Lack of ICU capacity was ‘political choice’, Chris Whitty tells Covid inquiry – UK politics live | Politics

Two pensioners are seeking to take the Scottish and UK governments to court over the cut to the winter fuel payment, PA Media reports. PA says:

Peter and Florence Fanning, of Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, have raised proceedings with the help of the Govan Law Centre against the Scottish government and the UK work and pensions secretary over the policy.

The judicial review – which has been raised at the court of session – now requires a judge’s approval to move to a hearing on the merits, with the Govan Law Centre seeking to expedite both the case and its application for legal aid to ensure a decision can be handed down before the winter.

The case asks the court to rule on whether the decision was unlawful, which would then allow the petitioners to ask the court to, in effect, set aside the policy and restore the winter fuel payment to all.

The case’s argument rests on the accusation both governments failed to adequately consult with those of pension age on the change and did not release an equality impact assessment on the changes.

A freedom of information request revealed an abridged version of such an assessment had been carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), with the UK government arguing a full study was not required.

Former first minister and current Alba party leader Alex Salmond was instrumental in putting the Fannings in touch with the Govan Law Centre ahead of the action being raised.

Speaking at the press conference on Thursday, Salmond said every person in Scotland “should be grateful” to the Fannings for raising the action, which he said should have been taken forward by the Scottish government in the first instance.

Rachel Moon, the instructing solicitor and a partner at Govan Law Centre, said: “Quite simply, (government) should have considered this rigorously. This policy and the decisions taken affect those with protected characteristics, including age and disability, and it affects 10 million people.”

While campaigning organisations regularly try to challenge government decisions in court in this way, it is unusual for them to succeed, particularly if they are trying to overturn big fiscal decisions. Governments regularly announce changes to tax and welfare policy with minimal consultation.

Before Prof Sir Chris Whitty started giving evidence, the Covid inquiry heard evidence from Prof Kevin Fong, a former clinical adviser in emergency preparedness, resilience and response at NHS England. As Andrew Gregory reports, Fong said dealing with the Covid crisis was, for NHS staff, like having to respond to a “terrorist attack every day”, with infected patients “raining from the sky”.

Keir Starmer told US business leaders at a breakfast meeting in New York today that he wanted to “turbocharge” the economy.

After saying that discussions with business helped shaped Labour’s policies, he said:

Because if we can get into the question of what works, what doesn’t work, how to get the economy to really turbocharge, what are the ambitions for investment, that really helps us shape our working.

Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, is still giving evidence to the Covid inquiry about the pandemic’s impact on the NHS. Here are some more lines that have emerged.

• Whitty said it was arguable that health chiefs overstated the risk from Covid at the start of the pandemic, rather than understated it. Asked if the government should have placed more emphasis on the risk from long Covid at the start, he said:

I worried at the beginning – I still worry, actually, in retrospect – about did we get the level of concern right? Were we either over pitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where, in fact, their actuarial risk was low or were we not pitching it enough, and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into? I think that balance is really hard.

And arguably some people would say we, if anything, overdid it, rather than under at the beginning. So I’m not certain loading an additional risk on would in itself be useful.

I think we probably should have been swifter off the mark in spotting long Covid as it emerged, although I think we were relatively quick and it wasn’t obvious, we could have done something different as a result.

The main thing we could do at the beginning, before we understood it slightly better, was to reduce the amount of Covid. If you don’t get Covid, you don’t get long Covid.

• He criticised a tweet by the World Health Organisation (WHO) from March 28 2020, which said: “#COVID19 is NOT airborne.” Asked about this, he said:

I think what was wrong about this was the degree of definitiveness that was put into this tweet ..

I don’t actually think tweeting is a very good medium for trying to put forward really difficult science.

Jeremy Hunt, the Tory former chancellor, has said that Treasury officials always told him that higher borrowing would lead to interest rates staying higher for longer. He posted this on social media, in response to reports that Rachel Reeves is considering changing the way debt is defined in her fiscal rules to allow more borrowing.

With all the discussion about Labour changing the fiscal rules to borrow billions more money (so much for ‘fully funded’ commitments), it’s worth noting that the Chancellor explicitly ruled out doing so last year. My advice from HMT officials was always very clear on this: more borrowing means interest rates stay higher for longer.

