Labour has expelled three senior members in Surrey for trying to unseat the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, by forming a progressive alliance with local Greens and Liberal Democrats to unite behind an NHS doctor standing against him.
Kate Townsend, the South West Surrey party secretary who stood in last week’s local elections, and Steve Williams, a party member for 46 years who sits on the constituency party’s executive committee, were notified of their expulsion this week.
Robert Park, a Labour member for almost five decades who chaired the Surrey Fabians and ran the regional remain campaign, has also been expelled.
Townsend and Williams have been leading figures in the campaign for a progressive alliance between local parties, where the Conservative cabinet minister has a 28,000 majority.
Williams has been working on behalf of Compass, the centre-left thinktank and champion of grassroots progressive alliance initiative, in defiance of the national party, which has said it will not entertain any notion of local party cooperation at election time. Party rules state that members must not support any other candidate for election who is running against Labour.
“We have massive support from the local party,” Williams told the Guardian. “It is such an overkill reaction to a group of people who are trying to unseat the health secretary. There was a campaign meeting last night, we only found out a few hours before that we had been expelled from the party so we weren’t able to go. People were storming out of the meeting, really very, very upset and angry.”
In a letter from the party’s head of disputes, Sam Matthews, Williams was told: “It has been brought to our attention with supporting evidence that you have publicly stated your support for a party that is standing against the Labour party in the 2017 general election, which is incompatible with membership of the Labour party.”
Williams was “ineligible to remain a member of the Labour party and have been removed from the national membership system”, the letter said, adding that he was no longer entitled to attend local Labour party meetings.
The party will consider an application for readmission only after five years, the letter said, though Williams said he was planning to appeal. The letter included supporting evidence, including Williams’ appeal for signatures for a letter to the Guardian supporting Irvine’s candidacy.
“We have been doing our best to unseat Jeremy Hunt, to hold him to account on his record because of what he has done to the health service over the last five years,” Williams said.
The initiative to back the National Health Action party’s Dr Louise Irvine, who received just over 8% of the vote in 2015, has the backing of local Labour leaders, including Townsend. Irvine, a GP, was the chair of the Save Lewisham hospital campaign, which defeated the government in court over the proposals to downgrade A&E and maternity units.
Williams said Irvine was “able, articulate, very capable of being able to hold Jeremy Hunt to account, when the NHS is such a key issue in his constituency”.
Local Lib Dem activists have also agreed not to campaign, after a meeting in Farncombe organised by Compass with members from progressive parties. The Green party has said it will not field a candidate.
Neal Lawson, chair of Compass, said: “Steve Williams has given 46 years of service to Labour and was backing a local doctor to take on Jeremy Hunt and defend the NHS. For this he got expelled by email. Labour is a tribal party in a non-tribal age.”
Park, who also stood for election for Labour last week, told the Guardian he had been expelled after an interview with the BBC’s Today programme in which he expressed cautious support for Labour standing aside.
“I have to say, I was upset,” he said. “It was a blunt, legalistic email message, I joined the party as student in 1963, I had thought particularly that somebody might have phoned to talk to me first, I’ve spent most adult life helping the cause.
“The irony is that [we are] three most loyal Labour members you could hope to get; when people were attacking [Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn, we’ve stuck by him. Now we’re all out on our neck.”
Park said he still intended to volunteer to help Labour MPs in marginal seats, as well as considering campaigning to help the Lib Dem former cabinet minister Vince Cable regain his seat in Twickenham, south-west London.
“Whatever we do, the likelihood is that Jeremy Hunt going to win,” he said of his constituency. “Nonetheless we’re tired of having a small share of the vote and we do feel that if we get behind one candidate we can stand some chance of denting his majority.”
Labour has selected IT manager David Black to fight the seat for the party after the CLP chair, Howard Kaye, the party’s candidate in 2015, has said he would not stand again. The Lib Dems have also selected a candidate, Ollie Purkiss.
The Green party co-leader Caroline Lucas has called for talks with Corbyn, and the Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron, to make a “series of electoral alliances” in some areas against the Conservatives before the election, though both have publicly rejected her entreaties.
Local Greens made the decision to stand down in the recent Richmond Park byelection, in which the Lib Dems’ Sarah Olney unseated the former Tory mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith.
The party has also decided to stand aside in several seats at the general election in June, including Ealing Central and Acton, to bolster the chances of Labour’s Rupa Huq in the marginal.
Lucas has called for Labour and the Lib Dems to respond similarly to strengthen her party’s chances of taking the Isle of Wight, where the party hopes to capture the traditionally Conservative seat after its good showing in local elections.
A bad deal on Brexit would be “a disaster” for the NHS, Jeremy Hunt has said, as he accused the European commission of deliberately interfering in the general election to undermine the Conservatives.
Ramping up the rhetoric of Theresa May, who last week accused the commission of leaking an unflattering account of talks at Downing Street to disrupt the election, the health secretary warned that a good Brexit negotiation was vital for the NHS.
“We’ve got 27 countries lined up against us,” Hunt told BBC1’s Andrew Marr show. “Some of them appear to think that for the EU to survive, Britain must fail.”
He said of the impact on the health service: “If we don’t get a good Brexit outcome, and we don’t protect the economic recovery, the jobs that so many people depend on, whose taxes pay for the NHS, if we get a bad Brexit outcome, that would be a disaster for the NHS.”
However, pressed on the issue, Hunt refused to specify what sort of bad deal this might involve, or to say whether the UK leaving the UK with no deal and defaulting to World Trade Organisation tariffs, would also affect the NHS.
“We’ve been very clear that no deal is better than a bad deal,” he said, adding: “I’m saying that a good deal would be best for the NHS, but obviously, a bad deal would be the worst possible outcome for all our public services. It would be bad for the country.”
On Wednesday, May used an address outside Downing Street launching the election campaign to accuse the European commission of seeking to influence the election.
“The European commission’s negotiating stance has hardened. Threats against Britain have been issued by European politicians and officials. All of these acts have been deliberately timed to affect the result of the general election which will take place on 8 June,” she said.
May did not specify who this interference was intended to assist. But pushed on the matter, Hunt said he assumed the commission wanted to undermine the Conservatives and help Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party.
“Well, you’ll have to ask them why they chose to do that, but I think the answer is very clear, that they are trying to leak reports that undermine Theresa May’s position,” he said, when asked who the commission favoured.
Asked specifically if the aim had been to harm the Conservatives, he said: “That must be the presumption, and what we’re saying is that they should not be doing that, because it’s an election for the British people to decide.”
May’s accusation baffled Brussels, where the European commission’s chief spokesman, Margaritis Schinas, dismissed the allegations as electioneering.
“We here in Brussels are very busy, rather busy, with our policy work,” he said. “We have enough on our plate.”
The European council president, Donald Tusk, said the stakes of the Brexit talks were “too high to let our emotions get out of hand”.
He added: “We must keep in mind that, in order to succeed, we need today discretion, moderation, mutual respect and a maximum of goodwill.”
Live coverage of all the day’s campaign action with the last PMQs before the election and a row over Labour’s NHS funding promises
Labour will lift pay cap for ‘overworked’ NHS staff
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PMQs – Snap verdict
PMQs – Verdict from the Twitter commentariat
Afternoon summary
You’d have to have a screw loose not to think things are pretty tough. I noticed when Jeremy addressed the PLP [parliamentary Labour party] he didn’t announce the key seats we’d need to take off the Tories to form a Labour government. I thought that was ominous.
