A leading campaigner from the Waspi (Women Against State Pension Inequality) group has said the prime minister is on a “sticky wicket” asking for the votes of Waspi women during May’s local elections in England unless “he heeds the clear instructions” from an ombudsmen over compensation.
Angela Madden expressed frustration at the unwillingness of politicians to commit to compensation, saying:
Rishi Sunak will be on a sticky wicket asking for Waspi women’s votes at these local elections – and at the coming general election – unless he heeds the clear instructions of the ombudsman that Waspi women should be compensated.
MPs of all parties signed up to the case for £10,000 compensation each. The prime minister has the power to bring legislation before parliament which would deliver that, and that is what 1950s-born women now rightly expect.
Asked about the issue earlier during a local election campaigning event in Derbyshire, the prime minister promised “a considered and thoughtful response” to the report, but stopped shy of promising that the government would commit to setting up a compensation scheme.
Sunak said “hopefully people will appreciate that we’ve only just received the report yesterday. It is very long and detailed, and the right thing for us to do is to go through it carefully, and then come back with a considered and thoughtful response.”
This block was amended at 16.01 GMT. Due to a transcribing error, it originally said Sunak had promised a “considerate”, not “considered” response.
We will shortly be closing the blog for the day. Here are the headlines …
Rishi Sunak said his government would give a “considered” response to a report saying Waspi women deserved compensation, without promising when any response could be expected. Leading campaigner Angela Madden said he was on a “sticky wicket” asking for votes from the women affected unless “he heeds the clear instructions of the ombudsman that Waspi women should be compensated”. Labour’s Emily Thornberry said they would await the government response before making any committment themselves.
Sunak was in Derbyshire launching the Tory local election campaign for England and Wales, in which the government are expected to suffer heavy losses. He criticised local Labour councils for failing to balance their books after over a decade of Conservative governments reducing central funding to local councils.
The prime minister, who was appointed to the role by the Conservative party seven weeks after losing a leadership contest to Liz Truss, urged voters to send a message to Keir Starmer during May’s local elections. Sunak said the Labour leader was “arrogantly taking the British people for granted” and “assuming that he can just stroll into Number 10 without saying what he would do”.
Environment secretary Steve Barclay has come under scrutiny for failing to declare a potential conflict of interest over a proposed waste incineration plant in his constituency. The minister has now recused himself from the process, but No 10 refused to say when that had happened.
A private member’s bill by a Conservative MP, backed by the government, which was attempting to overturn London’s elected mayor’s Ulez expansion team failed to pass a second reading in the House of Commons.
Plaid Cymru have begun their spring conference. Leader Rhun ap Iorwerth has attacked both the current government and any future Labour government for failing to provide the investment he says Wales needs. He said “a new Welsh first minister coupled with a likely Starmer-led government in Westminster” would lead to “more stagnation, more managerialism, more cuts to public services”
Former Channel Islands data commissioner Emma Martins will lead the external review into the use of WhatsApp and mobile messaging in the Scottish government.
Thank you for all your comments today. I do try to read them all and find them helpful. I hope you have an enjoyable weekend.
Zoe Williams is on sketching duties today while we wish John Crace all the best with his recovery. She watched Rishi Sunak’s English local election campaign launch in Derbyshire:
Rishi Sunk wanted to talk about Labour-run councils – Nottingham, “effectively bankrupt”. After having a fire-sale of assets, they still can’t balance the books, in contrast to the extraordinarily well-run Conservative Nottinghamshire county council; Birmingham, and the scandal of its bankruptcy. A 21% rise in council tax for residents, decimated services, mismanaged finances.
I find it quite hard to imagine anyone being taken in by this. Everyone knows that local authorities have taken savage hits to their spending power, due to cuts by central government. Say what you like about the Conservative party and their messaging, everyone is reasonably clear on one thing: that austerity was their idea.
Nobody’s going to need more councils, of varying political hues, also going bust, to realise that the problem is a little more systemic. Every local authority is now like Schrödinger’s cat: it could be alive or dead, but if you open the box and look in, it’s dead. This is Sunak’s unlovely task of 2024, to keep the box closed until he’s out of office.
