Two more refugees charities have joined the Refugee Council (see 1.44pm) in criticising the border security, asylum and immigration bill published today. They both want the government to open more safe routes for asylum seekers.

Lou Calvey, director of Asylum Matters, said:

This bill was a chance to make the change that’s desperately needed in our asylum system: to tackle the backlog; to let people work while they await their asylum decision; to save lives by creating safe ways to seek asylum.

Instead, the government has ignored evidence and experts to create a bill that repeats the same mistakes that have been costing lives and causing immense suffering for years.

Each new, harsher approach to militarising our borders, from Stop The Boats to Smash The Gangs, has done nothing but drive up deaths in the channel, leading to a record-breaking number of preventable fatalities.

We fear these measures will only cost more lives. Starmer could end irregular migration and save lives in one simple step, by opening up safe access to the asylum system. Instead, he’s chosen to copy failed policies in a bid to court popularity with a vocal anti-migrant minority.

And Tim Naor Hilton, chief executive of Refugee Action, said:

Framing migration as a ‘national security’ issue to use counter terrorism-style laws will irreparably harm refugees, many of them children, and stoke divisions as we have seen in last summer’s racist riots.

Most people who seek asylum here are racially minoritised and legislation aimed at deterring, detaining and criminalising them perpetuates racial injustice both in our systems and on our streets.

We want to support the government to amend this legislation so it can be a platform on which to build real solutions to protect people seeking asylum and support them to build new lives in our communities.

This includes protecting the right to claim asylum on arrival, creating safe routes to reach the UK, giving people the right to work, and repealing each of the last government’s anti-refugee laws in full.

The former prime ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair both paid tribute to John Prescott at his funeral service today in Hull today.

With many of the major figures in the Labour party gathered to honour Prescott, who was deputy Labour leader and deputy PM for 10 years, Brown described Prescott as a “working class hero” who “kept the show on the road during difficult times”.

Giving the first eulogy at the service, Brown said:

We will never see his like again. A man of the people he certainly was, in a class by himself, a one-off. One of a kind but one of us, in the best sense of the word.

Unique, remarkable, extraordinary. John Lennon would have called him a working class hero, and not least because he risked appearing on Gavin And Stacey, seen by millions, as Nessa’s rejected suitor.

John was a man of the people because he could connect with people, and I don’t just mean that man in Rhyl who dared to hurl an egg at him.

John could connect with people who had not only encountered him in the media, but knew he was on their side.

The John you saw in Hull and the John you saw at home was the John you saw in Downing Street, and the reason is he was never afraid to stand up for what he believed, and for the people it was his life’s work to serve.

As PA Media reports, Blair joked with the congregation about the “pandemonium” that ensued after “the punch” in the 2001 general election campaign. He recalled ringing his deputy with reluctance and asking him to apologise.

Blair said he got the reply: “The answer is no, I’m not bloody apologising and that’s the end of it.” The former PM added: “Classic.”

Prescott’s son David told the funeral: “He was a man who spent his life overcoming challenges and helping others.” He also spoke about his father’s final days in a care home, thanking all the carers and staff who looked after him.

Deputy PM Angela Rayner read the poem Here by Hull-based poet Philip Larkin, and Keir Starmer read from Psalm 107.

People seeking asylum on small boats who refuse to stop for the French authorities could receive sentences of up to five years under a new bill meant to disrupt irregular Channel crossings that has just been published.

A bill introduced to parliament will also allow people smugglers to be jailed for up to 14 years for handling small boat parts and strengthen police powers to seize laptops, financial assets and mobile phones from suspected smugglers.

The new powers, included within the border security, asylum and immigration bill, are inspired by powers used to combat terrorism, officials have said. It is understood that the Home Office is targeting “hundreds not thousands” of individual gang members believed to be responsible for the cross-Channel trafficking route.

Refugee groups have criticised the new powers, saying that they will criminalise legitimate asylum seekers who are forced to help gangs whilst en route to the UK and could make the cross-Channel route more dangerous.

