We ‘clearly let society down’ and have broken people’s trust in technology, Fujitsu boss tells Horizon Post Office inquiry – live | Politics

Rowena Mason is the Guardian’s Whitehall editor

Churn in the UK’s civil service is at its highest level since 2010 aside from its post-pandemic peak, with almost 12% of Whitehall staff changing department or leaving the government workforce in the year to the end of March, according to an analysis.

The Institute for Government’s annual Whitehall monitor found there had been a drop since 2022 when, after the worst of the Covid crisis, 13.6% of civil servants left their jobs – but it remained higher than at any point since the Conservatives took power 14 years ago.

In the introduction to the report, Dr Hannah White, the director of the IFG, said: “Staff turnover fell from its immediate post-pandemic peak but remains too high and continues to harm institutional memory. Further real-terms pay cuts continue to hinder the civil service’s ability to attract and retain top talent, as do slow and onerous processes for recruiting from outside government. A worrying fall in staff morale has raised questions about how the institution is led.”

Rhys Clyne, one of the report’s authors, said churn was a serious and longstanding problem in the civil service, and its high level may be related partly to dissatisfaction with pay and levels of morale.

Read more of Rowena Mason’s report here: Staff turnover in UK civil service ‘at highest level since 2010’

Graeme Wearden

Labour leader Keir Starmer is urging the government to take another look at the plan proposed by steel unions that would have saved thousands of jobs at the Tata Steel plant.

Starmer said he was “very concerned” after Tata Steel confirmed plans to close blast furnaces at its plant in Port Talbot, South Wales.

He told broadcasters:

I was there just in October so I know how this is going to impact on the workforce. The Government said it had a plan for steel. It transpires the plan involves thousands of redundancies. There’s a better plan, a multi-union plan, that the government needs to look at again.

That’s a viable way forward. It’s vital we have a viable steel industry in the UK. Labour has got a plan for that viable future, not just for the next year or two but for decades to come.

Nils Pratley

One of the main threads today has been the announcement that the Tata Steel blast furnaces at Port Talbot are to close, costing up to 2,800 jobs. Nils Pratley has this analysis of the alternative plan being suggested by unions:

The plan from the Community and GMB unions – rejected as unaffordable by Tata – was not an other-worldly proposal that imagined Port Talbot’s blast furnaces could keep polluting for ever, or that every last job could be preserved (just that compulsory redundancies could be avoided). It made the reasonable-sounding point that an electric arc furnace (EAF) only approach carries industrial risks and has uncertain benefits for global emissions reductions. For purer specialist grades, UK manufacturers may end up importing those volumes from blast furnaces elsewhere.

The unions’ proposal called for a two-stage decade-long transition to green steel. In stage one, only one of the blast furnaces – one that is near the end of its life anyway – would be closed and the other would keep producing until 2032. The output would be replaced by an EAF half the size of the model proposed by Tata. In the second stage, the other blast furnace would close but the choice of replacement technology would be kept under review. It could be direct reduced iron and hydrogen, the green steel technology that uses raw materials and is being widely adopted in Germany and Scandinavia.

“It is an industrial choice we are making as a country to get rid of blast furnaces,” says Jess Ralston of the independent analysts Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. “The government keeps talking about energy security, but this move is not going to do anything for energy security. It is going to make it worse.”

Read more of Nils Pratley’s analysis here: Tata’s Port Talbot decision goes beyond Wales and even steel

The head of Fujitsu Europe, Paul Patterson, has said trust in technology “has been broken” as a result of the Horizon scandal, and offered to meet post office operators who had been affected. He said the company had “clearly let society down”.

At the afternoon session, Patterson was being questioned by Sam Stein KC, a lawyer acting on behalf of post office operators.

Referring to Fujitsu’s online mission statement “to build trust in society through innovation”, Stein asked: “Do you agree, instead, that the combination of Fujitsu and the Post Office’s creation of this scandal has damaged trust in innovation within society?”