Severin Carrell

The information commissioner is investigating an alleged data breach involving WhatsApp messages held by one of Scotland’s most senior civil servants.

Unredacted messages held by Alyson Stafford, the Scottish government’s director general for Scottish exchequer, were sent by government officials to a mental health campaigner with the names and numbers of junior officials fully visible.

Peter Todd, a campaigner based in northern Scotland who received Stafford’s messages last week using freedom of information legislation, has complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office, which investigates data breaches.

He said the messages, written to and from Stafford at the height of the Covid crisis, included confidential conversations, gossip and information about the government’s finances during the pandemic which should have been redacted.

The ICO confirmed it was assessing Todd’s complaint.

The Scottish government said it had alerted the officials affected, and took the “accidental release” very seriously.

However, it is understood it does not believe the data breach is significant enough to require it to notify the ICO. Scottish government officials told Todd they were “content that we handling it in line with our statutory duties.”

Todd said the unredacted names, phone numbers and messages were sent to him by officials in a bundle of documents, most of which had been carefully redacted.

The visible names, numbers and messages came to him highlighted in yellow, as were notes alongside them on which parts of Scotland’s freedom of information act required their redaction.

He was angry about the data breach because he believes his medical information had been mishandled by the NHS on earlier occasions, and that insufficient care is taken by public bodies.

“The Scottish government should have strong procedures in place to prevent glaring data protection errors like this happening,” he said. “I trust all those affected are being swiftly informed.”

A Scottish government spokesperson said: “We are aware that some information intended for redaction was released in error in response to a freedom of information request and those affected are being made aware.

“Any accidental release of information is treated very seriously and is subject to review so that appropriate action can be taken to prevent future incidents.”

Road deaths in Britain remain “unacceptably high”, campaigners said today.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) was commenting after the Department for Transport published road casualty figures for Britain in 2023.

James Broun, research manager at RoSPA, said:

While we’re pleased to see road fatalities fall by 5% on 2022, sadly 1,624 people still died on the roads last year – an unacceptably high figure following years of stagnation in fatality reduction. We are particularly concerned that when we include the number of people seriously injured on the roads, the overall figure (29,711) has shown virtually no improvement over the last year.

It’s important to put this into context. Although it’s good to see that road fatalities have decreased by 9% over the past decade, this is a marked slowdown compared to the 47% reduction achieved in the previous ten years. Taking a longer view, it’s clear that without a comprehensive road safety strategy in place, momentum has been lost.

RoSPA also said the figures for 2023 showed pedestrian fatalities up 5% on the year before.

Here are the road death figures for 2023.

Knife crime rose 4% in England and Wales in the year ending March 2024, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics today.

The ONS says:

Offences involving knives or sharp instruments recorded by the police rose by 4% (50,010 offences) in YE [year ending] March 2024, compared with the previous year (48,409 offences). Of these offences, 22,167 (44%) were for assault with injury, or assault with intent to cause serious harm, and 21,226 (42%) were used in a robbery. These figures exclude the Greater Manchester Police.

These knife crime statistics come from recorded crime figures – police records from when a crime is reported.

The ONS report also covers figures from the crime survey, which measures crime rates by asking people about their experience of crime (whether or not it was reported to the police), and it says that, on his measure, the overall rate of violent crime was about the same in the year ending March 2024 as in the year before. It says:

In YE March 2024, approximately 0.5% of people aged 16 years and over experienced violence with or without injury where the perpetrator was an acquaintance, and 0.7% experienced this where the perpetrator was a stranger. There were no statistically significant changes, compared with YE March 2023.

Elon Musk has responded to a post on X highlighting the BBC story about the government not inviting him to its investment conference (see 9.55am) by saying people should not visit the UK anyway.

I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts

This is misleading, but it is a claim that is popular with the far right on social media.

The government specifically excluded sex offenders from its early release scheme, although a loophole meant that some sex offenders who had served their time for the sex offence, but who were still in jail for an additional, less serious offence, were released. And no one has been jailed just for being offensive on X; the people who have been jailed over riot-related social media posts were convicted of offences like inciting racial hatred.

The UK went into the Covid crisis with “very low” intensive care capacity compared with other wealthy countries, Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the Covid inquiry this morning.

Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, has given oral evidence to the inquiry in previous hearings, dealing with pandemic preparedness and government decisions taken during the emergency, but today he is being questioned as part of module 3, which is looking at how the NHS was affected.

He told the inquiry this morning:

Taking ICU [intensive care units], in particular, the UK has a very low ICU capacity compared to most of our peer nations in high income countries. Now that’s a choice, that’s a political choice. It’s a system configuration choice, but it is a choice. Therefore you have less reserve when a major emergency happens, even if it’s short of something of the scale of Covid.

Whitty also said, without trained staff, ICU capacity could not be scaled up quickly. He explained:

The key thing, which is the rate limiting thing for scale up, is people, trained people,

You can buy beds, you can buy space, you can even put in oxygen and things. And I think we learned some lessons from, for example, trying to set up the Nightingale hospitals, about the difficulties of doing that.

But fundamentally, the limit to that system, as to any system, is trained people and there is no way you can train someone in six weeks to have the experience of an experienced ICU nurse or an experienced ICU doctor. It is simply not possible.

So if you don’t have it going into the emergency, if it’s an emergency of this speed of onset, you should not have any illusions you’re going to have it as you hit the peak.

Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a thinktank specialising in race and identity issues, says that it is “courageous” for Kemi Badenoch to endorse Elon Musk as enthusiastically as she has done. (See 9.55am.) As he explains, he is using “courageous” in the Yes Minister sense, as a synonym for rash or unwise.

But Katwala is citing polling about the views of Conservative party voters. It is hard to know what Conservative party members think, because they are harder to poll, and so less polling is available, and they are the group that will ultimately elect the next Tory leader. If their views align with the views of Reform UK voters, then her stance on Musk might help her.

(Katwala thinks Tory members are probably more rightwing on this issue than Tory voters, but less rightwing than Reform UK voters, which is a reasonable guess.)

The Senedd (the Welsh parliament) has had the power to vary income tax in Wales since 2019, but the Labour government in power there has never used it. Yesterday Mark Drakeford, the former first minister who is now finance secretary, said the government would “of course” consider the option of raising income tax when it sets its budget for next year.

Drakeford made it clear that he was not very keen on the idea, but the fact that he would not rule it out has led to the Welsh Conservatives attacking him for floating this as a possibility. This is from Andrew RT Davies, the Welsh Conservative leader.

We all know promises mean nothing to Labour.

But increasing income tax, as Labour ministers in the Senedd are considering, would be unforgivable.

It would increase economic unfairness and put even more pressure on working people.

As the BBC reports, in evidence to a Senedd committee yesterday, Drakeford said the Welsh government would only be able to raise “significant amounts of money” by raising the basis rate of income tax, because just increasing the higher or top rates woul not raise a lot. (Wales has significantly fewer higher rate taxpayers than the UK as a whole.)

He told the committee that people start paying income tax at £12,500 and he said he was very conscious that, if the Welsh government put income tax up, people on low incomes would be hit. He referred to a constituent, a young woman doing an important job but struggling on a very modest income. He said:

This is a very responsible person. Her letter to me said that she hadn’t eaten for three days because she’d paid her council tax bill, and that had left her with nothing to manage.

That’s the person I have in my head when we talk about raising rates of income tax, not people who are able to do it and would want to make a bigger contribution, but the people who are right on the very edge of managing and sometimes not managing.

Ministers giving speeches at party conference, but often the most important news relates to something they don’t announce at the platform. The most significant news from Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, this week was about how she might change the fiscal rules to allow more borrowing, but there was only a vague hint of this in her actual speech.

And today the Times is splashing on a story by Matt Dathan about prison policy which is also potentially transformatory – and not something mentioned by Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, in her speech.

Dathan says the government is looking at a schemed used in Texas that allows inmates to earn points for early release if they take part in programmes that will cut their chances of reoffending. He says:

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, plans to visit the US state later this year to see how Britain could emulate its success in reducing its high prison population and rate of reoffending.

Prisoners in Texas can reduce the time they serve in jail by earning credit for good behaviour. They also win points by participating in courses aimed at tackling the underlying causes of offending such as drugs.

This includes education, training and vocational workshops, as well as sessions on drug rehabilitation and behavioural change.