They have also expressed concern that the new bill maintains some of the draconian powers introduced by the last Conservative government such as curbing the use of modern slavery laws by asylum seekers and powers to impose a cap on the number of asylum seekers allowed to settle in the UK.

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, said:

We are very concerned that by creating new offences, many refugees themselves could also be prosecuted, which has already been happening in some cases. This would be a gross miscarriage of justice.

Criminalising men, women and children who have fled conflicts in countries such as Sudan does not disrupt the smuggling gangs’ business model. When a refugee is clambering into a boat with an armed criminal threatening them, they are not thinking about UK laws but are simply trying to stay alive.

Labour hopes the new legislation will help turn the tide against people-smuggling networks that have facilitated more than 150,000 small boat arrivals in the UK since 2018. More than 1,000 people have arrived in the UK since the start of this year.

The bill will make it an offence to “endanger another life during perilous sea crossing to the UK”. Anyone involved in coercive behaviour, “including preventing offers of rescue”, will face prosecution and an increased sentence of up to five years in prison.

As part of Keir Starmer’s pledge to ‘smash the gangs’, those caught selling or handling small boat parts could also be jailed for up to 14 years as the Home Office will make it “illegal to supply or handle items suspected of being for use by organised crime groups”.

Where someone is suspected of selling or handling small boats parts or sharing suspect information online, officials believe the new bill will allow them to apply these offences against people smugglers and make an arrest.

Current rules mean law enforcement are unable to intervene until after a small boat crossing.

Campaigners have continued to criticise Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, for claiming that sustainable aviation fuel is a “game changer” that means a third runway at Heathrow can go ahead without climate targets being breached. (See 8.15am.)

Stay Grounded, a network representing groups campaigning to reduce flying on climate grounds, said in a statement:

Expanding Heathrow Airport in the midst of a climate crisis is a disastrous decision for people and planet. The claim that so-called “sustainable” aviation fuels can mitigate the climate impact of the expansion is completely misleading.

So called “sustainable” aviation fuels are nowhere close to being available at the scale that would be needed and would take clean energy away from the people and sectors that really need it. Instead the government must manage demand with measures such as a frequent flying levy.

Other campaigners and experts have made the same argument. See 10.19am, 10.32am and 10.53am.

More than 50 MPs and peers have called on the home secretary to commission an independent review into policing of the recent Palestine solidarity demonstration in London and to repeal “anti-protest” legislation.

In a cross-party letter signed by the likes of Diane Abbott, Sian Berry and Clive Lewis, they say they are “deeply troubled ... by the obstacles put in place by the Metropolitan police ahead of the demonstration of 18 January, as well as the policing on the day”.

The Met police arrested 77 people at the demonstration, accusing protesters of breaching police lines after it banned them from gathering outside the BBC’s London headquarters, citing its proximity to a synagogue and the fact it was taking place on the Sabbath.

The letter claims that footage posted by the organisers of the march, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, calls into question the Met’s account of what happened. It says:

There is a direct conflict in the respective positions of officers facilitating the progress of a delegation to lay flowers, and the allegation by police that their lines had been forcibly breached. Clearly being invited to proceed is wholly inconsistent with the allegation of a forcible breach.

It also says the signatories were “aghast” to learn that Met commissioner Mark Rowley said publicly the day after the protest that “his force imposed unprecedented restrictions” at the protest. Charges should be dropped against those “unjustly arrested or unjustly charged”, the parliamentarians say.

Labour MP Andy McDonald, one of the signatories, said:

There is a strong case for the home secretary to establish an independent investigation into the police’s decisions on Saturday 18 January, but also a wider review of public order legislation which Labour in opposition said would erode historic freedoms of peaceful protest.

Commander , the Met officer who led the policing operation, previously said: “We saw a deliberate effort, including by protest organisers, to breach conditions and attempt to march out of Whitehall.”