Patterson replied: “I think the history of this appalling miscarriage, Mr Stein, would tend to point that yes, trust has been broken and trust in technology and how technology is used and not used.”

Stein later asked: “Will you commit today to meeting with subpostmasters, their legal representatives … and discussing with them the way forward that can assist in seeking to show that Fujitsu means what it says by its apology and by its commitment to provide financial redress?”

Patterson said “I have not met any subpostmasters in the past because I didn’t feel it was appropriate for me to do that. If that is a request from the subpostmasters and their representation, I will absolutely do that.”

During the course of the afternoon session, he said:

This is a decades-old miscarriage which started a long, long time ago and involves many, many people in organisations, in that I think Fujitsu more recently, as we’ve understood more, we have clearly let society down and the subpostmasters down.

I think we had our obligations to the Post Office to be at the front of everything we were doing and that was wrong.

I think subsequently we’ve now seen where the evidence is taking us and the investigation is taking us and that’s why you’ve had the statements from Fujitsu more recently.

I can’t comment on the past, I don’t know why things weren’t done in 1999 or 2005 – I don’t know. But what I can say is that as long as I’m here and doing what I’m doing, I’m going to do everything to make sure that we get to the truth.

Rowena Mason

Rowena Mason is the Guardian’s Whitehall editor

Sky have issued a slightly longer version of Rishi Sunak’s awkward encounter with a former health worker challenging him about the struggling state of the NHS, which shows the encounter want on longer than first shown.

In the initially released clip, Sunak was seen being hustled away by aides as the woman said to him “If you had a problem, you could go to the hospital. My daughter spent seven hours waiting ….”

The longer version shows that the prime minister continued talking to her as she carried on walking with him, saying: “I’m sorry to hear that. The key thing is we have resolved all the industrial action apart from the junior doctors who have still not settled yet.”

At the end of the encounter, the woman thanked him and shook his hand.

Sunak had been explaining to the woman that there was progress in reducing the waiting lists before strikes hampered the government’s efforts to bring them down last year.

A No 10 source said the interaction had ended cordially and pointed out that they had carried on walking and talking together.

The footage had been captured by an off-duty Sky News camera operator.

Asked about the incident, the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, told broadcasters: “It further reinforces, I think, what many people across the country think: that this prime minister doesn’t talk to people, doesn’t engage, doesn’t understand what so many people are going through.

“We have a terrible problem with our waiting lists and that is why we have been really clear that we would get rid of the non-dom tax status where the super-rich don’t pay their tax in this country, and use that to bring down those waiting lists … We have got a plan, we engage with people over our plan, we don’t laugh and walk away.”

Labour: Sturgeon’s deleted Covid WhatsApp messages are ‘shocking betrayal of people of Scotland’

Libby Brooks

Libby Brooks is Scotland correspondent

There has been a furious response across the political spectrum to the official confirmation that the former first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon and her deputy John Swinney deleted their Covid messages – and that the national clinical director, Jason Leitch, joked in a group chat about his “pre-bed ritual” of deletion. (See 14.24 GMT)

The Scottish Labour deputy Jackie Baillie described the news as “a shocking betrayal of the people of Scotland”, and said it “shows the lengths that Nicola Sturgeon is prepared to go to in order to prevent justice for Covid-bereaved families”.

The Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, said both Sturgeon and Swinney “have huge questions to answer over their conduct in the wake of this devastating revelation”, adding that their actions “beg a very simple question: what were they trying to hide? Shamefully and outrageously for families of those who died during the pandemic, we may never know.”

In December, the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, told the Covid inquiry he was not advised that he should save WhatsApp messages from his phone, even after it was set up, and claimed he had no messages remaining from the pandemic period.

Sturgeon herself has previously responded through a spokesperson: “Any messages she had she handled and dealt with in line with the Scottish government policies. Nicola has provided a number of written statements to the UK inquiry – totally hundreds of pages – and welcomes the opportunity to give oral evidence to the inquiry again next month when she will answer all questions put to her.”

