Summary
Here’s a roundup of the key developments from the day:
- Labour plans to slash affordable rents and give first-time buyers exclusive rights to purchase new-build homes for six months, it will announce this weekend, as it bids to steal the Conservatives’ claim to be “the party of home ownership”.
- Grant Shapps said he would “move heaven and earth” to solve the nationwide shortage of truck drivers that threatens fuel supplies at some petrol stations, adding that motorists should not panic as the problem would be “smoothed out relatively quickly”.
- The transport secretary also denied that Brexit was part of the problem for recruiting HGV drivers in the UK, instead arguing that being divorced from the European Union had helped enable some of the solutions. Labour have disputed this.
- A cabinet split is hampering the government’s efforts to deal with the nationwide shortage of lorry drivers that threatens fuel supplies at some petrol stations and caused some panic-buying of fuel on Friday, the Guardian has learned.
- The chair of a group of MPs has accused the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, of treating her second role as minister of women and equalities as a “side hustle”. A damning report from the women and equalities committee accused the government of sidelining the push for equality.
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The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has claimed Boris Johnson asked him for an “emergency” deal to ease shortages of an unspecified food product, amid concerns about further disruption to supermarket supplies. It is understood the UK government regards the claim as untrue.
- Boris Johnson discussed the importance of the UK-France relationship with Emmanuel Macron, as well as small boat crossings of the Channel, during a call on Monday. The two accounts of Johnson and Macron’s conversation were starkly different in their tone.
- Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, has privately expressed her objections to Keir Starmer’s last-minute bid to push through changes to the party’s leadership election rules, the Guardian understands.
That’s all from me today. Thanks so much for joining me. We are closing this liveblog now but our global coronavirus liveblog will continue:
Updated
A recent report by the accountancy firm Grant Thornton concluded there were almost 1m vacancies in the UK. Half of them were in the food and drink sectors, industries that have for the past 20-30 years relied heavily on an EU workforce.
The chronic labour shortage has led to a crisis in supply chains, affecting a lengthening list of products. So what is the root cause of the problem?
The government argues it is the lingering impact of the pandemic. But industry bosses say it is the cliff-edge cause by Brexit with a lack of British workers filling the gaps left in the haulage industry, warehousing, hospitality and the meat production sectors.
Grant Thornton’s research showed that since the start of the pandemic, 1.3 million foreign-born workers had left the UK and were yet to return.
“These shortages are placing huge pressure on the sector and there is a very real chance that they could quickly reach breaking point,” Grant Thorton said in its report, Establishing the labour availability issues of the UK food and drink sector.
“They are shortages that cover the full breadth of the supply chain from the initial inputs into farming all the way through to those that serve food and drink ‘at the table’.”
As the crisis spread to petrol supplies on Friday, the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, dismissed claims that Brexit had caused the problem, insisting that Covid was the “main reason”.
The supply of lorry drivers was down to the fact 40,000 tests could not take place during the pandemic, he said.
“The pandemic is the cause, but Brexit is limiting our options for solutions,” said Shane Brennan, the chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, which represents chilled and ambient food warehousing owners.
Or put another way, Priti Patel’s decision, supported by many Brexit supporters, to shut the door to low-skilled workers in new immigration laws seems to be exacerbating the problem.
Read the full story here:
The government said a further 180 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Friday, bringing the UK total to 135,983.
Separate figures published by the Office for National Statistics show there have now been 160,000 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.
As of 9am on Friday, there had been a further 35,623 lab-confirmed Covid-19 cases in the UK, the government said.
Data up to 23 September shows that of the 93,350,658 coronavirus jabs given in the UK, 48,705,771 were first doses, a rise of 31,617 on the previous day.
Some 44,644,887 were second doses, an increase of 44,817.
A cabinet split is hampering the government’s efforts to deal with the nationwide shortage of lorry drivers that threatens fuel supplies at some petrol stations and caused some panic-buying of fuel on Friday, the Guardian has learned.
Ministers are divided about the best way to solve the shortage of lorry drivers, with a meeting on Friday afternoon expected to seek a compromise over whether to recruit more drivers from abroad.
On Friday, Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said he would move “heaven and earth” to solve the problem, and kept on the table the idea of adding truck drivers to the “shortage occupation list”, which would let foreign drivers enter the country more easily.
But multiple sources said Shapps and Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, were sceptical about the idea and another source said the Home Office, led by Priti Patel, was also unconvinced.
The idea is being pushed by the environment secretary, George Eustice, and by the Cabinet Office, led by Steve Barclay, as a way to boost the availability of drivers to deliver petrol to forecourts.
One potential compromise due to be discussed on Friday is a special short-term visa scheme for lorry drivers that could tackle the immediate crisis.
