next three years and reduce national debt was the second-smallest level on record.
They also told MPs on the treasury select committee they expect inflation to fall in between six months and a year but said the number of people leaving the workforce could keep it higher.
The economic forecasters said they also feared public transport may face a permanent black hole in its finances without service cuts as passenger numbers remain below pre-pandemic levels.
In a two-hour grilling by MPs on the details of chancellor Rishi Sunak’s budget, OBR chairman Richard Hughes suggested the Treasury may struggle to hit its new deficit targets, especially if interest rates rise, and would be in for a “wild ride”.
He said: “The chancellor set himself some new fiscal rules in this budget and they are to get debt falling as a share of GDP (gross domestic product) by 2024-25 and balance the current budget.
“The headroom he set aside to reach those targets is the second-lowest headroom that any chancellor has had when setting fiscal rules.”
He added: “Just a 1% interest rate rise could easily wipe out the chancellor’s headroom.”
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Irish premier Micheal Martin has urged the UK government to act constructively in a post-Brexit fishing row with France.
Speaking at the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, Taoiseach Micheal Martin said that Ireland stands in solidarity with other EU countries amid fresh tensions with the UK over fishing.
PA reported that Martin said that there was a concern that the UK has not been engaging with the EU in a “constructive manner”.
“We believe the European Union and the UK government need to engage constructively on a whole range of issues, not least fisheries.”
“I believe there is discussion under way between the UK government and the French government and that they may be in a position to get that issue resolved.”
“We would like to see that resolved, independent of the protocol,” he told reporters.
Here’s the full report from the Guardian’s political correspondent, Aubrey Allegretti, on the readmission to the Conservative party of MP Rob Roberts after he sexually harassed a member of staff.
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Covid scandals have eroded public trust in MPs by exposing poor behaviour among politicians, including breaches of lockdown rules and awarding of public procurement contracts to ministers’ friends, research by the anti-corruption watchdog has found.
A survey of 1,590 people on behalf of the committee on standards in public life found participants were “visibly angry as they recounted the strict pandemic rules they had to follow, which they believed were disregarded by various politicians who subsequently faced few or no consequences,” PA reports.
A report on the survey singled out Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Matt Hancock as “immediately associated with the word ‘sleaze”’ and not possessing “the core values expected from political leaders”.
In total, 41% of people felt ministers’ standards of conduct were quite low or very low, compared with 24% who felt they were quite or very high.
For MPs the figures were even worse. Just 20% of people surveyed felt that MPs’ standards of conduct were quite or very high, while 44% felt they were quite or very low.
Polling also found that 43% of people felt standards had got worse.
The survey was published on Monday, along with a report from the CSPL that recommended tougher sanctions for politicians with “poor ethical standards”.
The committee found there was “an underlying sense of resignation, bordering on cynicism” that politics would never be entirely ethical, but that improvements could still be made.
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Richard Hughes, the chairman of the OBR, has warned that public transport may need to permanently have subsidies to ensure no cuts to services.
He told MPs on the treasury select committee: “It remains to be seen what the financial model for public transport is in the long term.
“We don’t know to what extent people are going to start returning to work five days a week. Revealed preference seems to suggest people are going to work from home more.”
He added: “Assumptions about when ticket revenues into the transport system recover to pre-pandemic levels I think have to be kept under constant review and it may be the case there is a permanent hole in the rail system, the Underground in London and local transport systems, which are going to have to be subsidised in perpetuity if they’re not going to cut services.”
Hughes also told MPs that the impact of EU migrants leaving the UK during the pandemic was having an impact on the economy, with about 50% of those who left not expected to return.
He said: “There is an element of loss of migrants who would have otherwise come here or stayed here to stay in the workforce. That is a minority of the effect on the labour force but it is nonetheless a significant one.”
Hughes added: “EU migrants were particularly favourable to the UK finances in the sense that we tended to not pay for their education.
“They came here and were largely in employment. They often didn’t bring dependents with them. What we didn’t know is whether they would stay and collect a pension, or go home,” he said, adding that compared with migrants from other nations, EU workers “had some fiscal advantages”.
He added: “The bigger loss comes from the fact that we have a less trade-intensive economy which is less connected in terms of trade with the rest of the world and it has consequences for the long-run productivity of the economy as a whole rather than necessarily the individuals who were either here or not.”
Overall, the number of people leaving the workforce, either through returning to home countries or residents taking early retirement, was expected to be about 160,000, he said.