It is a remarkable achievement for the leadership to have taken a catastrophic situation in Scotland and made it quite a lot worse. We seem to be doing worse in Wales … We’ve gone backwards amongst every demographic, every region of the country. Jeremy is behind Theresa May on managing the NHS! It’s quite a special achievement to put all of that together in a short period of time. Hats off to Jeremy and Seumas [Milne], Diane [Abbott] and John [McDonnell]. That’s pretty special.
In February the government announced that it would close the so-called Dubs scheme for taking unaccompanied child refugees from Europe after a total of 350 were admitted. This caused outrage because, when the government accepted Lord Dubs’ amendment to the Immigration Act committing it to take some unaccompanied child refugees, it was expected that around 3,000 could be admitted.
Today, in a written ministerial statement, the Home Office minister Robert Goodwill has admitted that a further 130 places are available for unaccompanied child refugees. The Home Office should have know about these extra places when it made its announcement two months ago but it didn’t because it lost the submission from a council saying it could provide the places.
The government remains fully committed to the implementation of our commitment under section 67 [the Dubs amendment] to transfer unaccompanied children to the UK from Europe and no eligible child has been refused transfer to the UK as a result of this error. The home secretary has written to her counterparts in France, Greece and Italy and we are working closely with member states, as well as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and NGO partners so we can identify and transfer children to the UK as soon as possible.
It is welcome that an extra 130 children will be brought to safety in Britain under the Dubs scheme. But it beggars belief that these children weren’t helped earlier because of a basic admin error. This shows a shameful failure by the Home Office to talk properly to local councils who were willing and able to help or to check they had counted the figures up right. This shows the Home Office simply hasn’t taken this seriously enough.
Time and again the select committee and local councils across the country told the Home office that there were more places available, but they wouldn’t budge and they failed to follow up. Surely on something as important as this, when children are at risk of trafficking and prostitution, they would have checked the numbers were right.
Here is another picture from Jeremy Corbyn’s NHS visit this afternoon.
The Scottish Labour party has named a former chief of the pro-UK Better Together campaign, Blair McDougall, and a leading Corbyn supporter, Rhea Wolfson, in their first tranche of general election candidates.
After its rout by the Scottish National party at the 2015 election, Scottish Labour was left with one MP, leaving it the major task of finding up to 58 new candidates when its popularity is at a record low of 14%. This is the first election where Scottish leader Kezia Dugdale and her officials have autonomy from the UK party in choosing candidates.
Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, has also criticised Jeremy Corbyn for not being willing to take part in a leaders’ debate without Theresa May. She is echoing what her friend and political ally, the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon, said on Twitter earlier. (See 2.08pm.) In 2015 Wood and Sturgeon joined Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, Natalie Bennett, the Green party leader, and Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, in a so-called “challengers’ debate” that did not feature David Cameron.
Wood said:
It is disappointing to hear that the leader of the Labour party is not prepared to take part in any televised leaders’ debates without the prime minister.
These debates are a good opportunity for people to engage with the election and for the leaders to put forward their vision to voters.
You have probably got the point about “strong and stable leadership” by now, but just in case you haven’t, the Guardian video team have produced a video pointing out just how frequently the Tories hammered home this message at PMQs.
Jeremy Corbyn has renewed his call for Theresa May to take part in TV election debates. And he has signalled that he won’t take part if she is not included. Speaking to Sky News, he said:
I asked Theresa May this morning about the TV debates, lots of people asked her about it, and she said they’re over because there are no more prime minister’s question times because parliament is now dissolved, or will be dissolved next week. And so, actually, the debate has to include the prime minister, the leader of the Conservative party, and we are up for that debate.
You will see me all over the country taking questions from people on the streets.
This is from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
CPS source confirms they’ve received a file from Kent Police over election expenses in South Thanet
Jeremy Corbyn has been meeting health workers today.
A Panelbase poll is out today giving the Conservatives a 22-point lead over Labour. Here are the figures.
On BBC Radio 5 Live Michael Gove, the former Conservative justice secretary and a leader of the Vote Leave campaign, said he was “absolutely convinced” that Brexit would result in more money going to the NHS. When it was put to him that Vote Leave had said at one point that an extra £100m a week would go to the NHS if the UK left the EU, and he was asked if he still expected that, he replied:
I am absolutely convinced that we will be spending significantly more on the NHS [after Brexit.] I hope it’s £100m.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, has tweeted saying that he has “sacked” David Ward as a candidate. (See 2.26pm.)
I believe in a politics that is open, tolerant and united. David Ward is unfit to represent the party and I have sacked him.
Arlene Foster, Democratic Unionist leader and first minister in the last power sharing government in Northern Ireland, took time out today from electioneering to pay a highly symbolic visit to Irish language pupils at a Catholic school near the border.
Foster had been criticised earlier this year for her opposition to an Irish Language Act – a key demand by Sinn Fein – which would put Gaelic on an equal par to English throughout Northern Ireland.
Now Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, is accusing Jeremy Corbyn of “running scared” after it emerged that Corbyn will not take part in TV election debates if Theresa May is not included. Farron said:
Corbyn is running scared. He is running away from facing his opponents, he is running away from defending his policies, he is running away from leadership.
The Liberal Democrats have barred former Bradford East MP David Ward from standing again for the party, after Tim Farron said his comments about Jews had been “deeply offensive, wrong and antisemitic”, my colleague Jessica Elgot reports.
Related: Tim Farron sacks Lib Dem candidate for ‘deeply offensive and antisemitic’ comments
In the huddle for lobby journalists after the final PMQs of the parliament, Jeremy Corbyn’s spokesman struck an upbeat note about Labour’s prospects. He said the Conservatives’ poll lead will narrow once the campaign gets underway and the public get to hear Labour’s message, “in our own voice”.
We are confident that we can win this election, and we’re fighting for every seat, and we’re confident that once Labour’s message is clearly heard, and there is a chance for the public to hear policies that many of them won’t have heard before, but which are extremely popular, and we know to be so, that will have cut-through, and Labour support will increase.
The politics and the polling is actually quite complex and quite varied across different countries, and I don’t think it’s just a technical issue to do with the polling companies that we’re in; I think it’s to do with the volatile and fluid political situation, with much more fragmentation.
This was all dealt with when the allegation first came out, and it’s not the case that John McDonnell signed any such statement. When the story was first run about a year ago it was made clear that it was confusion about another statement; he never signed the statement involving MI5, it was another story entirely. This is recycled fake news.
Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, has been campaigning in Stirling today.
On the World at One Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s general election coordinator, said the party’s manifesto would be published on Monday 15 May. Asked how Labour would fund its promises, he replied:
I’m not in a position to spell out the Labour party’s full manifesto here. But we will have to wait until May 15 for the manifesto.
Conservatives have denied that Boris Johnson is being sidelined from the party’s general election campaign by Theresa May, the Press Association reports.
Reports have suggested the foreign secretary has been told to keep a low profile because he is vulnerable to challenge over his pre-referendum claims that Brexit would deliver £350m a week to spend on the NHS.
A senior Conservative source dismissed the claims as speculation, and said Johnson would soon enter the fray.
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, has criticised Jeremy Corbyn for apparently refusing to take part in an election debates if Theresa May is not involved. She posted this on Twitter.
Faced with an open goal, Corbyn decides against even attempting to score . Unbelievable, if true. https://t.co/JkRBLxgLID
Source close to Jeremy Corbyn reveals he won’t take part in TV debates if Theresa May doesn’t. #GE17
This is what political journalists and commentators are saying about PMQs.