The Home Office will ultimately make the decision over whether to relax restrictions for drivers, with the government recognising that something has to be done about the shortage to avoid scenes of chaos at petrol stations.
Read more from my colleagues Rowena Mason and Mark Sweney here:
It was at the Devon seaside that Keir Starmer finished his first draft of the speech that is set to be the most important moment of his political career to date. The Labour leader was ostensibly on holiday when he first rang aides to talk through his big pitch, his family yelling at him in the background, telling him to hurry up for their day out.
It is unsurprising that the Labour leader feels so much is at stake as he returns to the coast, this time in Brighton, for his first in-person Labour conference as leader.
In the Guardian’s conversations with five shadow cabinet ministers, plus senior aides, party staff, MPs and trade unionists, they reveal how much they feel is riding on this moment – and the battle in shadow cabinet over whether to go “Biden big” (the US president unveiled a multitrillion-dollar recovery plan this year) or preach fiscal responsibility at a moment of economic turmoil.
Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner has privately expressed her objections to Keir Starmer’s last-minute bid to push through changes to the party’s leadership election rules, the Guardian understands.
Rayner, the shadow secretary of state for the future of work as well as Starmer’s number two, has made clear she would like the party’s Brighton conference to focus on attacking the government and setting out Labour’s offer to the country, rather than wrangling over internal rule changes.
She is understood to be concerned by the timing of the changes and the principle of ditching one-member-one-vote.
Rayner is the latest senior party figure to question Starmer’s tactics, with the battle over the proposals raging just as he prepares to set out what Labour stands for in a keenly awaited party conference speech next Wednesday.
Relations between Johnson and Macron deteriorated significantly when Paris let rip fury at the tearing up of a contract it had signed with Australia to build 12 new submarines. Instead, Australia joined together with the US and UK to announce the formation of a new “Aukus” alliance to acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
The two accounts of Johnson and Macron’s conversation were starkly different in their tone.
The Élysée said the call was at Johnson’s request – and that the UK prime minister told him he wanted to “reestablish cooperation … in line with our values and our common interests”. And, in a diplomatic sting, the French readout said Macron told Johnson “he would wait for his proposals”.
Boris Johnson discussed the importance of the UK-France relationship with Emmanuel Macron, as well as small boat crossings of the Channel, during a call on Monday, a Downing Street spokesman has said.
The prime minister spoke to French president Emmanuel Macron this morning to discuss a range of issues of mutual interest.
They reaffirmed the importance of the UK-France relationship and agreed to continue working closely together around the world on our shared agenda, through Nato and bilaterally.
The leaders noted in particular the strategic significance of our long-standing cooperation in the Indo-Pacific and in Africa, including through the joint mission in Mali.
On the subject of small boat crossings in the Channel, the prime minister reiterated the UK’s position that we need to break the business model of people-smugglers who put lives at risk. They agreed to intensify cooperation on this matter and agreed to keep talking on other issues, such as fisheries licences and the Northern Ireland protocol.
Updated
Labour needs to pay “as much attention” to winning back seats in Scotland as it does to those in the north of England if the party wants to win a UK general election, leaders have been told.
The Scottish Fabians insisted that it was “impossible” for Labour to return to power at Westminster without a major effort north of the border, PA news reports.
Meanwhile, any suggestion that the party could form a power-sharing alliance with the SNP in a bid to oust the Tories from government was dismissed as a “political dead end”.
A new paper by the Scottish Fabians warned that talk of such a “progressive alliance” harmed Labour’s prospects in Scotland and England.
It said:
The Labour party must be ambitious and aspire to win seats across the length and breadth of Britain.
In successive elections, suggestions of a deal with the SNP harmed Labour not just in Scotland but also in English marginals, where voters rejected the idea of the SNP holding the balance of power.
A progressive alliance under the existing first-past-the-post system is a political dead end.
Of the 150 seats it believes Labour needs to win back to gain a “stable majority” in the House of Commons, 25 are in Scotland. With 11 of these constituencies having backed independence in the 2014 referendum, Scottish Fabians said Labour needed to win over voters from Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP.
The briefing paper, published ahead of the Labour party conference in Brighton on Saturday, warned leaders not to focus all their efforts on winning back seats in the north of England that the Tories captured in 2019.
With Labour currently only having one Scottish MP, the Scottish Fabians said:
An overemphasis on the ‘red wall’ seats in the north of England risks Labour losing sight of seats it needs to gain elsewhere.
The Scottish Fabians’ chair, Martin McCluskey – one of the authors of the paper – said:
Labour has a mountain to climb to win the next UK general election, but with voters swinging between parties more than ever before they have a historic opportunity.
However, a majority is impossible to win unless Labour wins seats in Scotland.
