Ed Balls says Starmer should perform ‘big U-turn’ and drop £28bn as size of green jobs plan – UK politics live | Politics

• Ed Balls, a former shadow chancellor, has said that Keir Starmer should perform a “big U-turn” over the commitment to spend £28bn a year on green investment. (See 4.20pm.)

• Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, has apologised “unreservedly” to the Covid inquiry, and to people who were bereaved during the pandemic, for the government’s “poor handling” of requests for messages. (See 2.15pm.)

• Chris Philp, the policing minister, has admitted that a previous government crackdown on zombie knives contained an obvious loophole. (See 9.24am.)

Rishi Sunak has restated his willingness to defy the European court of human rights if it imposes an injunction to stop a deportation flight taking off to Rwanda.

Speaking to broadcasters after the president of the European court of human rights, Síofra O’Leary, said that defying such an injunction would break international law, Sunak repeated a line he has used repeatedly in recent weeks. He said:

I’ve been very clear, I won’t let a foreign court stop us from getting flights up and running and establishing that deterrent.

The bill that we’ve just passed through the House of Commons has a specific power in it that says ministers will get to make those decisions, I would not have put that power in there if I wasn’t prepared to use it.

Sunak’s comments have been welcomed by Conservative MPs, although hardliners want him to go further and to commit to definitely defying ECHR injunctions. They tried to insert a clause to this effect in the Rwanda bill, but the government did not accept it.

Earlier No 10 argued that, given the changes made to the policy, the ECHR would not need to issue an injunction in the way it did in 2022. (See 12.48pm.)

Keir Starmer should perform a “big U-turn” over the commitment to spend £28bn a year on green investment, Ed Balls has said.

Balls, a former shadow chancellor who is married to Yvette Cooper, the current shadow home secretary, said that having that number attached to the green investment plan was a problem for Labour and that a U-turn had to be big enough to get noticed.

He made the comment in the latest episiode of his Political Currency podcast, which he hosts with George Osborne, the Tory former chancellor.

Balls, who is now a presenter on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, said that Labour has already tried “partial U-turns” on the £28bn-a-year green investment pledge. Labour has said that it would not get spending up to that level until the second half of a parliament, that some of the money will come from investment already committed by the government, and that if borrowing to fund the investment would break the fiscal rules, it would not happen.

But this has not stopped the Conservatives repeatedly claiming that Keir Starmer will have to put up taxes to fund the pledge – even though Starmer has explictly said he will not do that.

Balls said Labour now needed “a big U-turn” because the partial ones had not worked. He explained:

If you’re going to do a U-turn, you’ve got to notice it, you’ve got to see it happen. People need to hear Labour say that their commitment to sound public finances and the fiscal rules comes before spending more money on this agenda. Or they’re going to be open to this attack.

If they don’t say something now, they’re going to be asked about this in every interview. So I would say there is going to be a U-turn and that they won’t resile from a green plan, they won’t resile from the idea that that’s a way to grow some jobs, they won’t resile from the idea that you can spend now to strengthen the economy in the long term. But I think they’ll have to come off this £28bn number.

They’ll have to say the £28bn number is gone, that it’s ditched or else they can be open to this attack …

You need something which looks like a U-turn … They’ve tried partial U-turns. It hasn’t worked. They need a big U-turn.

In the same episode Osborne said Rishi Sunak would only make his leadership secure by getting a lead in the opinion polls. He said:

The only leadership strategy that works in the Tory party is having a poll lead. The only thing that works as a unifying strategy is the promise that you might win the election. And you can announce any amount of policy, you can make any amount of promises to the Conservative party. If you don’t look like you’re going to win, you’re going to have huge leadership problems.

At the Covid inquiry Humza Yousaf was asked about the revelation that he sought guidance from Jason Leitch, Scotland’s national clinical director, about what the rules said about wearing a mask at an official function. Leitch told him that, as long as he was holding a drink, he did not need a mask.