Mostly people are quite positive about Jeremy Corbyn, although several people think Angus Robertson was more effective.
Corbyn uses last #PMQs to attack May on triple lock, NHS, housing, education spending cuts. Weak ground 4 May but no real blows dealt #PMQs
May is a master at not answering the question. That is why Corbyn should use #PMQs to ask her the same one 6 times. Makes her uncomfortable
Corbyn channelling impressive levels of passion at #PMQs
Corbyn is doing rather well, as he did last week. Spitting out the questions. May quite pugnacious in reply
There’s much more to being a good PM than PMQs, of course, but May remains quite weak at this. No wonder she’s dodging tv debates
COMMENT AR shows JC how to do #PMQs but remember TM wants to drop pensions triple lock. If this is the worst this gets for her…
Theresa May savages Jeremy Corbyn at final PMQs before election #GE2017 https://t.co/9X2W54WHBL pic.twitter.com/hsy094eOaX
.@AngusRobertson there proving he’s the best opposition leader in the Commons. Skewers May on pension lock #pmqs
SNP’s Angus Robertson doing what Corbyn cd hv done: forcing May to wriggle on triple lock for pensions. May refuses to guarantee it. #pmqs
Corbyn channelling Miliband 2013: “He may be strong at standing up to weak, but always weak when it comes to standing up against the strong”
Corbyn with decent election lines the tories are for ‘the rich not the rest, the strong against the weak, and weak against the strong’
Corbyn quoted both Blair (“many not the few”) and Miliband (“weak against the strong”) at #PMQs. https://t.co/Q15ztRfeIH
Some very glum faces from Labour moderates sitting behind Corbyn during PMQs.
This is #PMQs at its worst – neither answering questions, talking about completely different subjects and shouting slogans #PMQs
Labour sources are also criticising Theresa May for referring to Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs as a terrorist sympathiser.
Senior Labour source says May calling Corbyn “a terrorist sympathiser” in #pmqs was a “discredit to the office of Prime Minister”
I Like Corbyn, But… https://t.co/xZPMEvtpjH
It gets so much better #ILikeCorbynBut pic.twitter.com/YzQwd7xrC8
Labour are ruling out Jeremy Corbyn taking part in any TV debates that do not feature Theresa May, Huffington Post’s Paul Waugh reports.
Labour source just ruled out Corbyn taking part in any TV debates that don’t feature Theresa May.
Theresa May refused to commit to keeping the triple lock at PMQs. But, according to today’s Times, the Tories are thinking of keeping the policy, which ensures pensions rise every year in line with earnings, inflation or 2.5%, whichever is highest, on the grounds that it would be cost free. Here’s an extract from Francis Elliott and Oliver Wright’s story (paywall).
Theresa May is considering keeping the “triple lock” guarantee on state pension increases because it is likely to be a cost-free promise for the next parliament, according to senior ministers.
Labour has promised to increase the state pension by a minimum of 2.5 per cent a year, despite warnings that it could cost taxpayers an additional 1 per cent of GDP by 2036. The lock is triggered only if inflation falls below that figure and the Office for Budget Responsibility is predicting that wages and prices will increase at a faster pace in the next few years.
The Lib Dem peer Olly Grender, who worked in Number 10 as deputy communications director during the coalition, says Theresa May was wrong at PMQs to argue that the Conservatives deserved credit for increasing council house building during the coalition.
Under Coalition NOT Con Govt increase in council house building thanks to LibDems who insisted (Tories at time didn’t give a ****) #PMQs
This is from Politico Europe’s Tom McTague.
French ambassador Sylvie Bermann in the chamber for PMQs. Chuckling away. Would love to read her diptel!
The SNP’s Alex Salmond says Liam Fox went to the Philippines and said we had “shared values” with it. What shared values do we have with Rodrigo Duterte?
May says we need trade deals after Brexit to ensure a strong economy.
Sir Simon Burns, a Conservative, says he has been Chelmsford MP for 30 years. They are perspicacious, he says. They want a government with a strong economy, strong defences and strong leadership. May will deliver that for the next five years, he says.
May thanks Burns for his contribution as an MP and as a minister.
Douglas Carswell, the independent MP, asks what assurance May can give to the 3.8m people who voted Ukip at the last election.
May says she wants to see the UK getting control of its borders and control of its laws.
Dame Angela Watkinson, a Conservative, asks May why people should continue to vote Conservative.
May says every vote for her and the Conservative candidate will be a vote to strengthen her hands in the Brexit talks.
Labour’s George Howarth says Andy Burnham had a debate yesterday on contaminated blood. He called for a Hillsborough-style panel to get to the truth. Will May join the SNP and Labour in backing the idea.
May says the government has put more money into compensation. The department of health will respond to the consultation.
Mike Wood, a Conservative, says it is good to be back. Doctors saved his life in January. Will May look at what can be done to reduce deaths from sepsis.
May says it is fantastic to see Wood back. She says he is right to focus attention on this problem. The department of health is working on a new sepsis action plan.
Labour’s Grahame Morris asks why May is afraid of TV debates. One should be held in Easington, he says, where May could see the impact of her policies.
May says she has been debating Corbyn every week.
Sir Gerald Howarth, a Conservative who is standing down, says he came into the Commons in 1983, when the country had a strong woman leader, and he leaves as another one is restoring British sovereignty. He appeals to Howarth to protect the armed forces guarding “this sceptred isle”.
May says people will have a choice at the election. The Tories will continue to protect the armed forces.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader, says May once berated her party as the “nasty party”. But it has never been nastier. And Labour is not holding to account. Doesn’t the country need the Lib Dems?
May says Farron talks about a decent opposition. She says Farron cannot say that when the Lib Dems have just elected a candidate with a questionable record on antisemitism.
Sir Eric Pickles, the Conservative, asks May about anti-semitism, and if she shares his disgust at the selection of David Ward, a former MP accuses of anti-semitism, as a Lib Dem candidate. (See 10.35am.)
May pays tribute to the work Pickles had done tackling anti-semitism. She says people will be disappointed to see the Lib Dems adopt a candidate with a questionable record on anti-semitism.
Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP MP, asks May if she agrees that those who refuse to take their seats (Sinn Fein) and who are refusing to form a government in Northern Ireland are not serving their constituents.
May agrees. She says she wants to work for the restoration of a government in Northern Ireland.
Peter Lilley, the Conservative, says he is standing down because of Theresa May. He says he has confidence that she will deliver Brexit properly. And we must accept that no deal is better than a bad deal. To deny this would be to admit that no price would be too high. That would be the worst possible deal, he says.
May thanks Lilley for everything he has done, not just as an MP, but as a minister in government. She says it is right to get on with delivering Brexit. The only way to ensure that is to get a Conservative government elected.
PMQs – Snap verdict: At PMQs you can deploy the sniper’s rifle or the shotgun, and today we saw Angus Robertson try one, and Jeremy Corbyn use the other. They were both effective in their way, although Theresa May’s shield of slogans and talking points managed to protect her quite adequately. It did not feel as if anyone secured a great triumph.
But in the circumstances, and with polling organisations pouring humiliation over Corbyn by the hour, that probably amounted to something of a win for the Labour leader. He asked about a range of topics, resorting to the “here’s a question from a viewer” formula that he used frequently in his first PMQs outings and neatly skewering May over her reluctance to take questions from members of the public. It was not flashy or eye-catching, but it was honest and solid and his points were strong. In response, May resorted to carpet-bombing Corbyn with the “strong and stable” leadership stuff. Her message discipline is outstanding, and conventional wisdom has it that you cannot repeat these slogans too often (although May seems to be testing that theory to destruction.)
