Burnham and Badenoch clash over Jackdaw gasfield and inflation – UK politics live
Total UK government debt hits £3tn for first time while inflation jumps to highest in nearly a year
Burnham faces Badenoch at PMQs
Government to crack down on ‘cosmetic cowboys’
Fahnbulleh declines to back Mahmood's proposal to make some migrant workers wait 15 years for indefinite leave to remain
Climate campaigners condemn ‘maddening’ decision to approve Jackdaw gasfield
Jackdaw development will create 27 new jobs, and safeguard 273 existing ones, government says
Healey announces initial £2bn funding for Energy Wealth Fund, which will allocate some North Sea tax revenue for renewables
Energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh says approving Jackdaw gasfield won't lead to cheaper energy bills
UK inflation rises by more than expected to 3.5% as war drives up fuel prices
Labour accused of ‘climate vandalism’ by Green leader Polanski after Jackdaw gasfield approved
Clive Jones (Lib Dem) says too many people have their cancers missed. He asks Burnham if he will suppport Jones’s private member’s bill on cancer reporting.
Burnham says the government has a national cancer plan that is delivering the improvements Jones is seeking.
Andy Burnham starts by saying he is welcoming the Sultan of Oman today. He also refers to Aberfan, saying he visited the village on Monday and heard how the injustices that community suffered at the hands of the state “still hurt”.
Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, starts by saying it is the 60th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. He says he remembers hearing about this as a child, and he says it was very moving to meet one of the survivors recently.
Most Labour MPs seem to be either supportive of the Jackdaw decision or, if they are opposed to it, willing to keep their views private.
One exception is the leftwing Richard Burgon. In a post on social media, he says:
An absolutely terrible decision on Jackdaw.
It will do nothing to lower people’s energy bills or improve our energy security.
Investing in renewable energy is the way to do that.
But this does not mean that Labour MPs would also approve a decision to greenlight the Rosebank oilfield. That would be much more contentious, because its carbon impact would be far worse.
In the light of her speech yesterday, it would be surprising if Kemi Badenoch does not ask about government spending. As Heather Stewart reports, the Treasury ran a higher than expected budget deficit of £24.5bn last month – and total government debt is estimated to have hit £3tn for the first time.
Julia Kollewe has more on the business live blog.
PMQs is starting soon.
Here is the list of MPs who have a question.
The government has launched a crackdown on “cosmetic cowboys” performing liquid Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs) on the high street in a bid to drive out rogue operators and raise standards across the board, the Press Association reports. PA says:
Ministers said that patients who choose to have cosmetic procedures deserve to know they are in safe hands and not risking their lives.
The government also remains committed to bringing in a licensing scheme to ensure “lower risk” treatments such as Botox and lip fillers remain safe.
Under the new rules, treatments that involve injecting fillers anywhere other than the face, such as BBLs, would be legally defined as cosmetic surgical procedures – meaning they can only be performing by qualified medics.
Other high-risk treatments such as deep chemical peels and vampire facials – which use microneedling to inject platelets drawn from a patient’s own blood back into the face – would be restricted to doctors, dentists, some nurses, midwives and pharmacists.
Those who flout the rules could be hit with unlimited fines or fixed penalties up to £4,000.
Sophy Ridge from Sky News has posted on social media the full transcript from the part of her interview where she tried, and failed, to get Miatta Fahnbulleh to say that she backed the Home Office plan to make some migrants wait 15 years for indefinite leave to remain.
But Sunder Katwala, from British Future, a thinktank focusing on race, identity and migration, says that other ministers are also refusing to defend the original proposals that were published last year.
v useful to see the transcript. But worth noting that neither the Home Secretary nor PM will publicly defend the pre-consultation proposals either now
Home Sec called it “policy to be settled” at select committee. Her conference speech says it will be fair. PM says ‘fresh eyes’
There will be two statements in the Commons after PMQs. First, the energy minister Michael Shanks will deliver one about Jackdaw. And then Lucy Powell, the education secretary, will give one about the review into antisemitism in schools.
