Post Office minister: people responsible for the Horizon scandal ‘should go to jail’ – UK politics live | Politics

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Mel Stride, the government Work and Pension secretary, was also talking about mental health and young people’s mental health on the media round earlier, although with a slightly different tack. He was saying the government was aiming to get more people who had been experiencing mental health issues back to work.

He told listeners to the BBC’s Today programme:

We need to be having a grown up and sensible conversation about where we’re going with mental health. It is very good news that we are more open about discussing mental health, far too many people suffered in silence in the past.

However, I think we also need to look very carefully about whether we are beginning to label or medicalise conditions that in the past would have been seen as the ups and downs of life. We all go through difficult times in our life. That is regrettable, but it is part and a natural part of the human condition.

None of that is to suggest that there aren’t additional pressures that have contributed to mental health problems … Covid and lockdown and so on, and I would add to that, incidentally, particularly for young people, social media and the impact of that. But we do need to have this grown up discussion.

Stride went on to say:

At the heart of the approach that I’m taking is perhaps it’s an old fashioned belief – but I think it’s one that needs to come back into fashion – is that work is good for you.

Work is good for your mental health. Getting up in the morning, having a sense of purpose, interacting with other people in the workplace, having a conversation at the water-cooler, or whatever it may be, is good for our mental health.

And there’s plenty of evidence that shows that, so my mission is to get as many people into work as possible. And I care the most about those who can benefit from work in the way that I’ve described. And that’s why I’m reviewing the process by which people go onto these long term benefits.

There is quite a healthcare theme developing today, and Wes Streeting has also been commenting this morning on a pledge made by London Mayor Sadiq Khan that if he is reelected in May, he would pledge £800,000 to “plug gaps” in mental health support for the most deprived schools in the capital.

Streeting said he was “delighted to see children and young people’s mental health high on Sadiq’s agenda. Really excited by these plans – and a Labour government working with our Labour Mayor will be able to go even further.”

Khan made the pledge late last night in the Mirror, saying it would “plug some of the gaps left by cuts and provide young people, their schools, and youth workers with the proper support they need”.

He said “Children and young people’s mental health is a public health emergency. It’s shocking that so many of our young Londoners are facing mental health difficulties. This is a crisis of the Tories’ making.”

In the Reform UK briefing, Richard Tice was dismissive of those comments by Labour’s Wes Streeting, saying “he must have heard what our conference was about because he wrote a few lines in a daily newspaper this morning.”

Tice compared Labour’s oft-cited pledge to spend £28bn on what he described as “their ridiculous green agenda that would have achieved nothing” to the £1bn figure he said they had pledged to use private healthcare capacity, saying Labour were showing “weak ambition”.

He said Streeting had claimed it would take a decade to sort out healthcare, but Reform UK were aiming for a zero patient waiting list within two years.

Tice claims that three main prongs of their policy would drive up capacity in the healthcare sector in the UK, proposing to vastly increase tax relief on private healthcare to drive uptake, use money to procure spare private healthcare capacity for the NHS, and that to attract and retain frontline healthcare staff they will pay zero basic rate income tax for three years.

He also claimed that Labour had a secret plan “to put VAT on all independent healthcare”, and said that instead of giving more money to “bungling NHS bureaucrats” he wanted to bring in logistics people from the likes of FedEx, Amazon and the military to sort out what he said was “the lack of productivity” in the NHS.

One part of the Reform UK briefing was directly addressed at Labour’s shadow health spokesperson Wes Streeting, who was also on the media round this morning.

Here is a flavour of what Streeting was setting out earlier as Labour’s plans for health. Describing it as a “pragmatic” argument, he told GB News:

It seems mad to me that we’ve got spare capacity in the private sector and we’re not using it.

You’ve got a situation today where middle and upper class people who can pay to go private are being seen faster, getting diagnosed more quickly and treated more quickly, which is certainly better for their quality of life but better for their outcomes.

And then working class people are left behind because they’re priced out of this two-tier system.

What I’m proposing is the Labour government would use spare capacity in the private sector to bring down waiting lists faster, but no one will have to worry about the bill.

I’m not happy about this because I think the NHS should have the staff, the equipment, the technology it needs without relying on the private sector, but I’ve got to deal with the world as it is after 14 years of Conservative government, not the world as I would wish it to be.

Of course, in the longer term Labour’s ambition is through workforce expansion, doubling the number of scanners and building on our proud record as a party of making sure that in future the NHS has the staff, the equipment and the technology it needs to treat patients, and to honour that founding principle of the NHS as a public service free at the point of use there for us when we need it.

On the Today programme, asked about the future of social care, Streeting said he would not be bounced into announcing something from the next Labour manifesto, but told listeners:

I would hope that the next Labour government won’t just provide an answer to the immediate crisis in social care but will set out a long-term direction for investment and reform that can command consensus across the divide and can last for generations, as we did on the NHS in 1948.

I’ll come back with some key points from the Reform UK briefing in a moment – essentially as expected Richard Tice has said the party would scrap net zero targets and use the money to fund a huge expansion of private healthcare provision – but my main takeaway was tonally it was pitched as if the party were the main opposition to an expected Labour government, and there was very little in there addressing the current administration.

Labour leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, has written for the Daily Record today repeating his attack on what he has called “the SNP’s financial mismanagement”.