Sacha Lord has stepped down from his role as an adviser to Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham following the decision by the Arts Council to request a repayment for a grant issued to one of his companies.

The Arts Council granted £400,000 to Primary Event Solutions, a company which Lord is the director of, from the culture recovery fund in 2021 in the wake of the Covid-pandemic.

Following a report by the Manchester Mill last year that the grant was obtained through what the online newspaper called a series of “highly misleading claims” , the Arts Council began to investigate the nature of Lords’ application.

Lord, the co-founder of the Manchester based festival Parklife and club night series Warehouse Project, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, with the Mill claiming that they were threatened with legal action for publishing the claims.

Yesterday the Arts Council announced that they had found inconsistencies in the original application. A spokesperson said:

Following a thorough review of the application that Primary Event Solutions submitted to the culture recovery fund in 2021, our decision is to withdraw the grant that was awarded and we are seeking to recover this money.

Lord had occupied the role of night time economy adviser for Greater Manchester since being appointed to the position by Burnham in 2018. Burham said that he had accepted Lord’s resignation “with regret” and questioned the decision.

In a statement Burnham said that Lord had “accepted there were inaccuracies in a grant application”, and believed that “there was no intention to mislead and that he made no personal gain from the grant”.

Primary Event Solutions, the company to which the grant was given, entered liquidation in September 2023, leaving the fate of the £400,000 and the chances of repayment in doubt.

In at least two interviews this morning Rachel Reeves was asked about the essentially bogus claims that she exaggerated her CV when referring to her experience before becoming an MP. On ITV’s Good Morning Britain she insisted that she was “qualified to do this job” and that she was proud of her economics background. (See 8.47am.) In an interview with Times Radio, she also said she was “not bothered” about the abuse she received over this. She said:

Before I became an MP I worked as an economist at the Bank of England and then I worked in the private sector in financial services. I’m proud of the jobs that I did before I became an MP. I’m really not that bothered about what people think about the jobs I did before I became a politician.

In both interviews she was asked about being dubbed “Rachel from accounts” – a jibe that is blatantly sexist, but widely used in the Tory papers.

Reeves must feel aggrieved about this because she has a post-graduate qualification in economics (a master’s from the LSE). Arguably this makes her better qualified to be chancellor than any of her predecessors since Hugh Dalton and Hugh Gaitskell, who were both academic economists. Rishi Sunak had an MBA from Stanford, which isn’t pure economics (although may perhaps be more useful as training for running a government department). And Kwasi Kwarteng had a PhD in economic history. But he wrote his dissertation on a currency crisis from the seventeenth century, which may help to explain why his Treasury career was swiftly destroyed by the 21st century bond market.

The Times has splashed this morning on a story saying the assisted dying bill could be amended to take out the requirement for a judge to sign off applications for an assisted death to be allowed. The story says:

Assisted dying campaigners are to look at dropping a requirement for a High Court judge to decide whether people should be allowed to end their own lives, amid concerns about the impact on Britain’s struggling court system.

Under plans being examined by MPs who support a change in the law to let people end their own life, a panel of experts, rather than a High Court judge, would decide whether to approve an assisted death.

The move follows private warnings from senior judges that the courts do not have the capacity to deal with the expected caseload. Family courts have seen a significant increase in delays in recent years, with cases taking an average of more than 40 weeks to be resolved. There are concerns that these delays could be increased if the family division in the High Court has to also deal with assisted dying cases.

But Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP who tabled the private member’s bill and who is leading the effort to get it through its remaining Commons stages, has denied the story. A spokesperson for Leadbeater said:

There is no proposal or amendment on the table on this. Kim is very clear that the bill has the strongest protections and safeguards anywhere in the world and she would not support any changes that would weaken the bill.

There were suggestions during the oral evidence this week that a multi-disciplinary panel of some kind could bring in other experts like social workers and psychiatrists where necessary which the committee would look at if a proposal was tabled but Kim would not support anything that removed the judicial element. So, in short, if it strengthens the bill it might be acceptable to Kim but if not then she wouldn’t support it.