Angus Robertson, the SNP leader at Westminster, asks for a clear and unambiguous commitment to keeping the triple lock for pensioners.
May says she has been very clear that pensioners have benefited to the tune of £1,250 a year. Under her pension incomes will continue to increase.
Ben Howlett, a Conservative, asks if May agrees that his voters should give him a renewed mandate to improve traffic around Bath.
May agrees. A vote for any other party is a vote for wrecking the economy.
Corbyn says millions of women will have heard that answer. Labour will guarantee the triple lock. And it won’t move the goalposts. Sybil, who witnessed the founding of the NHS, said she is 88. She has had wonderful service from the NHS. But now she is scared of going into hospital. With more delayed discharges, isn’t she right to be frightened.
May says the NHS is treated more people than ever before. But that is only possible with a strong economy. She says she will defend her record. She says Diane Abbott has been directing her followers to a website “I like Corbyn but ..”. It addresses questions about Corbyn not being able to pay for his policies and being a terrorist sympathiser. Even Corbyn’s supporters know he is not fit to run the country.
Corbyn says the last Labour government delivered a decent homes standard for every council in the country. House building has fallen to its lowest level since the 1920s. Children are being held back by cuts. Laura, a teacher, said she was seeing less cash every year to pay for children, and more reliance on parent funding. Is May still denying funding per pupil is being cut.
May says record levels of funding are going into schools. People will have a choice, she says. The government has delivered more good school places. Corbyn believes in a one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it approach to education.
Corbyn says Andy is concerned about how his children are being held back. All three of his children, in their mid 20s, cannot afford to move out of the family home. Don’t we need a housing strategy to deal with it?
May asks what happened under Labour. Under Labour, house building starts fell by 45%. And the number of social homes fell. Under the Conservatives more than twice as much council housing has been built as under Labour.
Jeremy Corbyn says this is the last PMQs of this parliament. It would be appropriate to pay tribute to MPs who are leaving, he says. And he thanks the speaker for presiding over these exchanges.
He says when he became leader 18 months ago he said he wanted people’s voices to be heard in parliament. So, instead of just speaking to handpicked audiences, will May today answer questions from the public. Christopher wrote to him this week saying hus husband had only a 1% increase in wages. But their buying power had gone down 15%. So where is his share in the stronger economy.
Richard Drax, a Conservative, asks about a leftwing campaign for socialist victory that proposed disbanding M15. Would May allow anyone like that to draft her manifesto?
No, says May. She says the plan to disband MI%, disarm the police and scrap the deterrent was endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn’s policy chief, Andrew Fisher. Corbyn is “simply not up to the job”, she says.
Theresa May starts by answering a closed question from the Conservative MP Michael Fabricant about the economy in the West Midlands. It is doing well, she says. And so are public services, because you can only have those with “strong and stable leadership”.
Fabricant says the country needs “strong and stable leadership”.
This is from the Daily Mail’s Jason Groves.
More Labour MPs in for #PMQs than there have been for a while – some taking a last look around?
Very loud cheers for Theresa May as she enters Commons chamber for #PMQs
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
#PMQS LIVEBLOG: These lucky MPs will be grilling the PM from 12. Follow all the action here – https://t.co/B8kBRMA48K pic.twitter.com/mTlwnKdOKL
This is from the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg.
This Parliament has only sat for 299 days – and had 61 PMQs – for some MPs, today’s the leaving do! Election will decide which ones
PMQs will start in 10 minutes. It is the last of this parliament.
And it is also only the second, and last, election TV debate between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn (counting last week’s PMQs as the first.)
Ipsos MORI has more good news for the Conservatives on the polling front. As Joe Murphy reports in the Evening Standard, Theresa May has the best ratings on “best PM” since the firm started polling on this in the 1970s. Here’s an extract from Murphy’s story.
Theresa May’s leadership score has soared higher than either Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair enjoyed in their best years, an exclusive poll reveals today
The Ipsos MORI survey shows the Conservatives on 49 per cent, with an extraordinary 23 per cent lead over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour who are on 26 …
Mahatma Gandhi was one of the great figures of the 20th century. He led India to independence and championed a form of non-violent civil disobedience that inspired campaigners around the world. It is hard to think of a modern equivalent, but the Ukip leader Paul Nuttall has suggested a possible candidate: himself.
Nuttall did quite put himself in the same league as the great Gandhi, but in an interview with the Wolverhampton Express and Star suggested they had something in common and the paper’s website has headlined the story: “I’m like Gandhi, says Ukip leader Paul Nuttall in Wolverhampton.” This is what Nuttall told the paper:
Raising issues of equality, women’s rights, and FGM are the issues other parties don’t want to tackle.
Ukip will lead on these and as I said in our press conference I feel as if we are a decade ahead of our time – a bit like we were a decade ahead of our time on getting out of the EU, and on mass immigration.
YouGov has released some new polling this morning. Since February, Theresa May’s net favourability rating has gone up (from +6 to +10) and Jeremy Corbyn’s has gone done (from -40 to -42).
Peter Lilley, the Conservative former social security secretary regarded as one of the Eurosceptics cabinet “bastards” once denounced by John Major, is standing down, the Guido Fawkes blog reports. In a statement announcing his decision Lilley said:
Now we have in Theresa May an outstanding Prime Minister in whom I have great confidence.
I profoundly hope she will be returned with a strong mandate to complete the process of leaving the EU and to seize the opportunities which regaining control of our laws, border, money and trade will give our country.
Lib Dem leader Tim Farron is continuing his tour of remain seats with Brexiteer MPs, after vowing to unseat Labour’s Kate Hoey in Vauxhall. His stop today is St Albans, where more than 62% of voters backed staying in the EU but Conservative MP Anne Main campaigned for leave.
Farron used the campaign stop to highlight the risk to the economy of leaving the EU and tell businesses they should stop funding the Conservatives while they pursue a hard Brexit.
My message to business is this – dump the Tories. Every penny you give them will hurt you; you are funding your own funeral. The success of British business matters. Strong British businesses mean more jobs and a stronger society.
With this disastrous hard Brexit the government is hurting businesses, both big and small, costing jobs and hitting families. All this means fewer jobs, higher prices and spiralling costs of things like fuel. This is a Brexit squeeze affecting millions of people.
.@timfarron visits the National Pharmacy Association in St Albans with @libdemdaisy talking about the #NHS & care pic.twitter.com/ZImwhVQEX1
The Conservatives have also produced a briefing accusing Labour of spending the money it proposes to raise from corporation tax over and over again. The Lib Dems cited 10 examples, although two items on their list were essentially the same. (See 9.09am.) In a note for journalists a few days ago, the Tories cited 11 examples. Most of the Tory ones were the same as the Lib Dem ones, but the Tories had three examples not on the Lib Dem list. Here they are, as set out in the Tory briefing.
Scrapping university tuition fees. Jeremy Corbyn said:‘At the moment what we’re doing is asking students to fund universities rather than the public to fund universities. I would rather move in to the other way around, with public funding of it … It would be largely on levels of corporate taxation’ (Victoria Derbyshire Labour Leadership Hustings, 17 August 2016).
Reversing changes to Universal Credit. John McDonnell:‘Universal Credit. We’re hoping on Wednesday the government will reverse that … If you had a fair taxation system, you weren’t giving the tax giveaways to corporations and to the rich, if you seriously tackle tax evasion and tax avoidance, if you grew the economy we’d be able to afford – we’d be able to afford our public services’ (The Andrew Marr Show, BBC One, 21 November 2016).