He writes:

It is not those with “the broadest shoulders” bearing the brunt of the SNP’s tax rises, as Humza Yousaf promised – it is ordinary working people, many of whom are struggling with high bills, soaring rents, and rising food prices.

Nurses, teachers, and council workers are all seeing their tax bills rise while they watch their services decline.

Sarwar has been criticising the SNP tax policy for raising taxes for those earning £29,000 and above, although some analysis has shown tha UK-wide national insurance changes will cancel out much of the rise for higher earners.

Richard Tice has opened up this Reform UK briefing by talking about “the woke managerial middle class who happen to be eco-zealots” and has introduced Lee Anderson who is reminiscing about coal-mining and is talking specifically about the mineworkers’ pension scheme.

I mentioned in the introduction that Reform UK are giving a press briefing that they have billed as being about “Labour’s betrayal of the working class”. That will be starting in a few minutes and I will bring you any key lines that emerge …

John Harris writes for us today, cautioning against schadenfreude at the Tories’ apparently inevitable defeat in the next election. He writes:

The Conservatives’ seemingly unstoppable lurching to the right is actually a grave cause for concern, for a few key reasons. One is to do with the basic functioning of our systems of power, and the fact that governments need to be held to account. Effective opposition, in other words, is a very important job, which an unhinged rabble will not be able to carry out.

But an even bigger cause for alarm centres on a possibility too easily written off. British politics now moves at a breakneck pace: less than five years ago, let us not forget, the party now apparently on its last legs won an 80-seat Commons majority. The state of politics in many of our neighbouring countries speaks for itself. The Tories’ immediate future, therefore, may not be quite the comical sideshow some people assume.

Even in the event of a Labour landslide, the likely survivors will include Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch. Regardless of who becomes the next party leader, post-Brexit Toryism is now built around a solid set of factors that will ensure that the most paranoid, belligerent views will remain noisy and untamed: a reactionary activist base, plenty of supportive media outlets and the element personified by Farage – present both inside and outside the party, and set on constantly yanking the Tories even further to the right. If a Labour government hits the skids, therefore, the consequences could be terrifying.

Read more here: John Harris – The Tory party has lost the plot, and could be bad news for Labour

Gordon Brown has written for the Times criticising prime minister Rishi Sunak over his threats to leave the European court of human rights (ECHR), which Brown says “plays into Putin’s hands”.

Last week Sunak told The Sun “I do believe that border security, and making sure that we can control illegal migration, is more important than membership of a foreign court.”

Brown writes:

When Sunak arrived in No 10, he had an opportunity to reaffirm core British values after the years of Johnson and Truss playing fast and loose with them.

Under this Conservative administration, the whole system of international law – not just the ECHR, but also the Refugee Convention and general human rights and humanitarian law – is being systemically undermined.

The result? Russia will exploit the British retreat to ridicule the legitimacy of international human rights law and our voice in the world will increasingly go unheard.

The Liberal Democrats have called for the formation of a national agencyto support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

Ed Davy said: “Parents of children with special educational needs across the UK are facing a postcode lottery.

“The Conservative Government has woefully underfunded both schools and local authorities, meaning that many parents simply can’t get their children the support they deserve.

“That is unacceptable. No child, or their family, should have to wait so long or fight so hard to have their needs met.”

PA Media reports Davy said called for the government to cut the amount schools pay towards the cost of a child’s additional SEND support – currently £6,000 per child.

Davy claimed this would help to remove the financial disincentive that stops schools from identifying pupils’ needs as early as possible.

While he was on the media round, Work and Pensions secretary Mel Stride was questioned on why the government would raise pensions in line with inflation, but had fought against inflation level pay rises for the public sector. He told Times Radio:

Pensioners are on fixed incomes, they don’t have the ability to adjust their economic circumstances as other people who might go out and work more hours or get a different job or seek a promotion or a salary increase or whatever it may be. Those things are typically not there for pensioners.

Work and Pensions secretary again refuses to commit to paying Waspi compensation

The state pension is increased from today, raised to £11,500 a year from £10,600.

The Liberal Democrats have claimed the extra pension support would be largely wiped out, as more pensioners are dragged into paying income tax as a result of threshold freezes.

Work and pensions spokesperson Wendy Chamberlain said: “This Conservative government is picking pensioners’ pockets to try to fill the black hole caused by their disastrous economic policy.

“These are people who have played by the rules their whole lives, paid their taxes and contributed so much to our society. They expect that in their older years the government would look after them, not place even more financial hardship upon them during a cost-of-living crisis.”

Liberal Democrat analysis suggest up to 1.6 million more pensioners will be paying income tax within the next four years due to the threshold freezes.

Writing in the Telegraph, political correspondent Dominic Penna described the freezes in the threshold as “stealth taxes”. Pensioners start paying income tax at £12,570.

Mel Stride, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said: “Thanks to the triple lock and our efforts to drive down inflation, we are putting money back in the pockets of pensioners. This is only possible because we have stuck to our plan and our economy has turned a corner.”

The UK economy went into recession in the last two quarters of 2023. Inflation in shop prices in the UK has eased to the lowest level for more than two years, but food inflation is still running at 3.7%, higher then the Bank of England’s 2% target for inflation.

Minister claims he has instructed officials to ‘just settle’ Post Office Horizon compensation claims where ‘it looks right’

Post Office minister: people responsible for the Horizon scandal ‘should go to jail’

Welcome and opening summary …