Many of the most senior figures in Labour politics are in Hull for the funeral of John Prescott. Here are some pictures of the mourners arriving.

Danny Shaw, the home affairs commentator and former BBC journalist, has been posting more key figures from the ONS crime statistics on social media.

BREAKING Crime in England/Wales has gone up by 12% 12% , according to latest survey data for the year ending in September 2024. Police figures show record levels of shoplifting - up 23%. Knife crime and robbery both up 4%.

Crime Survey of England/Wales is regarded as most reliable indicator of crime trends. The 12% rise has been driven by a 19% increase in fraud - with 3,858,000 incidents. Other increases in violence & theft are said by @ONS to not be ‘statistically significant’.

The number of knife crimes recorded by police is now back to pre-pandemic levels. There were 55,008 offences in the year to end of September 2024, compared to 55,170 offences in the 12 months to the end of March 2020.

Almost half of all knife crime is in London, West Midlands & Greater Manchester.

In year to September 2024, knife crime rose 18% in London & 4% in Manchester - driving the overall increase.

There was a 6% reduction in knife crime in West Midlands.

NEW Sexual offences recorded by police are at all-time high - almost 200,000 crimes in year to September 2024 (199,445).

This is 5% up in a year, more than double the figure a decade ago, nearly treble the number of sex offences 16 years ago.

Rapes also at record level.

Correction: Sexual offences recorded by police are almost *4* times the number 15 years ago.

April 2008 - March 09: 50,185

Oct 2023 - Sept 24: 199,445

This represents a huge shift in police caseload & one reason why there’s been a fall in overall charge rates.

Increase in police-recorded sex offences may in part be due to a genuine rise.

In year to March 2024, 2.6% of people aged 16-59 said they’d been sexually assaulted (including attempted offences).

Ten years earlier it was 1.5%.

Figures from @ONS Crime Survey of England/Wales

Here is the ONS report. And this is how it summarises its findings.

Crime against individuals and households has generally decreased over the last 10 years with some notable exceptions, such as sexual assault. The latest Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated 9.5 million incidents of headline crime (which includes theft, robbery, criminal damage, fraud, computer misuse, and violence with or without injury) in the survey year ending (YE) September 2024. This was 12% higher than last year’s survey (8.5 million incidents in YE September 2023), mainly because of a 19% rise in fraud (to around 3.9 million incidents). This was similar to levels of fraud estimated in YE March 2020.

Experiences of domestic abuse, sexual assault, stalking and harassment among people aged 16 years and over are presented separately in our statistics as prevalence estimates (the proportion of all people who were victims in the previous 12 months). Over the last decade, there has been a gradual decrease in domestic abuse, but an increase in sexual assault. Latest estimates from the CSEW for YE September 2024 showed no statistically significant change in these experiences compared with YE March 2023, except for stalking.

Nearly half a million shoplifting offences were recorded by police in England and Wales in a year, the highest 12-month total on record, PA Media reports. PA says:

A total of 492,914 offences were logged by forces in the year to September 2024, up 23% from 402,220 in the previous 12 months.

The figure is the highest since current records began in the year to March 2003, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Shoplifting levels had already reached a 20-year high last year, the ONS said.

Police recorded 1.8 million theft offences in the year to September, a 2% increase driven by shoplifting and a 22% rise in crimes involving theft from a person (146,109), according to the data published today.

It comes amid warnings that shoplifting is “spiralling out of control” after a survey by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) suggested there were more than 2,000 incidents a day, with staff facing assault, being threatened with weapons, and racial and sexual abuse.

On the Today programme this morning Rachel Reeves claimed that sustainable aviation fuel was a “game changer” in the debate about whether it is possible to expand airports without breaking carbon targets. (See 8.15am.)

