Labour has 99% chance of forming next government, says elections expert – UK politics live | Politics

David Neal, who was recently sacked from his post as the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration, has said the Home Office routinely used a factchecking process to try to “cover up” criticisms in his inspection reports. Emily Dugan has the story here.

Michael Gove’s leasehold and freehold reform bill was described as “eviscerated” legislation that will not do what he wanted it to do in the Lords today.

Lady Taylor of Stevenage, a Labour levelling up spokesperson, made the claim as she spoke in the second reading debate on the bill. She said:

This bill is certainly not the leasehold bill that the Labour party would have wanted. Most importantly, it is not the bill that the beleaguered legions of leaseholders would have wanted. And, to be candid, I don’t think it’s even the bill that the secretary of state [Michael Gove] wanted.

Taylor said that, when Gove originally set out his plans for the bill, he described leasehold as an “outdated feudal system that needs to go”. He also said that he wanted to reduce the ground rents that current leaseholders have to pay to “peppercorn” levels, or virtually nothing. She went on:

So the secretary of state clearly wanted to see a scrapping of the feudal leasehold system and a capping of ground rent to peppercorn rents. But, from the original vision for the bill, what we have before us today is a virtually eviscerated shell of a bill with little to give comfort to the people and families who had hoped to realise their dream of home ownership, and have found instead that being a leaseholder simply doesn’t offer the security and control of their lives that their dream promised.

Taylor said that Labour would have to finish the job of leasehold reform after the general election.

Whether this bill receives royal assent or not before this poll is dissolved, a Labour government will have to finish the job of finally bringing the leasehold system to an end and by overhauling it to the lasting benefit of leaseholders and reinvigorating commonhold to such an extent that it will ultimately become the default and render leasehold obsolete.

In her speech opening the debate on behalf of the government Lady Scott of Bybrook, minister for social housing and faith, said the bill would increase the rights of existing leaseholders. She said they would get “the security of an automatic 999-year lease extension, with ground rent reduced to a peppercorn on payment of a premium”.

On existing ground rents, she said the government was still considering the results of a consultation it launched on what to do about them.

The House of Lords briefing paper explains in detail what the bill in its current form will achieve.

Labour says higher death rates for black and Asian women during childbirth is ’emergency’ needing urgent action

Sammy Gecsoyler

Labour’s shadow equalities secretary has called the higher rates of death black and Asian women face during childbirth an “emergency” that is not being urgently addressed after it emerged that the government taskforce responsible for tackling disparities in maternity care only met twice last year.

Speaking at an event on Tuesday night organised by the Labour African Network, Anneliese Dodds outlined some of the steps the party plans to take to address the maternal mortality gap between black and Asian women and their white peers if they enter government.

A report published by the House of Lords in December showed that black women were 3.7 times more likely to die during or in the first year after pregnancy than white women. Another report released in January found that Asian women were twice as likely to die during or in the first year after pregnancy than white women.

The Maternity Disparities taskforce, which is responsible for tackling disparities in maternity care, met twice in 2023, despite initial plans to meet every two months.

Dodds said:

I view this situation as an emergency, it is incredibly urgent. When something is urgent, you would expect to see urgent action from government … but we are not seeing that urgent action in practice at all.

Last month, the Guardian revealed that, under a draft race equality act that is being drawn up by Labour, the party would bring in a new target to close maternal health gaps experienced by black and Asian women and update clinical training to better serve the diverse patient population.

Dodds said:

We need to be reviewing and updating cross cultural content and clinical training. That includes courses resources, presentation of physical symptoms, and the different expression of pain.

Dodds added that Labour would reinstate a target dropped by NHS England in 2022 that 75% of women from Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities and the most deprived areas would receive continuity of care “as soon as staffing allows”.

Water companies in England have faced a barrage of criticism as data revealed raw sewage was discharged for more than 3.6m hours into rivers and seas last year in a 105% increase on the previous 12 months, Sandra Laville and Helena Horton report.

Some 338 people were detected crossing the English Channel to the UK yesterday, bringing the cumulative number of arrivals so far in 2024 to 4,644: a new record for the first three months of a calendar year, PA Media reports. PA says:

The previous record for arrivals in the three months from January to March was 4,548 in 2022.

There were 3,793 arrivals in the first three months of 2023.

The cumulative number of arrivals so far this year, 4,644, is 23% higher than the total at this point last year, which was 3,770, and 12% higher than the total at this stage in 2022, which was 4,162.

There were 29,437 arrivals across the whole of 2023, down 36% on a record 45,774 arrivals in 2022.

Commenting on the figures, Stephen Kinnock, the shadow immigration minister, said:

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Rishi Sunak keeps on telling the British people that small boat arrivals are coming down and his promise to stop the boats remains on track.

Can he not see what is happening from inside his No 10 bunker, or does he think we can’t see it for ourselves?

Either way, it’s time to get a grip and restore order to the border.

A lot of political commentary in the media is framed by the notion that there is still some doubt about the outcome of the next general election. In part that is just sensible caution, because nothing in life is certain, and unexpected things happen; in part that is because parts of the print media are very rightwing, and find it hard to conceive that Labour can or should form a government; and in part that is because journalism is about narrative, and it spoils the story if you reveal the ending in advance.

But it is probably time to give up pretending that the Conservatives might win. There are few people in the world of political commentary more cautious than Prof Sir John Curtice, the psephologist and lead election analyst for the BBC, and even he has decided it’s all over for the Tories.