Mahmood and Lord Timpson, the prisons minister, are understood to be looking at whether similar schemes could be implemented in England and Wales, where prisoners’ release dates are determined in part by the risk they pose to the public.

In his own speech to the conference, Keir Starmer suggested he wanted to see more prisons built, not more inmates released early. “If we want justice to be served some communities must live close to new prisons,” he said. But in her speech Mahmood said she wanted to see fewer women going to jail, and ultimately “fewer women’s prisons”.

Private school bursars say number of pupils likely to leave due to VAT policy lower than campaigners have claimed

Sally Weale

Bursars at independent schools in the UK are preparing for fewer pupils to leave as a result of the government’s policy of adding VAT to fees than recent reports have suggested.

Since Labour outlined its policy, there have been wide-ranging estimates about the impact higher fees might have on pupil numbers, with some surveys suggesting up to one in four parents could be forced to take their children out of the private sector.

The most recent, from UK wealth management firm Saltus earlier this week, found one in eight (13%) parents are planning to move their children into state school this academic year.

Estimates like this have been widely publicised by campaigners, and newspapers, opposed to the VAT policy.

Now, however, it has emerged that “most” private schools are basing their calculations on an estimate that around 3-5% of pupils will leave as a result of the policy, according to the Independent Schools’ Bursars Association (ISBA).

This is even lower than the estimate put forward by leading economic think tank, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which predicted the policy would have “a relatively limited effect on numbers attending private schools – perhaps a reduction of 3–7%”, a figure which has been relied upon by Labour in defence of their policy.

Speaking to an online forum debating the issue yesterday, ISBA chief operating officer John Murphie was asked about the modelling being used to estimate the impact of the government’s VAT policy on the sector.

“There’s going to be a contraction, there’s no doubt about that,” Murphie said. “The working assumption that most schools are taking is that something around between 3 and 5% of pupils,” he said. The ISBA provides support to more than 1200 independent schools.

The policy, which comes into force in January, has triggered countless stories, warning that private schools will go bust and state schools will be unable to cope with the mass exodus of children from the independent sector.

The online meeting, hosted by the Independent Schools Show which takes place in November, was also told that some parents are planning to move out of London in order to find private schools with lower fees in other areas of the country.

Private schools, meanwhile, are looking at a range of cost-cutting measures, including increasing class sizes, reducing the curriculum offer, redundancies, mergers and asset disposals, the forum heard. Schools were also advised to invest in a robot to mark out cricket pitches to save money on a groundsman.

Patrick Wintour

The former UK ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher, who remains closely in touch with diplomats at the UN, said the joint statement backing a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon signed by the US, France, the UK, the EU and 8 other countries , including three Gulf States, now has to be used to bring about change on the ground.

If that happens, he said it could represent a watershed in the crisis and even a moment when diplomacy fought back.

He also praised the UK’s foreign secretary David Lammy for “coming out impressively early and hard” in favour of an immediate ceasefire in the way a Labour government failed to do in the 2006 Lebanese crisis

He said: “We have got to use this scaffolding so it turns into something that matters on the ground and not just to pause it for 21 days.”

He set out three headline priorities.

1) “Get all sides to step back from escalation. There are signs that Israel is holding back from hitting Beirut and there are signs of Hezbollah holding back from hitting Tel Aviv at scale. Maybe this shows the mutual recognition of the dangers of escalation.”

2) “Get the official Lebanese army on the ground on the Israel-Lebanon border – not Hezbollah, not Iran – get state authority back into the south Lebanon border.”

3 Return to persuading both sides – Hamas and Israel to re-engage with the Gaza ceasefire agreement. “It is that agreement that gets th- e hostages out, the aid in and in the end potentially opens the conditions for the two state solution”.

Elon Musk has not been invited to an international investment summit organised by the government next month, the BBC is reporting. No one will be surprised. Despite being the richest person in the world, and a guest of honour at Rishi Sunak’s AI summit last year, the far-right billionaire spent much of the summer attacking Keir Starmer on X, his social media platform, over the government’s handling of the riots and posting or reposting comments about the situation in the UK which were inflammatory, conspiracy theorist or just wholly false.

But one person may be disappointed. In an interview with the Spectator, Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leadership candidate most popular with party members according to most surveys, has said she is a “huge fan” of his.