Asked why Labour ministers who voted against Heathrow expansion in the past were now in favour, she replied:

We last voted on this in parliament about six years ago, but a lot has changed in the way that we fly since then. Engines have become much more efficient. And, just at the beginning of this year, this government introduced the mandate for sustainable aviation fuel, which can reduce carbon emissions from flying by 70%. And of course, there’s going to be much more progress on that in the years to come.

When Justin Webb asked if Reeves really believed sustainable aviation fuel completely changed the argument, Reeves replied:

I believe it is a game changer in the way that we fly and the carbon emissions.

We’re also reforming how we use airspace so that we don’t have the problem of planes circling around London. Indeed, having a third runway means that it’s easier for planes to land, rather than circling the vicinity of Heathrow.

Webb asked if the government would be able to produce evidence that showed sustainable aviation fuel really would make that much difference. Reeves replied:

We’ve asked Heathrow to come forward with plans for that third runway by the summer, and we’ve said that it needs to meet strict rules about environmental and carbon emissions … I do believe they can. And Heathrow believes that they can as well.

But the claim that sustainable aviation fuels are really a game changer to the extent that Reeves alleges is not supported by experts. Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, explained why in an analysis published yesterday. He says:

The government is only planning for 10% of jet fuel to be sustainable by 2030, which its official advisers, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), says is already ambitious.

The CCC says overall UK emissions must fall by 63% by 2035, compared with 2019. But there is agreement among analysts that building an SAF supply chain to displace much of the existing demand for jet fuel, let alone that from a big expansion in flights, will be slow and difficult. SAF created by using renewable electricity is expensive and there is a limited supply of the waste fat that is used to make SAF. The government’s own forecast is that SAF will only cut emissions by 6.3m tonnes by 2040.

Small electric planes exist that can travel short distances but it will be many years, if ever, before large long-haul planes can be powered by batteries. Aircraft are becoming more fuel efficient but the rate of improvement is marginal compared to the increase in flights a third runway would bring.

The full article is here.

And Iain Soutar, an environmental scientist at the University of Exeter has posed this on Bluesky, pointing out that the Climate Change Committee says that, while sustainable avaition fuels can help, on their own they would not compensate for the increase in carbon emissions caused by rising demand for flights.

The @thecccuk.bsky.social has suggested that SAFs may play a role in the future, but that demand will have to be constrained to meet aviation ghg targets.

In short, supporting another runway at Heathrow would mean that commensurate capacity will have to be reduced from airports elsewhere.

In the Q&A after her speech yesterday, Rachel Reeves was asked by GB News if she would release her tax returns. She said that previous chancellors had not done that, and she was not planning to do it either.

But previous chancellors, like Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, have published their tax returns, and today Reeves told Times Radio she would be publishing hers. She said:

I wasn’t aware that previous chancellors had released their tax return. I’m very happy to release my tax return in accordance with what’s happened in the recent past and I’ll be doing that alongside the prime minister in due course.

Keir Starmer published his tax returns when he was Labour leader, and yesterday his spokeperson said he would continue to do that as PM, as Sunak also did when he was PM.

Asked if she thought Kemi Badenoch should also release her tax return, Reeves said:

That’s the matter for Kemi Badenoch, but the prime minister and I will be releasing ours.

Rachel Reeves is now being interview on GB News.

She says a survey suggests two thirds of businesses are more confident as a result of what she announced in her speech yesterday.

She seems to be referring to this.

Q: But businesses are cutting jobs, and saying that your policies are to blame.

Reeves says businesses have to make their own decisions about jobs.

The measures in yesterday’s speech will create jobs, she says. She says a third runway at Heathrow would create 100,000 jobs.

Q: Can you rule out emergency tax increases in your spring statement to ensure that you meet your fiscal rules.

Reeves says she has already set out plans to address the £22bn black hole she inherited. She says the Office for Budget Responsibility will give an update on 26 March and she will set out her plans then.

Q: There is speculation you are going to get rid of the seven-year tax rules, which means gifts given seven years before someone dies are not covered by inheritance tax. Are you?