Almost one in five of the seats Labour needs for a stable majority are in Scotland. The UK Labour party cannot afford to put Scotland in the ‘too difficult’ pile.
We need to hear as much from Keir Starmer and the shadow cabinet about winning back Scotland as we do about winning back seats in the north of England.
Labour’s Scottish seats were the first red wall to fall, and they need just as much attention.
Updated
Patrick English, a research manager at YouGov, has been looking into what’s going on with the “red wall” – the northern heartlands that have traditionally voted Labour, some of which swung to the Tories in 2019 – ahead of the Labour party conference in Brighton.
He says:
Labour are in a much better place electorally now than they have been for much of the year. The latest YouGov vote intention polling for the Times found Labour on 35%, four points behind the Conservatives on 39%. Last week, we found a two-point Labour lead.
In his blog, he explores what progress Labour has really made with voters since 2019, and to what extent the party is advancing now in key political battleground areas up and down the country.
You can read his thoughts here.
What’s been happening in the Red Wall?
— Patrick English (@PME_Politics) September 24, 2021
According to our latest data, while Labour have not gone anywhere since 2019, the Conservatives are down 4 points.
Con 44% (-4 on GE2019)
Lab 38% (=)
That small swing is enough to flip 17 seats back to Labour.https://t.co/gBCxIwLDns
Updated
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has claimed Boris Johnson asked him for an “emergency” deal to ease shortages of an unspecified food product, amid concerns about further disruption to supermarket supplies.
A lack of drivers and food pickers, as well as carbon dioxide used to stun animals for slaughter and create dry ice to keep food fresh, has led to fears that some goods will be missing from shelves in the run-up to Christmas.
Downing Street has urged people not to panic-buy, after the announcement by BP that there may be a lack of fuel at some petrol stations and the managing director of Iceland supermarket warned food supplies could come under threat within days, not weeks.
Government insiders worry about a return to the days leading up to the first coronavirus lockdown, where shelves were left bare as people stockpiled items such as toilet roll.
Bolsonaro made the claim about Johnson’s request after a meeting between them in New York earlier this week at the UN general assembly. The prime minister had stressed the benefits of the Covid-19 vaccine to his Brazilian counterpart.
However, speaking in his weekly webcast to supporters, Bolsonaro recalled that Johnson “wants an emergency agreement with us to import some kind of food that is lacking in England”, according to Reuters, though he did not specify what the product was.
It is understood the UK government regards the claim as untrue.
Read more here:
Full story: Grant Shapps will do ‘whatever it takes’ to fix lorry driver shortage
The UK transport secretary, Grant Shapps, said he would “move heaven and earth” to solve the nationwide shortage of truck drivers that threatens fuel supplies at some petrol stations, adding that motorists should not panic as the problem would be “smoothed out relatively quickly”.
Shapps said he would consider all options, including the possibility of issuing short-term skilled worker visas to tap mainland Europe’s pool of potential HGV drivers.
“I’ll look at everything,” he told Sky News.
I wouldn’t rule anything out. We will move heaven and earth to do whatever it takes to make sure shortages are alleviated with HGV drivers.
Updated
The chair of a group of MPs has accused the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, of treating her second role as minister of women and equalities as a “side hustle”.
A damning report from the women and equalities committee accused the government of sidelining the push for equality, and said it risked “regression on equal rights after decades of progress”.
The report calls for the creation of a cabinet-level minister to reduce inequality, and said hard-won progress was at risk if the role of women and equalities minister was given to “secretaries of state with all-encompassing, non-complementary ‘day jobs’”.
Caroline Nokes, chair of the women and equalities committee, said that in Truss’s first full week as foreign secretary, the minister had said she was unable to attend the committee’s questions because of conflicting commitments.
Nokes said:
It is obvious that the current setup of Cabinet leaves no space or time to really address inequality in the UK.
By effectively treating the role of women and equalities minister as a side hustle, the government is demonstrating its lack of willingness to invest energy in creating change.
Read the full story here:
A minister has denied that Brexit was part of the problem for recruiting HGV drivers in the UK, instead arguing that being divorced from the European Union had helped enable some of the solutions.
Transport secretary Grant Shapps told Sky News:
I’ve seen people point to Brexit as if it is the culprit here. In fact, they are wrong.
Not only are there very large and even larger shortages in other EU countries like Poland and Germany, which clearly can’t be to do with Brexit, but actually because of Brexit I’ve been able to change the law and alter the way our driving tests operate in a way I could not have done if we were still part of the EU.
Shapps said the coronavirus pandemic was actually the “principal cause” of the driver shortage as he stressed it was a “global” problem.
Put to him on Sky News that it was “disingenuous” to suggest Covid-19 was the only reason for the lack of HGV drivers, the Transport Secretary said:
Covid is the main reason. It is a global problem and Europe is hit particularly bad.