The magazine asked all four candidates if they thought Musk had been good for freedom of speech, and Badenoch, the former business secretary, replied:

I think Elon Musk has been a fantastic thing for freedom of speech. I will hold my hand up and say, I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk.

I look at Twitter before he took over and after: there is a lot more free speech. Yes, there are many, many more things that I see on X, as he calls it, that I don’t like.

But I also know that views are not suppressed the way that they were, that there was a cultural establishment – that was very left – that controlled quite a lot of discourse on that platform.

All the other candidates were far more circumspect in how they replied to this question.

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister and current favourite in the contest, said that he did not have a strong opinion about the X owner, but that he was “not going to be booking a tête-à-tête with Elon Musk any time soon”.

James Cleverly, the former home secretary, said that when Musk took control of X, he tried to counter the perception that right-of-centre voices were being silenced on it. But Cleverly said you should be “very, very careful about curtailing voices that you disagree with”.

And Tom Tugendhat, the former security minister, said he was worried about malign states exploiting the internet for propaganda purposes. (There are claims this is happening much more on X since Musk took over, but Tugendhat didn’t directly make that connection.)

John Healey, the defence secretary, is hosting a meeting of the Aukus partnership today, as the UK and Australia are starting talks on a bilateral treaty.

The UK, Australia and the US formed the Aukus alliance, which is focused on submarine defence and Healey is hosting a meeting with the Australian defence minister, Richard Marles, who is also Anthony Albanese’s deputy prime minister, and US defence secretary Lloyd James Austin III.

The Ministry of Defence is also negotiating a separate Aukus side-deal with Australia, which it says will “lay out the nations’ relationship on submarine co-operation, as work progresses on future conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered attack submarines for the UK and Australia”.

In a statement ahead of the meeting, Healey said:

I’m proud to be the first UK defence secretary to host a meeting of Aukus defence ministers in Britain.

As Aukus partners, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder in an increasingly unstable world. This is a partnership that will boost jobs, growth and prosperity across our three nations, as well as strengthening our collective security.

I’m delighted that we will soon be commencing negotiations on a bilateral Aukus treaty with Australia, which will help create a more secure and stable Indo-Pacific for decades to come.

Good morning. Keir Starmer spoke at the United Nations security council yesterday, but today he is speaking at the UN’s general assembly (UNGA). In some respects these are chaotic meetings – world leaders queuing up to give speeches one after another, often over-running their times slots, not necessarily having much positive impact – but that does not mean it’s not a big gig for a debut PM.

According to advance briefing, Starmer will say the UK is returning to “responsible global leadership” because it is in British interests to address problems around the world. He will say:

War, poverty and climate change all rebound on us at home. They make us less secure, they harm our economy, and they create migration flows on an unprecedented scale.

For the rest of the speech, you may have to wait a while. According to the schedule, it will be 10.30pm UK time when Starmer gets to have his say, after Greece but before Nepal.

Before the speech (morning US time, afternoon UK time) he is due to meet US business leaders, including Jon Gray, president of the investment giant Blackstone, whih is announcing a £10bn deal to develop Europe’s largest AI data centre in Blyth, Northumberland. Rowena Mason and Lisa O’Carroll have the story here.

Yesterday, as well as addressing the security council, Starmer met Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, who confirmed that the two will meet in Brussels next week. Starmer said this would be a chance to “reset our relations with the EU”.

I want to reset our relationship with the EU and make Brexit work for the British people.

Looking forward to visiting Brussels next week to start discussions with @vonderleyen.

In Westminster parliament is in recess and, with Labour recovering after their party conference, and the Conservatives getting ready for theirs, there is a bit of a hiatus in the news cycle. Here are some of the events in the diary.

9.30am: The ONS is releasing violent crime figures for England and Wales.

Morning: Prof Sir Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry as part of the module looking at the pandemic’s impact on the NHS.

Noon: John Swinney, the first minister, takes questions in the Scottish parliament.

2.15pm: John Healey, the defence secretary, holds a press conference with his US and Australian counterparts, Lloyd Austin and Richard Marles, about the Aukus defence pact.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line (BTL) or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.

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I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos (no error is too small to correct). And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.