Jamie Dawson KC, counsel for the inquiry, put it to him that if he needed guidance on this, as health secretary, then the rules were too complicated for everyone else.

If the cabinet secretary for health and social care felt the need to clarify the rules, what chance do others have in understanding the rules?

Yousaf said that it was because of his job that he felt the need to, not just double check or triple check, but quadruple check what the rules were. He had to get them right, he said.

As the cabinet secretary for health and social care I didn’t want to just double-check the rules, triple check them, I would quadruple check them if I had to, because the intensity of the public scrutiny that we were under.

Dawson asked if he was concerned when Leitch told him that “literally no one” wore a mask when they were standing up and talking at a dinner, even though they should be doing that.

Yousaf said that Leitch, by his own admission, had a “casual way of speaking”. He had a tendency to “over-speak”, he said.

Q: Leitch was giving you a loophole, wasn’t he?

Yousaf did not accept that. He said he was just seeking clarification on how to follow the rules.

The British Polling Council (BPC) is looking into controversial YouGov polling used by Conservative plotters to call for Rishi Sunak to be ousted, Eleni Courea reports.

The outgoing Welsh first minister, Mark Drakeford, has hit back at UK Labour, urging his Westminster colleagues to avoid adopting a “King Canute” stance on devolution.

Drakeford said there were some in London who regard devolution as a “zero-sum game, that anything that is devolved elsewhere is a loss to them”.

He was speaking at an event at the Institute for Government, only days after the shadow Welsh secretary, Jo Stevens, rejected the Welsh administrations’s longstanding call for more powers over policing and justice.

Stevens said Labour would be focusing on the “things that matter” at the next election, listing “growing the economy, creating new jobs, getting cheaper bills, building an NHS fit for the future and breaking down barriers for opportunities for children and young people across the country”.

Drakeford said UK Labour had a “responsibility” to show the “journey has begun” on devolution if they won the election this year, and he said he hoped Keir Starmer would make an “early commitment” to adopting Gordon Brown’s report on the UK’s future, which urged a Labour government to “embark upon the devolution of youth justice and the probation service”.

Drakeford went on:

There are some colleagues in London who regard this as a zero-sum game, that anything that is devolved elsewhere is a loss to them.

All four police and crime commissioners in Wales are firmly in favour of the devolution of policing. So again, even people who are close to the operational end of all this share our view.

Drakeford who is due to step down as Welsh Labour leader in March, advised his successor to “be bold” and always “look for those radical changes that are necessary”.

Maintenance loans for students in England to rise by just 2.5% next year

Richard Adams

Next year’s university students in England will be left worse off after the government said it will increase their maintenance loans by just 2.5%, following this year’s rise of 2.8% during a period of high inflation.

The Russell Group of leading research universities said the 2.5% rise means that students will miss out on £2,000 worth of support they would have received if the loans had risen in line with inflation since 2021-22.

Joanna Burton, the Russell Group’s head of policy, said:

Once again, we are disappointed to see that there has been no move to correct the maintenance loan shortfall suffered by students in recent years. Inflation may now be slowing down, but today’s announcement fails to address the deficit that has been created across the last three years.

We know that a quarter of students regularly go without food and other necessities due to financial hardship, and it’s vital they are provided with adequate loan provision so they can afford the essentials and focus on their studies.

Russell Group universities have spent tens of millions from their existing budgets on additional support measures over the past year, but it’s not feasible for universities to plug the gap in maintenance provision on their own. The hardest hit will be the most disadvantaged students, who are most at risk of dropping out due to financial pressures.

Robert Halfon, the minister for skills and higher education, said the 2.5% increase “follows standard procedure to base annual increases in support on forecasted inflation”. Halfon added:

Decisions on student finance have had to be taken to ensure the system remains financially sustainable and the costs of higher education are shared fairly between students and taxpayers, not all of whom have benefited from going to university.