Tuition fees will be scrapped and maintenance grants brought back, the Green party are announcing as key features of their election manifesto.
Co-leaders Jonathan Bartley and deputy leader Amelia Womack will also say in a speech today that students and universities will be protected after Brexit if the Green party were in power.
The Green party is the only party standing up for students and putting young people at the heart of its campaign.
Education is a right not a commodity to be bought and sold, and we need a level playing field so everyone has the chance to go to university or college.
If the referendum result had gone the other way David Cameron – remember him? – would be in Downing Street this morning preparing for PMQs. Instead he happens to be in Bangkok, where he has just finished speaking at a tourism conference. My colleague Oliver Holmes was there and he has sent me the highlights.
Here are some of the key points he made.
Let me be optimistic … It’s very good that we are having this election, because I think if Theresa May is successful, she’ll actually have a larger majority and, potentially, more time to deal with Brexit and its consequences.
Arguably, you could say, looking at the state of British politics, the Conservative party having accepted the referendum result and got on with the process and responsibly delivering it, is probably the most healthy mainstream political party anywhere in western Europe.
It was a legitimate cause of populist concern, that Britain was a member of this organisation, the organisation had changed a huge amount over the last forty years, it had gained more powers, it had passed more treaties, it had become more important in more areas. And yet in spite of the fact that the British people were occasional offered a referendum by their leaders, most famously by Tony Blair, they never got a referendum.
If you want to address the causes of populism, it was necessary, in my view, to have a referendum.
But I think it was the right thing. The lack of a referendum was poisoning British politics and so I put that right.
These terrorists and their apologists are trying hijack a great religion and twist and pervert it for their own ends. We must not play into their hands. And that was to me, the biggest problem with President Tump’s travel ban. It would be seen, could be seen, as labelling whole countries as extreme and dangerous because they were predominately Islamic. It’s not a clash between civilisations that we face. That is what the extremists want us to think. This is if you like a war within Islam.”
There would have been a big lesson learn. I thought it was misconceived from the very outset.
Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told the Today programme earlier that Labour would have to raise “significant extra sums” to fund its plan to give NHS staff a pay rise. He said:
Each 1% on pay, just 1%, costs half a billion pounds each time. It’s not possible to say from what the Labour party have said quite how much more they intend to spend on the NHS.
If you are going to do that over the next two or three years you will also clearly need to raise significant extra sums in tax revenue.
Norman Lamb, the Lib Dem former health minister, told the Today programme that he agreed with Labour about the need for NHS staff to be paid more. He said the current 1% cap on NHS pay increases was unsustainable.
In effect we are asking very many staff across the NHS to just, year on year, take a pay cut in real terms in order to sustain our NHS. And I don’t think that’s acceptable. I think ultimately it’s dangerous. We are seeing widespread vacancies … Actually people will vote with their feet and leave if you don’t maintain wages at least in real terms.
The problem with the Labour position is their proposal just isn’t credible … The money from corporation tax increase has been spent about 10 times over.
Labour have already committed to using funding from an increase to corporation tax ten times since the last general election:
1. Bringing back the education maintenance allowance and university maintenance grants.
Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, will announce his guarantees for NHS staff in a speech to the Unison conference in Liverpool. According to extracts released in advance he will say:
NHS staff have been taken for granted for too long by the Conservatives. Cuts to pay and training mean hard working staff are being forced from NHS professions and young people are being put off before they have even started. Now Brexit threatens the ability of health employers to recruit from overseas.
What is bad for NHS staff is bad for patients too. Short staffing means reduced services and a threat to patient safety. Labour’s new guarantees for NHS staff will help keep services running at the standard which England’s patients expect …
In his Today interview earlier Jeremy Hunt admitted that Brexit would have an impact on the NHS.
There’s no point saying that Brexit and the Brexit negotiations won’t affect the NHS. This is absolutely critical for our public services.
Q: Are you saying you will give the NHS whatever it needs?
Ashworth says the NHS has not had what it needs.
Good morning. I’m taking over from Claire.
Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, is on Today now.
We will outline what level corporation tax will be in our manifesto when we publish it in the coming days … The whole programme that the Labour Party will be putting to the country in this election campaign will be costed.
I’m now handing over the live reins to Andrew Sparrow, who’ll take you through the rest of the day’s political news.
A quick reminder: you can sign up for the Snap, our daily election briefing email, here.
In a video for the Guardian, Paul Mason pushes back against the argument from the Daily Mail and others that those who oppose the government and its Brexit plans are “saboteurs”. Meaningful opposition to the Tories is necessary for the country and for democracy, he argues:
Meg Hillier, the Labour MP who chairs the cross-party public accounts committee, has been talking about its free schools report.
We will consider the recommendations carefully and respond in due course.
As well as Labour’s own NHS pledges, we might expect Jeremy Corbyn to press Theresa May on this damning MPs’ report on free schools when the two leaders meet for the final PMQs of this parliament at noon.
In the – so far – planned absence of televised head-to-head debates during the campaign, today could be the last time we see May and Corbyn take each other on ahead of 8 June.
The DfE is spending well over the odds in its bid to create 500 more free schools while other schools are in poor condition. Many free schools are in inadequate premises, including many without on-site playgrounds or sports facilities …
The department is in a weak negotiating position and commonly pays well in excess of the official valuation. On average, it has paid 19% over the official valuation, with 20 sites costing over 60% more.
Leaders in Europe will demand that Theresa May respects the right of EU nationals who have lived in the UK for five years to acquire permanent residence, Daniel Boffey and Lisa O’Carroll report:
In a sign of growing anger over the perceived bureaucratic hurdles being put in their way, the call will be made at a summit on Saturday, where the leaders of the 27 other EU member states are set to sign their negotiating guidelines.
The guidelines were amended by officials on Monday to strengthen demands over Britain’s €60bn divorce bill, open the door to further cooperation on EU-UK foreign policy and law enforcement, and add a call for transparency during the talks.
Such guarantees must be effective, enforceable, non-discriminatory and comprehensive, including the right to acquire permanent residence after a continuous period of five years of legal residence. Citizens should be able to exercise their rights through smooth and simple administrative procedures.
Related: Brexit: EU leaders to demand May respect citizens’ residency rights
Pressed on the issue of social care – which Theresa May has pledged to “stop ducking” – Jeremy Hunt is similarly reticent about what the not-ducking will look like:
We need a long-term sustainable solution.
You’ll have to wait and see what manifesto says … I’m not going to speculate on what the contents of our manifesto are.
And here’s Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, who’s popped up to defend his record against the Labour claim that staff are “ignored, insulted, undervalued, overworked and underpaid by this Tory government”.
I think they are working harder than they’ve ever worked before … You see a government that’s responding to that.
We will be able to train record number of nurses.
Applications do then recover.
You’ll have to wait and see what the manifesto says.
Labour will be attempting to shift the debate today on to the NHS, with shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth making a number of pledges:
Related: Labour will give pay rise to ‘overworked and underpaid’ NHS staff
Jonathan Bartley, co-leader (with Caroline Lucas) of the Green party, has been updating Radio 4’s Today programme on the progress of the progressive alliance, their proposed anti-Tory electoral pact.
The response from Jeremy Corbyn and Tim Farron, says Bartley, has been
very disappointing … they haven’t responded.
