Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells to hand back CBE with immediate effect in wake of Horizon scandal – UK politics live | Politics

Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, has said the government will consider making cuckooing an offence. Cuckooing is when criminals take over the home of a vulnerable person, for example someone with learning difficulties, so they can use it for criminal purposes.

During justice questions, in response to a question from Julie Marson (Con), who said cuckooing was not a victimless crime asked if it could be made an offence, Chalk replied:

We have held a stakeholder engagement exercise on this issue … and the exercise reveals that there are civil orders and criminal offences which are available to disrupt it.

It might be, for example, that the underlying offence is a possession of drugs with intent to supply, it might be possession of firearms, there could be common assault etc.

But I do think this is worthy of further consideration, so I would invite a conversation with [Marson] in due course.

Labour could draw on changes to VAT introduced by former Tory chancellor George Osborne in order to block wealthy parents from dodging its planned tax on private schools, PA Media reports. PA says:

Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, said the party would ensure new legislation leaves no loopholes for people to avoid paying the money if it wins the general election this year.

Education leaders have suggested that parents could sidestep some extra costs from Labour’s plan to abolish tax exemption for private schools by paying for years of schooling in advance.

In a speech at the Centre for Social Justice, Phillipson said: “We would make sure that the legislation is drawn in such a way to ensure that avoidance can’t take place. There is precedent for that. Back in 2010, George Osborne, when he made VAT changes, did something very similar.

“So we’re clear there was precedent when the legislation was drawn in such a way that it is effective in raising the money that we need to invest in our state schools.”

Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, has announced that MPs will debate the remaining stages of the Rwanda bill, the legislation intended to ensure deportations to Rwanda can go ahead, on Tuesday and Wednesday next week.

There will be six hours of debate each week.

The bill will considered by a committee of the whole house, meaning all MPs can contribute to the committee stage debates which are normally limited to members of a bill committee, and these are the debates where Tory rightwingers will try to toughen the bill. For example, they may try to remove the clause in the bill allowing individuals to appeal against deportation, or to include provisions saying ministers should ignore European court of human rights injunctions stopping deportations flights.

Tory centrists may also try to amend the bill to tighten the requirement on ministers to obey the European convention on human rights.

Mordaunt normally announces the following week’s Commons business in a statement on Thursdays, but today she made her announcement on a point of order. Asked why she was doing it early, Mordaunt replied:

If I had waited to announce this for the first time on Thursday there would have been very limited time for people to table amendments ahead of the normal tabling deadline.

Paula Vennells, the former Post Office boss, has announced that she is giving back her CBE in response to the controversy about the unsafe Horizon convictions. In a statement to PA Media she said:

I continue to support and focus on co-operating with the inquiry and expect to be giving evidence in the coming months.

I have so far maintained my silence as I considered it inappropriate to comment publicly while the inquiry remains ongoing and before I have provided my oral evidence.

I am, however, aware of the calls from sub-postmasters and others to return my CBE.

I have listened and I confirm that I return my CBE with immediate effect.

I am truly sorry for the devastation caused to the subpostmasters and their families, whose lives were torn apart by being wrongly accused and wrongly prosecuted as a result of the Horizon system.

I now intend to continue to focus on assisting the inquiry and will not make any further public comment until it has concluded.

Sir Robert Buckland, the Tory former justice secretary, also asked Alex Chalk to consider legislating to quash the Post Office Horizon convictions. In his reply, Chalk said an exceptional measures was needed. He told MPs:

These were truly exceptional circumstances. When I was a backbencher, I was on the record as saying this is the most serious miscarriage of justice since the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. But the clue is there were four in the Guildford case, there were six in the Birmingham case. We are talking about hundreds.

It is truly exceptional, it is truly unprecedented, and it will need an appropriate resolution.

And Sir Bob Neill, the Tory chair of the Commons justice secretary, said that if the government were to publish a bill to quash all the Post Office convictions, Chalk should check with senior judges to ensure they agree that the normal means for speeding up and grouping appeals could not deliver justice within an “acceptable timeframe”.

Chalk agreed. He said the government respected the judiciary, and would only legislate if it had exhausted all alternatives.

Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, has told MPs that he is considering bringing a bill to parliament to quash the unsafe Post Office Horizon convictions that remain unsafe.

