Fujitsu may have to pay compensation for flawed IT behind Post Office Horizon scandal, says minister – UK politics live | Politics

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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