On a local level, people are talking to each other …
We want people to vote Green [but] we will support whatever the local party wants to do. But it has to be a reciprocal arrangement.
Good morning and welcome back to another day on the campaign marathon.
I’m Claire Phipps, bringing you this morning’s essential – should your morning be incomplete without news of constituency selection battles – briefing, and steering the live blog until Andrew Sparrow joins us later.
Remember, the opinion polls were wrong in the 2015 general election; they were wrong in the referendum; and Jeremy Corbyn himself has said that he was a 200-1 outsider for the Labour leadership in 2015 – and look where that got him.
In effect, this is EU Referendum 2. This is the chance for those who didn’t vote/couldn’t vote, to come out. It’s a chance for Remainers to convert more people, help their friends to see the catastrophe that Brexit is …
‘My own constituency voted Remain,’ Theresa May announced in the Commons as an example of her adhering to the ‘will of the people’. But if everyone in Maidenhead who voted Remain backed the Lib Dems in June, the PM could lose her seat.
The Labour party will need more than a wish list and a collection of grievances. I’ll offer three topics for starters. How do we ensure a fair intergenerational settlement? How can our education and tax system respond to the changes of the world of work and employment? Where do we anchor democratic accountability in a world of global flows of goods, money and people?
Planning for parliamentary deadlock and pacts with other parties might be tempting. But these are the methods of counter-insurgents. If Labour instead wants to be a party of government, it has to go into the 2017 election fighting for every vote.
The gap between first- and second-place party in 2015, 2010 or earlier, as well as any byelection result, is not the only factor. Strategists are having to look at how many people in a given seat voted leave or remain in last year’s EU referendum. This information is especially crucial for the Liberal Democrats …
A 30- to 40-point improvement (that is, a 15% to 20% swing that went entirely from the first-placed party to the Lib Dems) would do the job in seats where a majority voted remain – but that is an incredibly ambitious target.
I do not want the people of Scotland to think that English eurosceptics put their dislike of Brussels ahead of our bond with Edinburgh and Glasgow.
It took two months but Trudy Harrison’s first speech as MP was good. “Who knows if you’ll be back,” SNP MP replies in praise. “Or any of us”
The health secretary has ordered an investigation into the deaths of a number of babies at an NHS trust in the Midlands, after seven of them were judged to have been avoidable.
Jeremy Hunt made the move after bereaved families and the local coroner criticised the quality and safety of maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS trust. He has asked NHS England and NHS Improvement to look into an undisclosed number of deaths at the trust in recent years, amid concern that some were not properly investigated at the time.
The BBC said it had obtained details of at least nine suspicious deaths that occurred at the trust between September 2014 and May 2016, seven of which were later deemed to have been avoidable if the newborns had received better care.
Five of the deaths involved apparent failures by staff to correctly monitor a baby’s heartbeat.
Dr Edwin Borman, the trust’s medical director, said the rate of baby deaths at the trust – which handles 4,700 deliveries a year – was no worse than anywhere else in the NHS.
However, he told BBC News: “In the case of foetal heart monitoring, we have identified a number of cases where learning has not been fully implemented. We’ve put systems in place to make improvements.”
John Ellery, the coroner in the June 2016 inquest into the death of Kye Hall at Telford’s Princess Royal hospital, said errors by staff had contributed to the baby boy’s death.
“His death was caused or contributed to by failings at the Princess Royal hospital, Telford, namely a failure to reclassify Kye’s mother as a high-risk case on two occasions and a failure to auscultate [listen to] his foetal heart rate at two critical times prior to delivery,” the coroner said.
Kye was born on 15 August 2015, but he died four days later as a result of hypoxic ischaemic brain injury and birth asphyxia, or serious oxygen deprivation.
The trust accepted during the inquest that some recordings of Kye’s heart rate when he was still in the womb were not taken or written down, and that his mother, Kate Anson, could have been referred to the consultant-led maternity unit when her blood pressure dropped.
Last week, an inquest into the death of a one-day-old girl, from a group B streptococcus infection while in the trust’s care, found she could have lived had she received better medical attention. The trust accepted that Pippa Griffiths would probably have survived if staff had spotted the infection earlier.
Pippa was born at home on 26 April 2016. When her mother, Kayleigh, rang the maternity unit at 6.30pm to voice concern about Pippa’s feeding, staff reassured her. She said she called again at 2.55am the next day to report brown mucus, although midwife Claire Roberts said she did not remember the baby’s mother saying that.
Sarah Jamieson, the trust’s head of midwifery, said afterwards: “We are truly sorry that we were unable to provide the appropriate care that would have prevented Pippa’s death.”
Maternity services at the trust were strongly criticised last year in an inquiry, commissioned by NHS England, into the death of a baby girl, Kate Stanton-Davies, in 2009.
Her mother, Rhiannon, said: “Look at the failings, learn from them, move on. To not do that, they haven’t just killed my daughter, but they have disregarded the value of her life, her memory.”
The inquiry found a “lack of a safety culture” in the maternity unit at the time. It also found staff had not been held accountable for their failings related to Kate’s death, and that lessons needed to improve patient safety had not been learned.
The nine suspicious deaths include those of twins Ella and Lola Greene, who were stillborn in 2014 after staff failed to correctly read and interpret their heart rates. The trust also accepted other inquest findings that poor foetal heart monitoring was a factor in the deaths of Graham Scott Holmes-Smith in 2015 and Ivy Morris in May 2016.
Other deaths under examination include that of Oliver Smale in 2015. The coroner said his death could have been prevented if he had been born earlier by caesarean section.
The Department of Health said: “Earlier this year, the health secretary asked NHS regulators to undertake an investigation at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS trust in light of disclosures that in a number of tragic cases standards of care fell far below those that parents would expect.”
Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has told the private memorial service for a one-year-old boy who died from blood poisoning that the child was let down by the NHS and the government.
Speaking at the service in Cornwall, Hunt said he had “come here to say sorry” to the family of William Mead, who died after the emergency services failed to diagnose a fatal case of septicaemia.
Hunt told those gathered at Truro Cathedral in Cornwall: “I as health secretary, the government, and the NHS, let down William.
“I’ve come here to say sorry. This weekend William should have been enjoying beautiful Cornish sunshine with his parents.
“We didn’t spot his sepsis before it was too late.”
William’s mother, Melissa Mead, has become a prominent campaigner for better diagnostics of sepsis, saying last year that the NHS system was “broken”.
She has also described her son’s final hours, his symptoms and her repeated pleas to health services in painstaking detail on her blog site.
An NHS England report revealed there were 16 mistakes associated with William Mead’s death. Photograph: PA
The health secretary became aware of the case last year and has taken a personal interest in Mead’s campaign, a Department of Health spokesman said.
The spokesman added: “He went down at the request of the family and was also down there to visit a hospital. He had obviously become quite close to Melissa and they have worked quite a lot on the campaign on sepsis.”
An NHS England report last year found there were four missed opportunities to save William’s life in December 2014. Doctors and the 111 non-emergency helpline failed to diagnose pneumonia and the common but lethal infection of sepsis, and he died within 12 hours of Melissa Mead’s last call.
The report found there were 16 mistakes contributing to his death, which included that the “tickbox” system used by call handlers failed to include “sepsis red flags”.
It added that doctors were under constant pressure not to prescribe antibiotics and that doctors working out of hours were unable to access patients’ medical records.