We’ve got, for example, in Germany a 60,000 shortage and Poland a 123,000 shortage of lorry drivers, so as I say it is the principal cause of the problem and we are working very hard to change it, including changing the law in order to provide more tests for HGV drivers and encouraging people back into the market.
But you are right, there are longer-term problems, which is that it is difficult – it is a long day’s work, it is hard work, it is a skilled job and, actually, it has been underpaid up until now, so we very much welcome the salary going up, the wages going up, and that’s attracting more people back to the sector.
Meanwhile, Labour party chair Anneliese Dodds said the government’s handling of Brexit was partly to blame for adding extra pressure on the HGV sector.
Speaking to Sky News, Dodds said:
There have been big failures in planning for this situation and the additional red tape that has been created, which was not inevitable, it was not an inevitable result of Brexit in many cases, but that hasn’t been tackled by government.
I talk to advanced manufacturers in my patch for example, and they tell me that now they have got to fill in dozens of pages of paperwork and that is quite a tall order for a HGV driver if they have got to be dealing with all of that, as well as getting goods from one place to another.
So undoubtedly the government’s method of implementing Brexit has had an impact overall on the system, but there are other factors that are in play here.
And I think their failure to consider whether they need to ask that Migration Advisory Committee about a different approach to shortage occupations - I really do think they should be engaging with business on this and listening to them.
Grant Shapps has said he will move “heaven and Earth” so that petrol and other goods can continue moving around the country easily.
The transport secretary told the BBC’s Today programme:
Well, look, I’ll move heaven and Earth to do anything that’s required to make sure that lorries carry on moving our goods and services and petrol around the country.
I’ll do anything which actually helps. The big query actually is where is the blockage? What we do know is that there are a lot of people who have their HGV licences but many of which will have lapsed to come out of the market, often because there has been cheaper European labour.
We want to get those people back in.
Shapps said a lot of European lorry drivers, who have settled and and pre-settled status, are overseas and the Government was trying to “entice” them back to the UK, PA news reports.
He told the Today programme:
Critically, they’ve already got the rights to come here and do it. Ironically, of course, every time you say, ‘let’s open it up to Europeans, eastern Europeans’ and you undercut the marketplace, this is how we’ve ended up with this systemic long-term problem, because salaries have been reduced to a point where people are saying ‘Well, that job’s not for me’. Part of it is this conditions.
Questioned if he would have a standby plan to deploy army drivers to deliver fuel, he responded:
Anything that’s reasonable, and probably that’s not the solution in terms of sheer numbers. We’re not in a position where, previously, drivers have just stopped driving. We will always look at all the different things which are required.
Labour announces housing policy plan ahead of conference
Labour plans to slash affordable rents and give first-time buyers exclusive rights to purchase new-build homes for six months, it will announce this weekend, as it bids to steal the Conservatives’ claim to be “the party of homeownership”.
Lucy Powell, shadow housing secretary, will say a government led by Keir Starmer will restrict to 50% the number of properties in a development that can be sold to overseas buyers, which in some city locations has created “ghost towers” as investors leave homes empty. Labour also wants to give councils powers to force landowners to sell vacant sites to build new housing at lower prices than the compulsory purchase system currently allows.
The policy package will be announced at Labour’s conference in Brighton and amounts to a direct challenge to Michael Gove – the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities. Labour claims his decision to pause unpopular planning reforms has left the government without a strategy for meeting its housebuilding targets.
Labour is also keen to capitalise on what it perceives to be government weakness over its handling of the building safety crisis with hundreds of thousands of leaseholders, including people in shared ownership affordable housing schemes, facing bills in the tens of thousands of pounds.
“Labour is the party of homeownership, the Tories are the party of speculators and developers,” Powell said. “They treat housing as a commodity, not the bedrock of stable lives and life chances.”
But the Conservatives are also poised to make changes to housing policy, starting with reissued planning reforms. Putting Gove in charge of levelling up and housing policy has been widely viewed as Boris Johnson giving one of his most trusted ministers the remit for issues seen as crucial to the next election.
A lack of access to affordable housing is viewed as a key driver of inequality, both between regions and across generations. One of Gove’s new junior ministers is Neil O’Brien, the Tory MP who previously acted as Johnson’s official adviser on levelling up. He proposed reforming compulsory purchase powers for councils in a 2018 paper on solving the housing crisis titled “Green, pleasant and affordable”.
Read more from my colleagues Robert Booth and Peter Walker here:
Welcome to today’s liveblog. I’m Nicola Slawson and I’ll be taking you through today’s politics news. If you want to contact me, you can email me on nicola.slawson@theguardian.com or find me on Twitter @Nicola_Slawson.
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