Curtice told Sam Blewett from Politico that there is now a “99% chance of Labour forming the next administration”. He said the chances of a Tory revival were small and that, even in the event of a hung parliament, Keir Starmer was better placed to become PM than Rishi Sunak. “The Labour party will be in a much stronger position to negotiate a minority government than the Conservatives because, apart from possibly the DUP, the Conservatives have no friends in the House of Commons,” Curtice said.

A minister has claimed that “credulous clerics and lefty lawyers” are helping people abuse the asylum system.

Andrew Griffith, the science minister, made the comment this morning in the light of revelations about how Abdul Ezedi, the man accused of being responsible for the Clapham chemical attack, came to be granted asylum.

As Matthew Weaver reports, Ezedi was granted asylum by a judge who accepted he was a Christian convert despite concerns about his honesty, court documents have revealed.

Griffith was doing an interview round on behalf of the government this morning and he told Sky News that cases like this showed why the government was right to be changing the asylum system. He said:

We can’t run an asylum system based on credulous clerics and lefty lawyers. That is why we are fundamentally reforming it.

People like the case you mentioned [Ezedi] … should not be here, because we want to get to a position, it is very clear, if you come here illegally from a safe country, France is a safe country, it is a fellow member of the G7, it is a member of the European Union, it has signed all of the same treaties to protect refugees that the UK has, so if you come here illegally, you will not be able to say.

That would apply to this case, as it would many other cases that people are concerned about.

That is the law that we are trying to get through the House of Lords right now. We are a couple of busloads of peers away in terms of the votes to be able to get that through the House of Lords and then that will create the system that we want that would have prevented this tragic case.

Parliamentary pressure is building on the UK government to ban arms sales to Israel, amid signs that Israel intends to ignore the UN security council resolution passed this week calling on all sides to commit to a ceasefire, Patrick Wintour reports.

The Labour party has said that water company bosses should not be getting bonuses if their firms are still polluting rivers and the sea. It has also said they should be criminally liable for repeated failures to tackle pollution.

In the light of today’s figures showing raw sewage discharges have more than doubled in the past year, Labour is saying these sanctions should be introduced immediately. Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, said:

The Conservatives’ are too weak to get tough with polluting water companies.

Instead of imposing Labour’s ban on water bosses’ bonuses, Steve Barclay [the environment secretary] has weakly chosen to only talk about doing it.

The evidence is clear. We don’t need the dither and delay of a consultation, we need immediate action.

That is why Labour will put the water companies under tough special measures. We will strengthen regulation so law-breaking water bosses face criminal charges, and give the regulator new powers to block the payment of bonuses until water bosses have cleaned up their filth.

Good morning. One sure sign that an election is on the way is that pensions increasingly become a topic of political conversation. At the weekend Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, said that keeping the pension triple lock would be in the Conservative party’s manifesto. At the liaison committee yesterday the Tory MP Stephen Crabb asked Rishi Sunak to confirm that he wanted to keep it in place for the whole of the next parliament. Struggling to suppress his belief that this was a daft question, because the answer was obvious, Sunak replied that it was safe for Crabb to assume that the answer was yes.

The triple lock is a pledge to increase the value of the annual state pension every year in line with earnings, inflation, or by 2.5% – whichever is higher. Introduced by the coalition government, it is designed to ensure that pensioners never start falling behind other groups in terms of living standards. Over the last decade it has helped pensioners considerably, and you can see why Sunak wants it in the manifesto. But it does not come cheap.

Today the i points out that Sunak cannot make this promise without inviting awkward questions about when the age at which people can start getting the state pension will rise from 66 (the current age) to 68. It is going up to 67 later this decade, and is currently due to rise to 68 in the 2040s. Last year a report said the government should bring forward the rise to 68 by three years, but Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, announced he was postponing the decision until the next parliament.

In her i story, Alexa Phillips quotes two of the Conservative party’s best experts on pensions as saying that keeping the triple lock in place for another five years could mean the rise in the state pension age to 68 having to happen earlier. David Willetts, a former minister who is now president of the Resolution Foundation thinktank, told the i that the coalition government was only able to afford the triple lock because the state pension age was going up. He said:

The argument was, if we speed up the increase in the pension age, there will be fewer pensioners, and we’ll be able to pay them a higher pension.

That was the trade-off on which the triple lock rested when it was first introduced, and it is a reminder that somehow or other these pledges have to be paid for, even with unpalatable measures like that which have come back and proved to be very controversial.

And David Gauke, a former work and pensions secretary, told the i that Sunak’s promise would mean the government having to revist the state pension age decision. He said:

The triple lock proved to be more expensive in practice than was anticipated when the policy was first announced, just because of the way in which the economy operated after 2010. It did more to increase the value of the state pension than anyone had thought was likely.

Ultimately, governments are going to have to take into account the wider fiscal situation. If you prioritise the increase in the state pension, then one way you can address that is by looking at the age in which it comes into play.

Why is this so salient as an election issue? Because pensioners are far more likely to vote than other age groups. This chart, from a British Election Study report, illustrates this, with turnout figures for the last three general elections, by age group.

The Commons is in recess, and it looks as if it may be a quiet day at Westminster. Here are some of the things in the diary.

Morning: The Environment Agency publishes sewage discharge figures.

Morning: Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, meets mayors and mayoral candidates in the west Midlands.

Afternoon: Peers debate the second reading of the leasehold and freehold reform bill.

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