Richard Adams has a story about that review here.
This is from Kemi Badenoch on the Jackdaw decision.
Finally. Labour spent 2 years faffing about to make a decision which Conservatives had already approved 2 years ago.
If they’d done this in the summer we’d have had that gas heating British homes this Christmas.
An unnecessary waste of time and money by a party that puts its own interest above the country’s.
(The last government did approve the Jackdaw development. But that decsion was ruled unlawful, which is why Labour chose to do it again.)
Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, has declined to back the home secretary’s plan to make some migrant workers wait up to 15 years before they can apply for permanent residency in the UK (indefinite leave to remain, or ILF).
Earlier this week, it emerged that she published a comment criticising the plan on her constituency website – before she removed it supposedly because it was a poorly-phrased summary of her position drafted by an aide.
In interviews today, asked specifically if she backed migrants having to wait for up to 15 years for ILR, she refused to support this proposal.
Asked about this on Sky News, she said:
We have got to reform our immigration system, and my view is that we need a system that is based on the principle of compassion, contribution.
And so there is a package of reforms. The home secretary [Shabana Mahmood] has been consulting on this. She’s looking at the range of responses, and she will come out with the measures that we take forward.
No-one can look at our immigration system – and I say this as someone that came to this country as a refugee – and not believe that it’s broken and not believe that we need to fundamentally reform it.
But our principles has to be a system where we’ve got control, but ultimately a system that when people do come to this country, they are able to integrate, they are able to contribute, and that we both respect but also value that contribution.
Mahmood is proposing most migrant workers should have to wait 10 years for ILF, not five years as now. But under her plans foreign care workers would have to wait 15 years.
Fahnbulleh came to the UK as a child refugee from Liberia.
In its splash story today, the Times says Mahmood is “fighting a rearguard action to save her migration reforms in the face of mounting public criticism from cabinet colleagues”.
The report says:
Andy Burnham, the prime minister, is considering exempting care workers from plans to extend the qualifying period for claiming indefinite leave to remain (ILR) from five years to 15 years.
However, the Home Office has argued that the move could backfire because it could lead to an exodus of foreign care workers from their jobs once they gained permanent residence and were no longer bound by the terms of their visas.
The Science Media Centre, which publishes comments from scientists on stories in the news, has published reaction this morning to the Jackdaw decision from four academics specialising in climate science. None of them are enthusiastic. Two of them are critical (one extremely critical), while two of them argue the decision has modest benefits.
(They are all fully committed to the transition to renewables.)
The most positive comment is probably this one, from Prof Jon Gluyas, emeritus chair in geoenergy carbon capture and storage at Durham University.
Development of Jackdaw will improve UK energy security and reduce the UK’s emissions because it will displace imported LNG, some of which has emissions as high as burning coal.
And the most negative is probably this one, from Richard Sulley, senior research fellow in sustainability policy at the University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.
Why approve the Jackdaw gas field? It makes no sense economically, it will create only 27 jobs, and some modest tax receipts for the exchequer. Environmentally if it displaces imported LNG it will reduce emissions marginally, but if it displaces Norwegian gas they will be worse. It will do nothing for the cost of living, the volume extracted will be too small to have a material impact on the global markets. There’s no energy security benefit, it in fact keeps UK industries and consumers exposed to the international markets that set prices and the wills of foreign governments who can control the flow of resources.
Fiona Harvey, the Guardian’s environment editor, has more here on climate campaigners condemning the Jackdaw decision.
The government itself has admitted that the Jackdaw development will only create a small number of new jobs. This is from the small print of its news release.
The developer estimates that Jackdaw will create 27 new direct jobs and safeguard 273 existing jobs that would otherwise be lost. The developer also estimates that the project will add around £2.9 billion to the UK economy.
Over its lifetime, Jackdaw is estimated to produce gas with an energy equivalent to around 40 million barrels of oil.
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