Melissa Mead (@amotherwithout)
RT: Official Sepsis Public Awareness Campaign Video. Do you know the #SymptomsOfSepsis Please watch & RT to help us save thousands of lives. pic.twitter.com/5jV6ePxBaO
December 14, 2016
Sepsis – which includes common symptoms of fever, increased heart rate and confusion – kills approximately 37,000 people each year in England.
Melissa Mead said on Sunday: “We invited Jeremy to William’s memorial as he’s played a pivotal part in the sepsis campaign and we couldn’t have got it off the ground without his government support.
“Jeremy agreed to come in a personal capacity and it was a very intimate event for friends and family. The relationship that we have shows how productive a constructive approach can have.
“We know William was let down, but William didn’t know blame or regret, only love, and it is with this love that we keep putting one foot in front of the other.”
Hunt has admitted letting the family down and in January 2016 Mead welcomed his apology then.
She said: “We are quite overwhelmed, to be honest. We are just a little family from Cornwall but William is going to make an impact on the world and we are very thankful for that.”
The Department of Health spokesman added that Hunt was working with Mead’s awareness campaign in conjunction with Public Health England and the UK Sepsis Trust.
New figures released by Agenda, the alliance for women and girls at risk, have highlighted the routine use of physical and face-down restraint against women and girls in mental health settings. Although government guidance is clear that physical restraint should only be used as a last resort, this research shows that in many trusts it is widespread.
Given that more than half of women who have mental health problems have experienced abuse, restraint not only risks physical harm and can be frightening and humiliating, but being restrained, particularly face-down, can also re-traumatise those with a history of violence and abuse.
Mental health units are meant to be caring, therapeutic environments, for people feeling at their most vulnerable, not places where physical force is routine. That is why we believe face-down restraint must end and other forms of restraint should only be used as a last resort.
Instead, women and girls’ particular needs and experiences, including their histories of trauma, must be taken into account by mental health services and support given to tackle the underlying issues they face.
Katharine Sacks-Jones director, Agenda
Paul Farmer CEO, Mind
Mark Winstanley chief executive, Rethink Mental Illness
Sarah Hughes chief executive, Centre for Mental Health
Kathy Roberts chief executive, Mental Health Providers Forum
Liz Felton chief executive, Together for Mental Wellbeing
Professor Joy Duxbury chair, Restraint Reduction Network
“Just how easy is it to speak about things that have gone wrong?”, asked health secretary Jeremy Hunt in a speech he made last year about improving transparency and ending the blame culture in the NHS. Mr Hunt is himself failing badly on this critical benchmark for greater openness. The Guardian this week has revealed that half a million pieces of medical correspondence, including test results and diagnoses for life-threatening conditions like cancer, sat undelivered in a warehouse between 2011 and 2016. Yet it has taken almost a year for the full extent of this failure to emerge.
Mr Hunt was first made aware of the problem in March last year. But he did not inform MPs until July last year, in a 138-word written statement that mentioned neither the scale of the problem nor the potential harm to patients. The incident was confined to a single paragraph buried in the Department of Health’s annual report. While it appears a team was set up in early summer 2016 to look into the problem, much of the undelivered correspondence did not arrive at the GP surgeries of affected patients until November and December last year. No explanation has been offered for why it has taken nine months from Mr Hunt being informed to urgent correspondence finding its way to patients and their doctors. The idea that letters containing test results and diagnoses for life-threatening conditions can go missing for years is a frightening prospect for any NHS patient. According to the government, 500 patients may have suffered serious harm as a result of the missing correspondence.
The way that Mr Hunt and his department have handled this affair seriously undermines his pitch to be an ardent advocate for patient safety. It bears all the hallmarks of a government whose primary concern is not the health of NHS patients, but sneaking out bad news in order to avoid an embarrassing story. Mr Hunt has rightly drawn lessons for the NHS from the airline industry, which radically improved its safety record by improving transparency. He has introduced grading of hospitals on the openness and honesty of their reporting cultures. But he has failed utterly to hold his own department to the standards he expects of hospitals.
It is critical that affected patients are swiftly identified and offered an apology and financial compensation. But patients who have suffered as a result of NHS mistreatment often say that what’s more important is knowing what’s happened to them will never be allowed to happen to others again. This means tough questions need to be asked within Mr Hunt’s department about what went wrong, and what needs to change. How could such a monumental failing go unnoticed by so many for so long? How could the Department of Health fail to hold the responsible private company – which it part owns – accountable for basic standards like the successful delivery of internal correspondence?
These issues will remain relevant when and if the NHS ever completes its much-delayed transition to digital patient records. Mr Hunt said he wanted the NHS to become paperless by 2018; that goal now looks a long way off. There is nothing to suggest a paperless NHS means a more competent NHS when it comes to communicating with patients and updating their records. NHS IT projects have a terrible track record: the last ill-fated attempt to create electronic patient records was abandoned after nearly £10bn had already been spent on it. The creaking IT infrastructure at many hospital trusts has resulted in several serious data failings, including at St George’s in London and the Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust, often resulting in cancelled operations.
Communications and IT failures are far from the only risk to patient safety. The current NHS funding crisis has crippled the finances of many hospitals, leaving them with staffing levels that fall far below those recommended as safe by the inquiry into the devastating failures at Mid Staffs. Indeed, its chair, Sir Robert Francis, has warned the NHS now faces an “existential crisis” that makes another scandal on this scale inevitable.
Mr Hunt is perhaps the first health secretary to put patient safety so firmly at the heart of his rhetoric. But rhetoric cannot save patient lives. This week’s revelations of cover-up could not run more counter to his agenda to improve transparency in the NHS to reduce avoidable deaths. Mr Hunt must reflect on why – far from modelling the culture he expects from hospitals – he and his department have so badly failed to practise what he preaches.
A charity has urged the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to press the NHS to fund potentially life-saving treatment for blood cancer patients who it claims have been abandoned.
The blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan said the health service should fund second stem cell transplants for people with diseases such as leukaemia who relapsed after their first transfusion of cells. About 16 people a year relapse, and the charity says a second transplant provides a cure for one in three cases.
However, NHS England has said a second transplant is too expensive and provides low clinical benefit when compared with other treatments. The decision not to fund a second round is set to be reviewed in May, and the charity wants Hunt to put pressure on NHS England to change its stance.
Anthony Nolan’s chief executive, Henny Braund, said the refusal to fund a second transplant was unacceptable. “The health secretary must take action for people with blood cancer and blood disorders by raising this issue with NHS England,” she said. “We ask that Mr Hunt meets patients and families affected and take this issue up on their behalf with decision-makers at NHS England. Families are losing loved ones because the NHS is under pressure to make savings.”
In a poll of 1,700 people carried out by Populus on behalf of the charity, 66% of respondents said patients who relapsed after their first treatment should be given a second round, and almost half said it was unacceptable for friends or family to have to foot the bill. Almost six in 10 said the government was not doing a good enough job of making sure the NHS had the money to fund the treatments people needed.
Lisa Hepburn, whose husband Gavin died last year after two attempts to get an individual request for a second stem cell treatment were rejected, said: “There’s no explanation from the NHS; nothing from the heart. I feel for people who are in the situation of having to raise the money themselves. I can’t believe the government can put a price on a person’s life – that’s what they are doing.”
Last week a group of charities wrote to Theresa May urging her to stop the NHS rationing treatment for people with serious illnesses and to find more money for care in next month’s budget.
NHS England had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
Jeremy Corbyn has criticised Tony Blair’s call for pro-Europeans to form a new cross-party movement to oppose Brexit, urging the former prime minister to “respect the result” of the referendum and to put his energy towards building relations in Europe.