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Downing Street said the prime minister’s thoughts were with those injured in the Salisbury train crash, adding that the government was investing to ensure the railway network remained “one of the safest in the world”.
PA reports that a No 10 spokesman said: “The Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) have been deployed to the site and are conducting forensic investigations, obviously the prime minister’s thoughts remain with those who were affected by the incident.
“It would be inappropriate for me to comment further at this time while the RAIB are working to investigate what happened.”
The spokesman added: “I think it’s important that we let the RAIB investigate this thoroughly, but more generally in terms of safety standards on the network it’s obviously a top priority for this government, which is why we have allocated £40bn worth of spending to ensure that the railways continue to be one of the safest in the world.”
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There’s more on the Northern Ireland bus hijacking on PA:
Stormont’s infrastructure minister, Nichola Mallon, said the two masked men who hijacked the bus “muttered something about the protocol” as they held the driver at gunpoint.
Mallon told BBC Radio Ulster’s The Nolan Show: “Two masked men entered the bus. They held the driver, a male, at gunpoint, they said something about the protocol, and they then proceeded to spray the inside of the bus with flammable liquid. They forced the bus driver off the bus and then they set it alight.
“The faceless, mindless cowards who did this have done nothing more than attack their own community.”
She added: “We understand that they muttered something about the protocol.
“I do not know what these people thought they were setting out to achieve by putting at risk a bus driver just trying to do his job and attacking a bus that is there to transport people in the community. It is mindless.”
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Downing Street has not set out whether there are contingency plans if France carries out threats in the fishing rights row, or when it understands the French deadline to be.
PA reported that when asked if there were contingency plans in case of disruption, a No 10 spokesman said: “We are keen for France to take a step back from the threats.”
He pointed towards the foreign secretary Liz Truss’s warning that the UK could launch dispute settlement proceedings under the Brexit trade deal, and the Brexit minister Lord Frost’s threat of retaliatory “practical responses”.
Asked for a second time if there were contingency plans, he said: “It is the French who have issued the threat, we’re keen to continue to abide by the TCA [Trade and Cooperation Agreement] and continue to look at licences and the validity of them as they’re applied for.”
Asked whether it was clear if the deadline for an agreement on licences set by France for Tuesday was at the beginning or the end of the day, the spokesman said: “That would be a question for the French.”
Pressed on what the British understanding of the deadline was, he said: “It’s the French who have set out the timescale as per their threat, our focus is on trying to work with them and hope they step back from the threats they’ve made.”
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The disgraced MP Rob Roberts has been given his Tory membership back despite a warning the move would “let him off the hook” for sexually harassing a member of staff.
PA reports:
The Conservatives confirmed on Monday morning that Mr Roberts was a Tory party member again after a 12-week suspension.
The MP for Delyn in North Wales will continue to sit as an independent as the Tories are still withholding the party whip in the House of Commons.
Labour party chair Anneliese Dodds described the scheduled end of Mr Roberts’ suspension as “scandalous”.
“Rob Roberts should have resigned as an MP the moment he was suspended. That he is now set to return to the Conservative Party shows they’ve let him off the hook,” she added.
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France’s seafood sector is divided over government sanctions on British trawlers due to start on Tuesday, with processing companies warning they will cost jobs but fishers insisting that after 10 months waiting for UK permits, tough action is needed.
The Guardian’s Jon Henley reports that Paris has said it could ban British trawlers from unloading in French ports, carry out extra licence checks on boats, tighten checks on trucks and reinforce customs and hygiene controls unless London grants more licences to fish in UK waters.
But the head of the fish wholesale association in Boulogne, France’s largest fishing port, said the planned measures were “excessive” and “disproportionate”, warning they risked doing more harm to the sector overall than good.
The British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said on Monday France had 48 hours to back down or the UK would begin dispute talks. President Emmanuel Macron said the ball was in Britain’s court and that France had tabled concrete de-escalation proposals.
Here’s a fuller report on events in Northern Ireland from the Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll:
Unionist leaders have condemned the “thuggery” and “stupid actions” behind this morning’s petrol bombing of a double decker bus in Northern Ireland fuelling fears of a new wave of loyalist violence linked to opposition to the Brexit protocol.
The BBC in Northern Ireland reported that loyalists had claimed the hijacking, saying it was to coincide with a deadline set by the DUP to resolve issues around the NI protocol.
The DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson ,moved to head off further violence, warning that “thuggery and terrorism will do nothing to remove the NI protocol” and “violence has no place” in Northern Ireland.
“There was never any justification for people with guns on our streets and damaging property – there never will be,” he added.
Doug Beattie, the head of the Ulster Unionist party, described the dawn attack that left the bus driver “shaken” as the “utterly disgraceful, depressing and stupid actions of thugs and criminals”.
He asked in a tweet: “In what way does this help address issues concerning the protocol, it simply hurts their own community.”
The shadow Northern Ireland secretary, Louise Haigh, described the attack as “ utterly reprehensible”, adding: “There is no place for these sickening acts of violence and intimidation.”
Utterly disgraceful, depressing and stupid actions of thugs and criminals.
— Doug Beattie (@BeattieDoug) November 1, 2021
In what way does this help address issues concerning the protocol, it simply hurts their own community. Wise up…… 😡 https://t.co/4i2FjrvFSg
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A senior official in Northern Ireland’s Department of Health has admitted that health waiting lists have spiralled “out of control” in documents provided for a landmark case.
In one testimony seen by the Guardian, the offical said the delays were “extremely regrettable” but that the health minister had repeatedly said a significant increase in funding was necessary to make a return to acceptable levels, the Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll reports.
“While doctors, nurses, other health professionals and managers have made every effort to ensure that any negative impact on patients has been kept to a minimum, waiting times have continued to grow to a level where many believe that they are now out of control,” he added.
Mark Dayan, policy analyst at the health services thinktank, the Nuffield Trust, said that Northern Ireland’s waiting lists began to “spiral to more and more unacceptably poor levels relative to the rest of the UK” 10 years ago.
He said “one year-plus waits” were “almost unheard of” in England before Covid, but had been “common in Northern Ireland”. Out of an estimated 460,000 on a waiting list, 250,000 had been on it for more than a year, he said.
Two landmark cases will be heard in December and January featuring the Northern Ireland health minister, Robin Swann, the UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and the health secretary, Savid Javid, as defendants.
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The DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, has denounced the bus attack, saying “violence has no place” in Northern Ireland.
In a strong condemnation aimed at heading off any further unrest, he said “thuggery and terrorism will do nothing to remove the NI protocol”.
He tweeted:
There was never any justification for people with guns on our streets and damaging property - there never will be. Thuggery & terrorism will do nothing to remove the NI Protocol. Political action has secured progress and must be allowed to continue. Violence has no place in this. https://t.co/dHrPW7m1dL
— Jeffrey Donaldson MP (@J_Donaldson_MP) November 1, 2021
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Fears of a new wave of violence in Northern Ireland linked to loyalist opposition to the Brexit protocol were prompted today after a double-decker bus was hijacked and set on fire in a town close to Belfast.
The incident happened in Newtownards at dawn, with local press reporting the men cited the Northern Ireland protocol during the attack, raising concerns it may be linked to today’s date of 1 November.
The Democratic Unionist party had given a deadline of the end of October for substantial changes to the Northern Ireland protocol to be agreed with the EU. A PSNI spokesperson said:
At approximately 6.30am, two masked and armed men boarded the bus and poured fuel over the vehicle before setting it alight. The driver managed to get off the bus unharmed but has been left badly shaken by the incident.
Negotiations between the UK and the EU aimed at reaching a solution to the other dispute over the Brexit arrangements are entering their third week, with the UK’s Brexit negotiator, Lord Frost, still threatening to trigger article 16 if the substantial gap in positions is not bridged.
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Fishing row rumbles on
The foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has criticised the French, accusing Paris of making unreasonable and unwarranted threats and again hinting that the president, Emmanuel Macron, is playing to the crowd, with the upcoming election in mind.
French officials have warned they will bar UK fishing boats from some ports and tighten customs checks on lorries entering the country unless more licences are granted – starting tomorrow.
Macron said on Sunday that the ball is in the UK’s court. This morning, Truss has told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:
Those threats are completely unwarranted. We allocated the fishing licences completely in line with what is in the trade agreement with the EU and the French need to withdraw those threats.
Otherwise we will use the dispute resolution mechanism in the EU deal to take action.
We are simply not going to roll over in the face of these threats.
The dispute was triggered by decisions made by the authorities in the UK and Jersey over licences for small French boats to operate in British waters, with officials arguing permission can be given only to vessels which can demonstrate a history of fishing there.
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