Reeves says she is not planning to do that.

And that’s the end of that interview.

In her Today programme interview Rachel Reeves, a Leeds MP, was asked about her previous opposition to the expansion of the Leeds Bradford airport. Kemi Badenoch raised this at PMQs yesterday, claiming it showed that Labour minister were “hypocrites”.

Reeves replied:

If Leeds Bradford came back with plans to expand, I would support those, because I think that things have changed significantly in the last few years, and the cabinet supports these plans.

We’ve already, as a government, signed off expansion at Stansted and City Airport, because we know that we need the economic growth, and we know that sustainable aviation and economic growth go hand in hand.

In an interview on LBC Rachel Reeves was asked if Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, was fully behind the plans for Heathrow expansion. She replied:

Yes, we are all united as a cabinet backing these plans.

We know that we have to grow our economy, we can’t keep saying no to big infrastructure projects.

Miliband is seen as the cabinet minister most sceptical about the third runway, and whether it can be built without wrecking the UK’s climate commitments. It has been widely reported that he threatened to resign over this when he was in Gordon Brown’s cabinet as energy secretary, and Brown was committing his government to a third runway. Miliband’s biographers say that is not quite right, and that instead he was just focusing on getting the best possible mitigations.

Q: You talked about bats yesterday, and the HS2 bat tunnel. But there will have to be a bat tunnel for the Oxford-Cambridge rail plan. What are you proposing?

Reeves says decisions need to be made differently. There will be a Nature Restoration Fund. Developers will have to pay into that. But it might fund environmental measures somewhere else.

Q: So the bats might not be protected in one particular area?

Reeves says there are trade-offs. She claims that the current rules go too far.

The balance has gone too far in the direction of always protecting every bat and every newt.

Q: So, if the Oxford-Cambridge rail line goes ahead, it won’t have a tunnel to protect bats.

“Other ways will be found,” Reeves says.

And that is the end of that interview.

According to Politico’s London Playbook, Reeves has three more interviews to go: on Good Morning Britain at 8.30am, Bloomberg at 8.50am and GB News at 8.55am.

Rachel Reeves is now being interviewed by Justin Webb on the Today programme.

Q: When did Keir Starmer, who used to oppose Heathrow expansion, change his mind?

Reeves says MPs last voted on this about six years ago. Since then a lot has changed, she says.

She claims sustainable aviation fuel can reduce emissions by 70%.

Q: So you think sustainable aviation fuel has changed the arguments.

Reeves says she thinks it is a “game changer”. But she says reforms to the way airspace is used also make a difference. If planes spend less time circulating, they use less fuel, she says

Good morning. The Treasury is continuing to give Rachel Reeves’ speech the sort of media treatment usually reserved for a budget; after a week-long advance briefing blitz, the chancellor is now engaged in a day-after full media round. She will be on the Today programme at 8.10am.

Here is our lead story overnight about the speech.

On BBC Breakfast this morning, in response to questions about whether it is realistic to expect a third runway at Heathrow to be built anytime soon, Reeves said she would liktop see “spades in the ground” this parliament.

Asked for a timeline on the plan, Reeves replied:

We want to see spades in the ground in this parliament.

We have asked Heathrow to come forward with plans by this summer, and then we want to grant that development consent order by the end of this parliament, so we can get the diggers in the ground to get this project up and running.

Asked when flights might take off from the third runway, Reeves said:

I think we can get that done in a decade.

Asked if this meant planes would be using the new runway by 2035, Reeves said:

That is what we want to achieve and that is what Heathrow wants to achieve.

(“Spades in the ground” is a metaphor. Or, at least, one hopes so. If they are going to build the third runway with spades, the economy is in even more trouble than we realised.)

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: The ONS publishes crime figures for England and Wales.

9.30am: Johnathan Reynolds, the business secretary, takes questions in the Commons

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 11.30am: MPs hold a backbench debate on proportional representation.

Noon: Mourners attend John Prescott’s funeral in Hull.

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