Corbyn, who was questioned on the comments after addressing Labour’s local government conference at Warwick University, said: “Well, it’s not helpful. I would ask those to think about this – the referendum gave a result, gave a very clear decision on this, and we have to respect that decision, that’s why we didn’t block article 50.
“But we are going to be part of all this campaigning, all these negotiations about the kind of relationship we have in Europe in the future.. The referendum happened, let’s respect the result. Democracy happened, respect the result.”
Earlier Corbyn said people were dying at the hands of the government’s austerity policies in a scathing attack on the prime minister days before two crucial byelections.
The Labour leader blamed ministers for an “emergency” in local services and a social care crisis caused by “disgraceful neglect” as he urged voters in Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent to “send a message” to Theresa May on 23 February that they had had enough of cuts.
In a speech to Labour councillors at Warwick University, Corbyn said: “We have a state of emergency in our social care system and the worst crisis in the history of our NHS.”
He added that the situation in social care was an “absolute scandal that leaves 1.2 million elderly people without the care they need”.
Corbyn cited a report in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine that said the crisis was linked to 30,000 excess deaths in 2015. “People are dying because of the choices made by this government,” he said. “Councils are at breaking point on social care. Our social care system has been privatised, outsourced and cut. It has dehumanised our parents, grandparents and neighbours.”
Corbyn vowed a Labour government would provide the NHS and social care with adequate funds while accusing May of leading a government that gives billions away in tax breaks to big business and the richest in society while cutting services for the most vulnerable.
He said: “It is this callousness, even brutality, that has put local services in a state of emergency.”
The twin byelections, caused by the resignation of Labour MPs Jamie Reed and Tristram Hunt, represent Corbyn’s toughest electoral challenge yet. The Conservatives are hoping to win Copeland from Labour, who are trailing in the polls. Corbyn’s past opposition to nuclear power is viewed with suspicion among many voters in the Cumbrian constituency, which is economically reliant on the Sellafield nuclear processing facility.
The party’s battle to retain the two seats suffered a further blow after Corbyn’s campaigns chief, Simon Fletcher, quit on Friday over an apparent clash with Labour’s inner team over the direction of the party.
The sudden resignation of one of his closest aides follows the resignations of four shadow cabinet members over Corbyn’s support for the article 50 bill.
Corbyn said on Saturday that Fletcher would continue working with Labour. “Simon and I are great friends and will remain great friends. We had a good chat last night. I’ve known Simon for 25 years, he’s a great friend of mind and he is going to do other things, but will continue working with us.”
In Stoke, which voted strongly in favour of Brexit in last year’s referendum, the main challenge is expected to come from Ukip, where party leader Paul Nuttall is standing.
Corbyn, who is expected to campaign in the constituency on Saturday, claimed Labour would “defeat Ukip’s politics of hate”.
Jeremy Hunt has said that performance in some parts of the NHS is “completely unacceptable”.
The health secretary said there was “no excuse” for some of the problems being seen in the health service and that some of the care being offered was not what anyone would want for their family.
His remarks, in an interview with the BBC, came after official figures for December and leaked January statistics for waiting times in England showed consecutive months of the worst delays in A&E since a four-hour target was introduced 13 years ago.
Earlier, one of his key advisers, Patrick Carter, had said that hospitals were under such extreme pressure that they were in a state of war.
On Thursday figures emerged showing that the number of A&E patients seen within the target of four hours fell to a record low of 86% in England in December, while those waiting longer than 12 hours to be admitted to a hospital bed doubled to more than 2,500 in 2016. The leaked January figures suggested a worse performance on A&E waiting times, with NHS England meeting its four hour target in 82% of cases.
The number of people waiting more than two months to start cancer treatment after an urgent referral was at a record high of 25,157 in 2016, and the proportion of patients receiving hospital treatment within 18 weeks fell below 90% for the first time since 2011.
Hunt said there was already a “big transformation programme” under way in the NHS with the aim of treating more people at home or in the community to ease burdens on hospitals.
But he said the changes would take time and said progress had been “disappointingly slow” in some areas.
“It is incredibly frustrating for me,” said the health secretary. “I am doing this job because I want NHS care to be the safest and best in the world. That kind of care is completely unacceptable. No one would want it for members of their own family.”
He said there were no excuses for cases such as that of 89-year-old Iris Sibley, who was stuck on a hospital ward at Bristol Royal Infirmary for more than six months because a nursing home place could not be found for her.
“It is terrible for Mrs Sibley but it is also very bad for the NHS,” Hunt said. He insisted the government was addressing problems in the social care system which are preventing many elderly and frail patients from being discharged from hospital – so-called “bed-blocking”.
Hunt added: “The prime minister has been very clear: we recognise the pressure’s there. We recognise there is a problem about the sustainability of the social care system. That has to be addressed and we are going to do that.”
Barrister Sir Robert Francis, whose 2013 report uncovered poor care in Mid Staffordshire, said the NHS was facing an “existential crisis” which made a further similar scandal inevitable.
Francis, a non-executive director at the Care Quality Commission, told the Health Service Journal there was an “increasing disconnect” between what is said nationally about the NHS and “what people on the ground feel or see is going on”.
“Let’s make no bones about it, the NHS is facing an existential crisis,” he said. “The service is running faster and faster to try and keep up and is failing, manifestly failing.
“The danger is that we reach a tipping point; we haven’t reached it yet, but there will come a point where public confidence in the service dissipates.”
A rowdy exchange, in which the Speaker interrupted four times to call for order. Jeremy Corbyn returned to a consistent theme this winter: the funding crisis in social care and the broader strain on the NHS. This time he came armed with what he described as leaked texts, exchanged between David Hodge, leader of Surrey county council, and a mystery official named “Nick” in the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Surrey had until this week planned to hold a referendum on a 15% rise in council tax to pay for the spiralling costs of social care, but on Tuesday abandoned the idea. Corbyn said the texts indicated the government had cut a secret deal with Surrey council – presumably to provide extra funding in return for the referendum being called off – and demanded to know the details, and whether the same deal would apply to councils across the country.
He wondered if it was merely coincidence that the health secretary and the chancellor represented Surrey constituencies. Theresa May dodged the question but said every council had been given the opportunity to raise a 3% “precept” to fund social care provision. She accused Corbyn, in a nod to US politics, of presenting “alternative facts” and claimed the Conservatives would spend £0.5tn on the NHS during the course of this parliament, whereas Labour wished to borrow the same amount.
Snap verdict
Flash rhetoric and clever questions are fine at PMQs, but facts are better – and Corbyn demonstrated how nothing beats a good, old-fashioned, leak-inspired ambush. His first two questions were a bit vague and waffly, he sought to lay a trap with his third, but then he surprised May with his leaked text allegations and, to his credit, he kept pressing her for an answer as to whether Surrey was getting a special deal for the rest of the session.
It was a successful hit. May stonewalled his questions quite forcefully, but without being able to conceal the fact that she was not answering his key question. Even without Corbyn’s Surrey deepthroat, May’s answers would have been unsatisfactory – she has not got anything substantial to say about her long-term review of care, and her attack lines on Labour on health, about spending, read as if they have come from David Cameron’s pre-2015 PMQs file – but having a strong attack story meant Corbyn easily had the upper hand.
Memorable lines
“Congratulating NHS staff on their hard work is one thing, paying them properly quite another” – Corbyn on NHS funding
“What we get from Labour is alternative facts. What they really need is an alternative leader” – May channels Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway
