Politics live blog - Thursday 17 February
Rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen
<div id="helper">To receive updated content, refresh the page (F5 for a web browser).</div>This page will update automatically every minute: On | OffScreengrab from BBC News of David Cameron's speech on the welfare reform bill. Photograph: BBC News screengrab
12.55pm: Labour's Kevan Jones says Spelman has come to the Commons with the attitude "nanny has been misunderstood".
12.54pm: Roger Gale, a Conservative, says Spelman's broad approach was right.
12.52pm: Labour's David Winnick says Spelman has been "personally humiliated" by the prime minister and the chancellor. He asks her to congratulate those who campaigned against her plan.
Spelman says she never intended to sell off the forests to the highest bidder.
12.48pm: Spelman says she made the decision to abandon the consultation at a meeting with the consultation.
She criticises Creagh for not acknowledging that Labour left the nation's finances in a poor state.
She says the advisory panel will represent a "broad range of views".
And she says it was hard to take what Creagh said about Labour's support for the countryside. Spelman mentions "humility". That is the difference between her and Creagh. If Creagh admitted that Labour sold off forests without adequate assurances, MPs would take her more seriously, Spelman says.
12.42pm: Mary Creagh, the shadow environment secretary, asks Spelman when she was told about the decision she is announcing.
Creagh says today is not a victory for politics as usual. It's a victory for those people who have campaigned for their local forests and woods. She pays tribute to the "silent majority" who spoke up.
Creagh asks if the sale of the 15% of Forestry Commission land that has already been postponed will now be abandoned for good.
Who will sit on the new advisory panel, she asks.
How will the Forestry Commission work more efficiently if it is losing a quarter of its staff?
Creagh congratulates Spelman on being the only secretary of state in living memory to unite the Socialist Workers Party with the National Trust in opposition to her plans.
12.39pm: Spelman says she has three announcements to make.
• The consultation on the proposed sell-off will be cancelled.
• The clauses relating to the Forestry Commission will be taken out of the public bodies bill.
• A panel will be set up to advise on the future of forests.
Spelman says that if there is one key lesson from this episode, it is that people "cherish their woodlands and forests."
She apologises.
I am sorry. We got this one wrong.She thanks her colleagues for their support.
• Spelman apologises for proposing to privatise state-owned forest. She says she takes full responsibility for what went wrong.
12.38pm: Spelman starts by saying she takes full responsibility for what has happened.
12.38pm: Caroline Spelman is making her statement on the forest sell-off U-turn now.
12.24pm: The government has published 18 separate impact assessments to go with the welfare reform bill. These documents are highly technical, but they're worth reading because they tell you what officials actually think the costs and benefits of legislation will actually be. I've just been skimming through the universal credit impact assessment (pdf). Here are the key points.
• Universal credit will be introduced in October 2013 and it will take four years before everyone switches onto it.
• Benefit spending will be £2.6bn a year higher in net terms once universal credit is full established. Benefits will be £2bn more generous and increased take-up will lead to another £2.6bn a year being spent. So £4.6bn more a year will be spent on benefits. But the government will save £2bn a year from less fraud and error.
• Around 2.7m households will have qualify for more in benefit. Around 1m will see their entitlements go up by more than £25 a week. Some 85% of that increase will go to the poorest 40% of homes.
• Transition protection will ensure that there are no cash losers. At the point of transition, households who would otherwise lose will receive "full cash protection".
• Some 1.7m households will qualify for less in benefit in the long term. Some 75% will have a reduction of less than £25 a week.
• Some 1.46m households will see their marginal deduction rate - the amount they lose in benefits for every extra £1 they earn - go down. There will be virtually no households with an MDR of more than 80%. (In other words, virtually no one will lose more than 80p for every extra £1 they earn.)
• But some 2.11m households will see their marginal deduction rate go up.
• The median marginal deduction rate will go up by 4 percentage points.12.16pm: Here's that final quote from Cameron in full. It's interesting, because Cameron seems to be acknowledging that there will be more U-turns to come on the welfare reform bill.
I expect there will be many parts of this bill that will be hard fought in both Houses of Parliament, and lots of difficult issues and many things that we will have to examine all over again. But we've got to get this done, not just to make our national finances add up, but actually to make sure that we give people the opportunity to get into work and out of poverty.
12.07pm: An ITN reporter asks Cameron if he agrees with Iain Duncan Smith that some Britons are too lazy to work.
Cameron says that he listened to Duncan Smith's interview on the Today programme (see 8.51am) and that this is not what Duncan Smith was saying. Cameron says he does sometimes listen to the Today programme, although it can disturb his wellbeing. It is best to listen in short doses, he suggests.
Cameron says the government has to do more to ensure that people get into work.
Many parts of the bill will be "hard fought" in parliament, he says. There are many areas where the government will have to look again.
Cameron is still going strong, but BBC News and Sky have now had enough.
12.04pm: Someone from Mencap asks about the withdrawal of the mobility component from disability living allowance for people in care homes.
Cameron says, as someone who has filed in the DLA forms, he knows how complicated they are.
On the mobility component, the government wants to avoid an "overlap", with people being funded twice.
Iain Duncan Smith says the government has listened. No one in a care home will lose the money they need for mobility, he says. The department will take longer than expected to work out the details.
12.02pm: Nick Robinson from the BBC asks about the housing benefit U-turn and forests.
David Cameron says the housing benefit plan was announced before the government finalised details of its work programme. The government should listen to experts, he says.
On forestry, he says Caroline Spelman will be making a statement in the Commons. The government wants to open up forests, and to make this area of policy "cost effective".
Again, if you launch a consultation and you get a "very strong response", it is right to take notice, he says.
Should we listen to people along the way? Yes. I thought that was the point of a listening government.
11.57am: Cameron says the bill marks the beginning of "a cultural change". It will create "a new culture of responsibility", he says.
11.53am: Cameron says the government will pay companies to get the unemployed into work.
Don't let anyone tell you this happened before. Under the last government's model, some companies still got a large share of their payment – even if they didn't get someone into work. We're saying: we will withhold the vast majority of these companies' payments until they get someone into work – and they stay in work.
He says that people have been suggesting programmes like this for years. But in the past the Treasury opposed them. Now the Treasury is in favour. Cameron pays tribute to Lord Freud, the welfare minister, for helping to develop this idea. He says he is glad the Tories "poached" Freud from Labour.
11.52am: People who can't work and can't be expected to work will be supported, Cameron says. "Full Stop, end of story."
11.51am: Cameron is now talking about the tougher sanctions that will be imposed.
So if you're unemployed and refuse to take either a reasonable job or to do some work in your community in return for your unemployment benefit, you will lose your benefits for three months. Do it again, you'll lose it for 6 months. Refuse a third time and you'll lose your unemployment benefits for three years.
11.49am: Cameron is now talking about how the universal benefit will be. He says it will be much simpler than the current system.
With the universal credit, you would keep 35p of benefit for every extra pound you take home. And because this rate of benefit withdrawal is the same whatever you earn - it's easy to calculate just how much better off you will be.
11.46am: Cameron says nothing has shocked him more since he has come into government than the situation with housing benefit.
We inherited a system that cost £20 billion a year, with some claimants living in property worth £2,000 a week in rent. That's £104,000 a year. That's the income taxes and national insurance contributions of sixteen working people on median income ...
We've been sending a signal to people that if they're out of work, or on a low wage, and
living in an expensive home in the centre of a city, that the decision to go back to work, or take a better paid job, could mean having to move to a cheaper home, in a different part of the city, in order to escape benefit dependency.11.44am: Cameron is now giving examples of how the system encourages people to be irresponsible.
High marginal deduction rates mean that a single mum has no incentive to work if she is going to lose 96p for every £1 she earns, he says.
And the benefits system makes it sensible for couples to live apart.
You might think, no one would split up because of benefits. But in our country today, there are two million people who 'live apart together' – that is couples who maintain separate homes while being economically interdependent. Can we honestly say the signals in the benefit system have nothing do with this?11.40am: Cameron makes the point about people being more responsible 60 years ago. I quoted this extract earlier. (See 8.35am.)
He says the welfare system now operates in such a way as to encourage people to be irresponsible.
But I know this country and therefore refuse to believe that there are five million people who are inherently lazy and have no interest in bettering themselves and their families.
What I want to argue is that the real fault lies with the system itself. The benefit system has created a benefit culture. It doesn't just allow people to act irresponsibly, but often actively encourages them to do so. Sometimes they deliberately follow the signals that are sent out. Other times, they hazily follow them, trapped in a fog of dependency. But either way, whether it's the sheer complexity and the perverse incentives of the benefits
system, whether it's the failure to penalise those who choose to live off the hard work of others, or whether it's the failure to offer the right support for people who are desperate to go back into work, we've created the bizarre situation where time and again the rational thing for people to do is, quite clearly, the wrong thing to do.11.35am: Cameron is now talking about the bill. He says that it is about making work pay.
Some elements of the bill have been "amended and rationalised", he says. (That's a new euphemism for a U-turn - he talking about the housing benefit proposals.)
The bill will encourage responsibility, he says.
One in four adults are out of work, he says. That has to change.
Creating a working welfare system is not just an economic necessity; it's an ethical necessity too.
Other politicians have promised to get to grips to welfare before. Cameron says he will explain why this time the government will make a real difference.
11.33am: Cameron says Iain Duncan Smith has made the Conservative party think about poverty. For too long people have thought about the consequences of poverty, but not the causes, he says. Duncan Smith has made people focus on the causes. If politics is about changing lives, Duncan Smith already has a legacy, Cameron tells the audience.
11.32am: David Cameron is speaking now. He says he started this week with a speech about the Big Society. Perhaps he should have come to Toynbee Hall, he says. It's an "exemplar" of the Big Society. He admires the way it combines doing with thinking and teaching.
11.30am: David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith are at Toynbee Hall in London. Duncan Smith says Toynbee Hall has always been associated with people who want to improve society.
11.28am: The Cameron/Duncan Smith event is about to start.
11.13am: David Cameron will be making his welfare speech shortly. The Department for Work and Pensions has published its bill this morning. The details are available here, on the DWP website.
Rather unusually, LabourList is running an article on the reforms today headlined: In Praise of Iain Duncan Smith.10.47am: You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here.
As for the rest of the papers, here are the articles I found particularly interesting.
• Andrew Grice in the Independent says David Cameron is going to recruit 10 new policy advisers to improve the way Number 10 operates.
Nine months into his premiership, Mr Cameron has decided to fine-tune the Downing Street machine. With hindsight, his aides admit, he has allowed ministers too much leeway to draw up and announce policies without No 10 knowing the full details ...The policy unit was a powerful force under Labour but was scaled back by Mr Cameron, partly because he had pledged to employ fewer special advisers. He scrapped the Downing Street delivery unit set up by Labour, with some staff leaving and others transferred to the Cabinet Office.
The number of special advisers, publicly funded officials who carry out party-political tasks, was cut from 78 under Gordon Brown to 68. It was hoped this would reduce the £6.8m wage bill by £2m. But the changes could result in the Cameron regime employing more special advisers than Labour did. Insiders say the promise to have fewer did not anticipate the extra pressures of a coalition. Junior and middle-ranking Liberal Democrat ministers may be allowed to recruit special advisers for the first time.
• Benedict Brogan in the Daily Telegraph says that, contrary to some assumptions, there may be a proper Tory in Downing Street.
Steve Hilton, so often teased for his Californian manners and his hippy look, is arguably the most ideologically Conservative member of the inner circle. Recently, his role has been enhanced by the Prime Minister. He is being put in charge of a beefed-up policy unit, and is more than ever the driver of what Mr Cameron knows might well prove to be a one-term project.
Mr Hilton would be the first to acknowledge that if the public does not understand what the Government is doing, it is the Government's fault, not the public's. But look beyond the presentational problems, and it is possible to argue that our contempt for the Big Society idea is no different from the opprobrium heaped on Mrs Thatcher in the early months of 1980, eight months after she took office and years before the significance of her economic reforms became clear.
"We have to be better at explaining that what we are doing is deeply Conservative. It is about a smaller state. But it is much too early to expect people to understand that this is a social revolution," one aide says. In myriad ways, the Coalition is dismantling the "Big Government" that is Mr Cameron's opposite of the Big Society ... Behind the noise about the Big Society, the shrinking of the state is well and truly underway.
• Daniel Martin in the Daily Mail says Lord Falconer is leading a fight in the Lords to stop judges having to contribute more to the cost of their pensions.
The Pensions Bill, which is going through the House of Lords, will give the Ministry of Justice the power to force judges to contribute and to decide how much more they should pay.
Welfare reform minister Lord Freud said: 'It is right that judges, like other public service pension scheme members, should begin to contribute towards their own pensions" ...
And in a debate on Tuesday night, Lord Falconer argued that to increase pension contributions would effectively be a pay cut.
'The constitutional points here are very significant,' he said. 'This is an obvious deterioration in their terms and conditions.'
He said the Pensions Bill would give ministers 'a classic tool with which to interfere with judicial independence'.
• Greg Hurst in the Times (paywall) says the National Union of Students has described the government's tuition fee reforms as "relatively progressive" in a private memo.
The NUS has publicly opposed any rise in tuition fees but the briefing note appears to contradict that stance, calling the Government's higher education reforms "progressive". It also admits that funding cuts are not as drastic as the union has claimed ...
Aimed particularly at universities in the Russell Group and the 1994 Group of smaller research universities, it cautions NUS officers against trying to stop universities setting the maximum fee. It says that "simply campaigning for a low fee might not generate the results you require (especially inside the Russell and 1994 Group)".
On the reforms of student finance, with a high repayment threshold and payments spread over 30 years, the note says that "the vastly increased numbers of graduates that will never pay the loan off are in fact what makes the system relatively progressive".
It contradicts Aaron Porter, the president of the NUS, who previously criticised the rise in fees.
• The Times says some prominent Labour supporters of the alternative vote will refuse to campaign for it.
[Harriet] Harman said: "I will be voting for AV, but I won't be doing any campaigning for it because my priority is to help elect Labour councillors. We will be campaigning against Lib Dem candidates, not working with the Lib Dems on AV."
• James Kirkup in the Telegraph says the government is freezing for at least two years the threshold for savings above which elderly people have to pay for their own care. This means thousands more people will have to pay, he says.
Around 250,000 people aged over 65 are estimated to be funded by councils in residential care homes, and the figure is forecast to grow steadily in the coming decades. Charges are based on a means test, under which anyone with savings and assets, including a house, worth more than £23,250 must pay the full fees ...Normally, the threshold increases each year to take account of inflation and rising values of assets such as houses. Ten years ago, it was £18,500.
But the Coalition has quietly decided to freeze the limit for at least two years. The move is likely to amount to a real-terms cut in the threshold of almost 10 per cent. A lower capital limit of £14,250 – above which councils pay part of the fees – has also been frozen. The decision was disclosed in a Department of Health document.
• The Times (paywall) says some families could face paying an extra £400 because councils are increasing the fees they charge for services.
A survey by The Times of the country's key councils reveals that many propose to increase charges by up to 400 per cent to avoid further cuts in frontline services. Parking, rubbish collection and burials are among those worst affected.Some authorities have opted to charge for the first time in areas such as home care, libraries, pest control, after-school clubs and child-minding. In the past, town halls have raised extra income through an increase in council tax. But this year the Chancellor has imposed an effective freeze, forcing council chiefs to look at other areas.
A 4 per cent increase in council tax this year would have cost the average household an extra £57, but the new fees have added hundreds of pounds to bills. The scale of the rises in some councils is prompting local protests and the threat of judicial reviews.
10.34am: There's going to an urgent question in the Commons about Bahrain too. Here's the running order.
Now - Business Department questions - now
11.30am - Urgent question on Bahrain.
Around 12pm - Business questions
Around 12.45pm - Caroline Spelman's statement about the forest privatisation U-turn.10.17am: Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, is going to make a statement in the Commons on the decision to abandon the forest privatisation at about 12.30pm. The term "humiliating U-turn" is a journalistic cliché. But, for once, the adjective humiliating really does seem appropriate. It is hard to think of any major departmental policy that has sunk so quickly.
9.52am: Reform, a centre-right thinktank, has today published a report on the government's public service reform programme. It is not impressed. The policies are "all over the place", it says.
In most cases the departments are failing the prime minister's reform challenge. The health reforms do not make the NHS accountable to patients. Even the schools reforms deliver neither open choice for parents nor true autonomy for schools. What should be more worrying for the prime minister is the inconsistency between and even within departments. Some departments want an open competition in public service markets while others want to favour mutuals or social enterprises or small firms. Some departments are arguing that resources do not equal results while others have guaranteed spending increases. The Department for Education wants more academies that are free from the national curriculum yet wants to impose a national curriculum on the vast majority of schools. The Department for Work and Pensions will means-test child benefit but not any other universal benefit.
These contradictions are a gift to the opponents of reform, who can argue, for example, that private sector delivery in healthcare must be a mistake if the government forbids it in education. But they also make the task of implementation much harder. The government wants new investment into new public service organisations but the uncertainty and inconsistency will damage investors' confidence.
The report itself (pdf) also includes a scorecard supposedly showing which departments are doing best at reform. The Home Office comes top; it gets a B for its police reforms. The Cabinet Office comes bottom, with an E. As Guido Fawkes has pointed out, by a happy coincidence Nick Herbert, the minister in charge of the Home Office police reforms used to run Reform before he became an MP in 2005.