He was responding to a question from Nadhim Zahawi, the former Tory cabinet minister, who said there were 800 unsafe convictions that have not yet been overturned. He urged Chalk to bring forward a “simple bill” to quash those convictions.

Chalk said Zahawi had put his finger on the problem “with his customary precision”. He went on:

The suggestion he made is receiving acting consideration. I expect to be able to make further announcements shortly.

Here are some more lines from Bridget Phillipson’s speech and Q&A this morning.

• Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, said keeping schools open should be a priority if a future pandemic ever required another lockdown. She said:

When the government first reopened schools for most of our children, the pubs had already been open for weeks.

That was entirely the wrong way around. And I tell you today, that if I’m secretary of state for education, if and when such a national crisis comes again, school should be the last to close and the first to open.

This is a response to the Tory attack line on education. Last night, in response to the advance briefing about Phillipson’s speech, CCHQ issued a statement from Richard Holden, the Conservative party chair, saying: “We’re not going to take any lectures from Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party, which fought tooth and nail to keep schools closed longer during the pandemic.”

• Phillipson said the fact that Gavin Williamson, the former education secretary, did not give evidence to the Covid inquiry in person showed how schools were sidelined by the government. She said:

It says a lot that the Covid inquiry isn’t even taking evidence from Sir Gavin Williamson. I don’t blame them because he wasn’t important.

The education secretary – he wasn’t at the table. Ministers failed our children in their greatest hour of need.

Cheaper holidays, birthday treats, not fancying it today – these are no excuses for missing school.

Penalties must be part of the system, but they can never be the answer alone. Allowing your child to skip school without good reason shouldn’t just be cause for a fine. It’s deeper.

It’s a mark of disrespect for the children, the teachers, the school. Because absences hurt not just the children missing, but the children there.

• She said Labour would introduce a single number, like the NHS number, to hold children’s records across different services together. She said:

Labour will bring a simple single number, like the NHS number that holds records together and that stops children’s needs falling between the gaps within schools and between them, between all of the services that wrap around them. That linkage allows us not just to support children with the issues that they face today, but to help identify the challenges of tomorrow.

Will labour apply VAT on school fees retrospectively if parents try to pay fully in advance @bphillipsonMP says will make sure there isn’t avoidance

• She praised Michael Gove, the Tory former education secretary, for bringing energy and drive to the department.

What Michael Gove brought to education was a sense of energy and drive says @bphillipsonMP who says education has been deprioritised since his time as education secretary.

There have been a couple of stories recently, based on leaks, that seem intended to undermine Rishi Sunak’s standing with Tory MPs on immigration. On Saturday the BBC said it had seen No 10 papers from 2021 suggesting that Sunak had doubts about the Rwanda policy. And yesterday the Sun published a story saying Sunak considered dropping the policy altogether when he was running for Tory leader in 2022. Sunak did not explicitly deny it.

And today another story in this vein is in the Times. Matt Dathan and Geradline Scott say Sunak overruled Home Office plans to close dozens more hotels used by asylum seekers last autumn. They say as a result the government is paying £1.5m per day for empty beds. They write:

In October the Home Office drew up proposals to close 100 hotels by January but the prime minister ordered the target to be scaled down to 50.

Downing Street feared that the government would be forced to reopen hotels this summer in the event of a surge of migrant crossings, which would damage Sunak politically before the general election.

However, a Home Office insider said it exposed Sunak’s “lack of faith” in the Rwanda policy acting as a deterrent. “No 10 had a low expectation of Rwanda working so they wanted to maintain hotel space and held us back from closing more,” a source said.

A government spokesperson told the Times they did not recognise the claims – a phrase often interpreted in Whitehall as meaning that the facts are essentially true, but that spokesperson contests the way they are being interpreted.

MPs are expected to resume next week the debate on the bill intended to ensure deportations to Rwanda can go ahead and rightwing Tories want to toughen it up to make legal challenges to the policy even harder. Sunak is resisting their demands, and if the leaks are deliberate, and not just the product of journalistic enterprise, they may be intended to pressurise him into backing down.

Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, has been giving a speech this morning about Labour’s plans to tackle persistent absence in schools. Sally Weale has a story about the main points here.