Nicola Sturgeon deleted all her Covid WhatsApp messages, inquiry told

Libby Brooks

Libby Brooks is Scotland correspondent

With the UK Covid inquiry still taking evidence in Scotland, today’s hearing in Edinburgh has been told that the former first minister Nicola Sturgeon did not keep any of her Covid WhatsApp messages.

The startling revelation came from Lesley Fraser, the director general corporate of the Scottish government, who said messages were deleted “in routine tidying up of inboxes or changes of phones” but that Sturgeon would have worked with her private office and those instructions would be retained.

This is the first official confirmation that Sturgeon did not keep any of her pandemic messages – she previously refused to clarify to journalists whether she had deleted messages, while insisting she had “nothing to hide”, and it also contradicts the commitment she made in August 2021 when she announced there would be a Scottish Covid inquiry and pledged to disclose her private messages.

The inquiry was also told that the former deputy first minister John Swinney had set up an auto-delete function whilst the national clinical director Jason Leitch had sent a message to a colleague stating that “WhatsApp deletion is a pre-bed ritual”.

Asked by Jamie Dawson KC for the inquiry if the Scottish government’s record retention policies “were simply not fit for purpose” during the pandemic, Fraser said she did not accept this but understood “hurt and frustration” about not being able to access WhatsApp messages and the policies should be reviewed.

Also giving evidence, Ken Thomson, the former manager of the Covid Coordination Directorate of the Scottish government, said that Sturgeon “did not take a decision in informal messaging”. He told the inquiry: “It would be very rare that she would message me at all, never mind to make a decision.”

Here is a clip you might see a few times between now and the election. Rishi Sunak was speaking to a woman about the NHS earlier today, arguing that when there weren’t strikes the backlog was going down. She said to him that he could put things back to how they used to be, to which he laughed, and then as she began to explain about an NHS experience her daughter had, Sunak was hustled away by his team.

Daniel Boffey

Daniel Boffey, our chief reporter, has also been watching the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry this morning, and here is an excerpt from his report:

The public inquiry, led by the retired high court judge Sir Wyn Williams, heard that 29 bugs and defects in the system were identified from as early as November 1999 and they led to false records being posted.

The Fujitsu Europe chief executive, Paul Patterson, said there was evidence that Fujitsu employees had a “don’t share with the Post Office” approach to a document chronicling the known errors in the system.

“In your reading of the materials in your investigation of the issues … did you notice any reluctance on the part of Fujitsu in the past to reveal the existence of a thing called the known error log?” the counsel to the inquiry, Jason Beer, asked.

Patterson responded: “There is, in the submission to the inquiry today … there is evidence of that ‘don’t share with the Post Office yet’ – I don’t know the individual situation where it was subsequently shared with the PO but there was certainly those.”

Read more of Daniel Boffey’s report here: Post Office IT scandal – Fujitsu boss condemns ‘shameful’ editing of witness statements

Graeme Wearden

The Wales Green Party leader, Anthony Slaughter has said it is “unacceptable” that the government is allowing Tata to cut so many jobs in Port Talbot, by not following the alternatives proposed by the GMB and Community unions.

Slaughter says:

This is devastating news for the local community and beyond. Wales knows only too well what happens when communities are abandoned by government and industries. We saw it with the coal industry and now it is happening again with the steel industry. Decarbonisation of industry is vital, but communities and people’s jobs must be protected.

The GMB and Community unions say it is “extremely disappointing” that Tata rejected its proposal to keep blast furnaces running.

In a joint statement, describing the decision as “an absolute disgrace”, the unions say:

It’s unbelievable any government would give a company £500m to throw 3,000 workers on the scrapheap, and our government must re-evaluate its miserly offer to support investment at Tata Steel. The German, French and Spanish governments are all committing billions to secure the future of their strategically important steel industries, and our government must show similar ambition.

A UK government spokesperson has said there is help available for those losing their jobs in Port Talbot.

Follow the latest developments with the Tata Steel plant with Graeme Wearden: Tata Steel accused of ‘industrial vandalism’ over plan to cut up to 2,800 UK jobs – business live