Read more of Zoe Williams’ sketch here: On the buses with Rishi Sunak, we see only side-streets and diversions
Rowena Mason, Kiran Stacey, Peter Walker and Eleni Courea all share a byline on this campaign preview going into the May local election campaign in England:
Launching his party’s local election campaign, the Rishi Sunak is six weeks away from a moment of maximum danger for his premiership. Qualms about the prime minister’s leadership are rumbling on, with talk of installing Penny Mordaunt or Tom Tugendhat in his place, but those calls may become more public and louder from some Conservative MPs if the party loses mayoralties in Tees Valley and the West Midlands on 2 May.
Few political experts anticipate anything other than a resounding victory for Labour in the 107 council contests on that date, but the possibility of Keir Starmer’s party getting a clean sweep when it comes to mayoral polls in London and 10 other areas is what is really causing jitters in Conservative party headquarters.
Senior Tories say they will measure success or failure mostly by a handful of mayoral contests, rather than how many councillors they lose. One cabinet minister said: “We are at risk of losing both the Teesside mayoralty and West Midlands. If we can hold one or both of those, we will have done well.”
The cabinet minister added, however: “The polls currently have us 20 points behind. If that were to be repeated at the locals, we would do well to hold on to a single council.”
Labour dismisses such suggestions as setting unrealistically low expectations in order to outperform them come election night. One shadow minister said: “They’ll easily hold both of those mayoralties. But that won’t eclipse the hammering they will get in local authorities.”
Read more here: ‘This isn’t a game of 4D chess’: Tories braced for bruising local elections
Plaid Cymru have been having the first day of their spring conference today, and Rhun ap Iorwerth has attacked both the current government and any future Labour government for failing to provide the investment he says Wales need.
He said:
The sight of Rachel Reeves walking in lockstep with Jeremy Hunt only offers more austere times. Sacking a shadow minister for standing on a picket line is a new Labour low.
Sunak and Starmer’s HS2 betrayal only keeps Wales in the slow lane. And the Labour-Tory coalition on lifting the bankers’ bonus cap only goes to prove whose side they are really on.
That is why Plaid Cymru will be unapologetic in demanding fair funding for Wales from whoever holds the keys to 10 Downing Street by the end of this year. Decades of chronic underinvestment must come to an end.
What does a new Welsh first minister coupled with a likely Starmer-led government in Westminster mean for us? My fear is that it’s be more of the same.
More stagnation, more managerialism, more cuts to public services.
I mentioned earlier that parliament had been debating a private member’s bill aimed at curbing the London mayor’s Ulez expansion scheme. It didn’t get voted on before the 2.30pm cut-off time, and so at present would be expected to be debated again on 19 April.
London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s team had warned that ministers risked “fundamentally undermining devolution” if they started “seizing powers from directly elected mayors”.
Labour’s Nottingham South MP Lilian Greenwood spoke for 33 minutes, a move criticised by Conservatives in the chamber as an attempt to talk the bill out.
During her speech, Greenwood accused the bill of trampling over devolution, saying:
The whole purpose of devolution is for local people to determine the policies that are needed for their area. The Government has set the targets for air quality, it is for democratically elected mayors and local authorities to run their cities or their counties in the way that works best for their area.
Transport minister Guy Opperman had said: “The government supports this particular bill.”
Not everybody is in full sympathy with the Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) campaign. Ross Clark writes at the Telegraph:
How bizarre it would be if women, after being told they can have equal pay, equal opportunities for promotion and everything else, had continued to be allowed to swan off at age 60 while their male colleagues had to continue to work for several more years.
They tell us that the decision of John Major’s government to equalise state pension ages has ruined carefully planned retirements. Yet somehow that detailed planning didn’t seem to extend to looking up at what age they would retire?
Women were given more notice than I received about my pension age rising to 67. Not that I am complaining. I fully accept – as should everyone – that as longevity increases so must the length of our working lives.
The government doesn’t give remotely as much notice of other fiscal changes as it did the change of the women’s retirement age. When the Chancellor jacks up taxes we usually get little notice – even though it can have serious consequences for our future financial lives.
There may be slightly less sympathy for Clark in some quarters on account of this payoff line though, where he writes “For many of us with private pensions the age at which we think we have enough to retire goes up and down daily with the stock market.”
Angela Madden, chairwoman of the Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) campaign, also had questions for the Labour party over an ombudsmen finding that potentially hundreds of thousands of women are owed compensation, saying they wanted to see Labour “step up” support, not “step back”.
She said “We also want to hear what a Labour government would do if they were in office. Labour MPs have long supported the Waspi cause. At this critical moment, we want to see the Labour leadership step up that support, not step back.”
In her media round appearance this morning, Labour shadow cabinet minister Emily Thornberry said her party would not be making any commitments until the government had put forward its response, telling Sky News viewers:
It has to be done in the right way. At the moment, we have to make sure that the government doesn’t wriggle out of this. The government has to make a decision about what is the appropriate way of compensating these women, and then they have to make a decision about how we make sure that Whitehall never makes this mistake again.
During the 2019 election campaign, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour manifesto committed to a £58bn compensation package, which would have involved an average of £15,380 being paid to each of those affected. The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) has recommended payouts of between £1,000 and £2,950.
A leading campaigner from the Waspi (Women Against State Pension Inequality) group has said the prime minister is on a “sticky wicket” asking for the votes of Waspi women during May’s local elections in England unless “he heeds the clear instructions” from an ombudsmen over compensation.
Angela Madden expressed frustration at the unwillingness of politicians to commit to compensation, saying:
Rishi Sunak will be on a sticky wicket asking for Waspi women’s votes at these local elections – and at the coming general election – unless he heeds the clear instructions of the ombudsman that Waspi women should be compensated.
MPs of all parties signed up to the case for £10,000 compensation each. The prime minister has the power to bring legislation before parliament which would deliver that, and that is what 1950s-born women now rightly expect.
Asked about the issue earlier during a local election campaigning event in Derbyshire, the prime minister promised “a considered and thoughtful response” to the report, but stopped shy of promising that the government would commit to setting up a compensation scheme.
Sunak said “hopefully people will appreciate that we’ve only just received the report yesterday. It is very long and detailed, and the right thing for us to do is to go through it carefully, and then come back with a considered and thoughtful response.”
This block was amended at 16.01 GMT. Due to a transcribing error, it originally said Sunak had promised a “considerate”, not “considered” response.
With impeccable timing, just as Rishi Sunak is out and about on a transport-themed day launching the Conservative local election campaign, Conservative MPs in Westminster have been debating to try to override the Ulez expansion in London.
Gareth Johnson, Conservative MP for Dartford, has tabled the Greater London Low Emission Zone Charging (Amendment) bill in a bid to give ministers the power to overturn the expansion.
Johnson said the expansion was “unfair” on people who lived outside London as they had “no say on who the London mayor is” but may have to frequently drive into the city.
Uxbridge and South Ruislip MP Steve Tuckwell, whose byelection victory after Boris Johnson resigned the seat was widely ascribed to a campaign that focused on Ulez expansion, said “the expansion of Ulez to outer London has nothing to do with air quality, it has everything to do with punishing hard-working families and businesses of all sizes.”
He said he continues to be “contacted by people sharing examples of financial hardships, collapsed businesses and the negative social consequences.”
Walthamstow’s Labour MP Stella Creasy reminded MPs that the London mayoral election takes place on 2 May, adding voters will “have an opportunity to express an opinion at the ballot box” in connection with Ulez expansion. She questioned if the bill suggested Tory MPs have “no confidence in their mayoral candidate being able to win that argument”.
Labour’s shadow energy minister Kerry McCarthy said the bill was “a desperate last-ditch attempt to try to boost the Conservative vote, and I think we know how that will turn out. We’ve seen some sort of quite depressing attempts to make it part of these cultural, anti-woke wars against net zero, to try to sort of say that net zero comes at a cost. We saw the secretary of state for transport buy into the whole conspiracy theory about 15-minute cities at party conference, which again is incredibly depressing.”
Rishi Sunak has claimed that his government is “doing everything it can” to try to support the Alstom train-making plant in Derby, which has recently said it might close, threatening thousands of jobs, as it has an 18-month gap until its next orders.
Visiting the company as part of his campaigning trip today to launch the Conservative local election campaign for May, the prime minister said:
I know it will be a concerning time for everyone, both in the plant and more generally. That’s why we’ve set up a dedicated cross-government taskforce to make sure there is appropriate support in place for all the workers.
More generally, without obviously being able to comment on commercial conversations, as you’ll appreciate, the government is doing everything it can to support the supply chain and make sure there is a good pipeline of work to do.
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2024-03-22 17:04:26Z
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