At the event this morning Phillipson was introduced and endorsed by Sir Kevan Collins, who was education recovery commissioner for the government until he resigned after Boris Johnson refused to back his call for a £15bn investment to help pupils recover from the impact of Covid on learning. The Johnson government proposed spending £1.4bn instead.

Collins said:

Covid revealed the best and worst of our system: teachers performed heroically as they turned on a sixpence to deliver online learning, parents leant in to support their children’s learning as never before and our children displayed resilience and determination to continue their studies.

However, too many of our children are still living with the impact of the disruption. The failure to re-engage and return to established norms is seen in the collapse in school attendance. For too many children the habit and convention of going to school every day has been broken.

Tackling the crisis of persistent absence must therefore be a priority and the national response must measure up to the scale of the local challenge. It demands a shared endeavour.

Education standards should always take top priority. I’m excited by Bridget’s ambition for our education system and her determination to raise standards and improve outcomes for all our children.

A reader asks:

There was a lot of press in advance of the oil & gas licensing reaching the Commons yesterday, but I cannot see any report of what happened. Can you fill us in?

The government cancelled the debate (the second reading of the offshore petroleum licensing bill) at short notice. But that wasn’t because they were worried about being defeated. It was because there were four statements or UQs beforehand (on Gaza, the NHS, flooding and the Post Office scandal) and two of them went on for much longer than usual because so many MPs wanted to speak (Gaza and the Post Office – the Post Office one went on for more than two hours). So, by the time the second reading debate was due to start, at 9.13pm, there was only 47 minutes left for the debate. It is being rescheduled, and is due to take place within the next two weeks.

During his interview round this morning Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, became the latest Tory to put pressure on Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, over the scandal. Asked about Davey’s involvement, he said there were “big questions” for Davey to answer “which he’s being asked in a very robust way”. Stride added: “I think it’s for him to answer those challenges.”

In an interview with Pippa Crerar yesterday, Davey defended his record while he was minister for postal services from 2010 to 2012 in the coalition government. He said Post Office managers covered up what was happening with “a conspiracy of lies”.

Labour has tabled a motion for a vote in parliament today calling for the release of documents relating to the UK government’s Rwanda deportation policy. Here is the story.

Good morning. Cabinet is meeting for the first time this year and, among its other problems, the government is still under pressure to announce something definitive about the Post Office Horizon scandal that will show it is responding to the outrage generated by the ITV drama about the case. The drama, of course, did not reveal anything new about the scandal, which has been seen as a colossal miscarriage of justice for years and already outraged most people who took an interest. But TV turbocharged the sense of injustice, brought in a much wider audience and plonked it on the desk of parliament on the prime minister in a way that means the pressure to “do something” is unavoidable.

As Pippa Crerar reports, ministers want to find a speedy way of quashing the convictions of hundreds of post office operators.

Talks were taking place yesterday and Kevin Hollinrake, the minister for postal services, gave a statement to MPs at around 7pm last night. But he did not have anything definite to announce on and so Mel Stride, the work and pensions minister, has been fielding questions again on the topic during his media round this morning. He told Sky News that things were happening “hour by hour” and that an announcement was imminent.

My understanding is that [talks on quashing convictions] are happening now. So this is something that is happening hour by hour. It’s not something that’s going to happen next week. It is happening right now and we intend to move very quickly.

Stride also told LBC that Fujitsu, the company that provided the faulty Horizon IT system blamed for people being wrongly accused of stealing money, would “quite possibly” have to pay compensation. He said it would not just be the taxpayer compensating the victims.

We’ve got this public inquiry under way. One of the things it’s going to look at … is where does culpability lie? Who is responsible, who knew what when, who did things they shouldn’t have done and so on?

And to the extent that that culpability rests upon the shoulders of others than government, then I think you can expect ministers to come to the appropriate conclusions. And perhaps it won’t be just the taxpayer that is on the hook for those costs.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

10am: Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, gives a speech on school absences. As Sally Weale reports, she will say Labour would legislate for a compulsory national register of home-schooled children as part of a package of measures designed to tackle the problem of persistent absence in schools.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 12.30pm: MPs debate two Labour motions. The first is on dentistry and the second, which starts around 4pm, is on a motion that would force the government to publish confidential government documents about the Rwanda scheme, mostly relating to costs.

2.30pm: David Cameron, the foreign secretary, is questioned by the Commons foreign affairs committee.

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