9.35am: For the record, here are the latest YouGov GB polling figures.
Labour: 45% (up 15 points since the general election)
Conservatives: 35% (down 2)
Lib Dems: 10% (down 14)Labour lead: 10 points
Government approval: -26
9.04am: Ed Miliband has issued a statement about the government's decision to drop its plan to sell state-owned forests.
The sorry saga of the forest sell-off demonstrates how incompetent and out of touch this Government is. Virtually every person in the country could see selling off our forests was a foolish and short-sighted policy but they went ahead regardless. Now they are panicked into a retreat hours after Mr Cameron said they would carry on with their consultation. This is a chaotic and incompetent way to run government.
But the very idea of the forest sell-off shows something else. This government doesn't seem to understand the things we value which we hold in common. Just as people are angry about the threat to the forests, so too the threat to local libraries, children's centres, other common institutions. The decisions they are making suggest a government which understands the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Later, when I get a chance, I'll post a list of all the U-turns we've had so far from the government. Do mention some in the comments if you think there are any I'll forget.
8.51am: PoliticsHome and the Press Association have been monitoring the interviews Iain Duncan Smith has been giving this morning about the welfare bill. Here are the main points.
• He claimed that nobody would be worse off under his plans.
Nobody will be worse off because every single person, as we migrate them on to this new credit, will be cash-protected. That means that whatever system you are on, we will stay at that level whilst the new system is set.
• He claimed that almost 1m people would be lifted out of poverty under this plans.The key thing about the system is that by bringing [benefits] together, simplifying them and making sure that people understand it, and by changing the way they're withdrawn so there's a simplified system – actually what we're going to see is just under 1m people will be lifted out of poverty because of this, and 1m people, mostly of the poorest, will see increases of around £25 per week as they go back to work.
• He said that foreign nationals took more than half of the 2m jobs created under Labour. But 4m people were on benefits, he said. "That doesn't make any sense to me," he said.
• He confirmed that he is dropping plans to cut housing benefit by 10% for anyone unemployed for more than a year.
We won't see this in the bill for one very good reason. The more we looked at this, the more I reviewed the interplay between that reduction at 12 months and the universal credit and work programme meant that all of these people were going to move into the work programme anyway, so they would be having intensive help to get back to work.
• He dismissed the idea that Nick Clegg was responsible for this decision.
I made it clear when I was in front of the select committee that I was prepared and I looking at that interplay and what I want to do is to make sure there are no disincentives for the unemployed. I am fully one with Nick and others on this. It's a very good idea.
8.35am: David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith are publishing the welfare bill today. It is routinely described as the biggest reform of the welfare state for 60 years and at its core is a plan to replace existing out-of-work benefits with a single universal benefit, which will be designed in such a way as to make it always worthwhile for people to work. This is seen as the "holy grail" of welfare reform - a wonderful idea, if it can be made to work.
Duncan Smith has been giving interviews about the bill this morning. On the Today programme, he confirmed Patrick Wintour's report in the Guardian today saying the government has dropped plans to impose a 10% cut on housing benefit on anyone unemployed for more than a year.
But he did dispute the suggestion that it was Nick Clegg who killed the idea. Duncan Smith said the idea was flawed because, under the government's plans, people who have been unemployed for more than a year will get intensive help through the work programme anyway. That means they won't need an extra sanction to encourage them to get a job, he said.
Cameron will deliver a speech on welfare speech at about 11.15am. Downing Street released some extracts overnight, and they show that Cameron believes that the welfare state needs to be reformed because people are less responsible than they were 60 years ago.
When the welfare system was born, there was what we might call a collective culture of responsibility. More than today, people's self-image was not just about their personal status or success…it was measured out by what sort of citizen they were; whether they did the decent thing. That meant that a standardised system of sickness and out-of-work benefits – with limited conditions – was effective.
It reached the people who needed that support, and not those who didn't, in part because fiddling the system would have brought not just public outcry but private shame. In other words, personal responsibility acted as a brake on abuse of the system.
And because the ethos of self-betterment was more wide-spread, the system supported aspiration rather than discouraging it. Now let's be honest about where we've travelled to, from there to here. That collective culture of responsibility – taken for granted sixty years ago – has in many ways been lost.
Otherwise, it's a fairly quiet day. But I'll be covering all the breaking political news - such as it is - as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm, and an afternoon one at about 4pm.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Politics live blog - Thursday 17 February | Politics | guardian.co.uk
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