Scotland’s mental health minister has said there is “absolutely no doubt” there is a serious staffing crisis in NHS psychiatry which has led to record spending on locums, which hit £35m last year.

An investigation by the Guardian and BBC Scotland revealed on Monday that Scotland’s NHS boards have spent £134m on locum psychiatrists over the last five years, largely drawn from recruitment agencies and private health companies.

Maree Todd was challenged about the findings by Edward Mountain, from the Scottish Conservatives, and Paul Sweeney, from Scottish Labour, at Holyrood on Tuesday afternoon.

Mountain said the data, which established that spending on locums and emergency cover was increasing year on year, showed mental health services were “at breaking point” and the consequence of poor work-force planning.

Sweeney said the response to the staffing crisis was “an extortionate sticking plaster of spending over £130m on locum psychiatrists”, with boards paying up to £837 an hour to plug the gaps. “Is the minister’s idea of a robust NHS workforce strategy, anything resembling that sort of figure?”

Todd said she is “absolutely in no doubt” there were recruitment challenges in NHS psychiatry and “certainly” accepted concerns that some locums were paid to do online consultations from outside the UK, including one who dialled in from India.

“I am absolutely aware of the challenges which exist across the workforce and which can be particularly marked in more remote and rural areas,” she said, adding that as a former mental health nurse for NHS Highlands, she was acutely aware of the problem.

She said Neil Gray, the Scottish health secretary, was meeting the Royal College of Psychiatrists on Thursday to discuss the staffing crisis, while several working groups had been formed to investigate longer-term solutions, on improved recruitment of psychiatrists and on the extensive use of locums.

Todd said medical school psychiatry places were full and significant sums being spent across mental health services in the NHS. She added:

There is undoubtedly a rise in demand that we have seen in some parts of the country. These are pressures which could not have been predicted. So that relates to the reduction in stigma associated with these causes, but it undoubtedly adds to the challenge in managing the current situation.

According to Hugo Gye from the i, the Robert Jenrick camp is arguing that he should be in the final ballot because he has support from all wings of the party.

Jenrick campaign source: “Robert is now in prime position to make the final two. MPs want seriousness and competence. That’s why he’s won support from across the party so far - from Danny Kruger on the right to Vicky Atkins on the left.”

But the Kemi Badenoch camp is arguing that rightwingers need to unite behind her as the candidate for the right, he says.

Badenoch campaign source: “There are three candidates left in this contest, two are gaining votes and one is going backwards and losing support. The right of the Conservative Party now needs to coalesce around Kemi.”

For much of the summer Robert Jenrick was the clear bookmaker’s favourite in the Tory leadership contest. Going back to a point before the general election, Kemi Badenoch was favourite for a long time, but the odds shifted when political insiders started to take the view she was unlikely to make the final ballot.

Even a week ago, at Conservative conference, Jenrick was still ahead. The big news, in polling terms, this time last week was that Jenrick had just about caught up with Kemi Badenoch in terms of popularity with members.

But the rise of James Cleverly (a distant third in the race this time last week) has been extraordinary. There were 16 votes up for grabs in the ballot this afternoon (MPs who voted for Mel Stride before he was eliminated). Cleverly’s vote went up by 18 – suggesting he could have picked up the entire Stride haul, and won over two extra people too. In reality, some of the Stride votes may have gone elsewhere, and there is likely to have been some churn (people who voted for one candidate last time switching to another). Still, it is close to a clean sweep.

Last week it was clear that Cleverly had “won” the final hustings by delivering the best speech on the final day. But I don’t think there were any commentators who realised on the day quite to what extent that speech would upend the race.

Now Cleverly and Badenoch both have a path to victory. For Jenrick, it is much harder.

A survey of Tory members by ConservativeHome at the weekend implies that, if Cleverly and Badenoch are on the final ballot, Badenoch will win narrowly. Here are the figures, which suggest she is ahead of him by 48% to 42%, with don’t knows at 9%. If Badenoch can make the final ballot tomorrow, by overtaking Jenrick, and if she can hold this lead with members, she can win.

Cleverly’s best chance of becoming leader would involve going into a final ballot against Jenrick. These figures suggest he would win quite easily, as they put him on 54% against Jenrick’s 36%. That means Cleverly supporters may be tempted to lend votes to Jenrick to get him over the line tomorrow. This happened in 2019, when Boris Johnson wanted to be up against Jeremy Hunt, not Michael Gove, in the final ballot. But it’s a risky enterprise.

For Jenrick, there is no obvious route to victory as things stand now.

Of course, a survey is just a survey and, as the last week has shown, in an electoral contest people change their mind about the candidates. Perhaps Jenrick could make the final two and turn things around. But today he’s trailing.

Here are the results.

James Cleverly: 39 (up 18 from last round)

Robert Jenrick: 31 (down 2)

Kemi Badenoch: 30 (up 2)

Tom Tugendhat: 20 (down 1)

Labour was not ready for government, in organisational terms, Peter Mandelson has said.

Speaking on the Times’ How to Win an Election podcast, Mandelson, who was a key fixer when New Labour was in government, said:

One of the problems for the Starmer administration is that there was an ambiguity about what the role of Number 10 was right at the beginning. And Keir had given a signal that he didn’t want to run a command and control Number 10 operation. He wanted to give more freedom, more autonomy to departments. He didn’t want to second guess everyone. He wanted to give people wriggle room. Well, I’m afraid that the great ship of state called the British Nation and Government doesn’t work like that.

[It] requires a very good, quite complex, quite sophisticated machine at Number 10. And the truth is that for all the preparation that was made for government by the Starmer team, it wasn’t done to the extent or in the way it should have been. There wasn’t enough sort of pinning down and agreement amongst everyone as to how it should operate. And once in government, you know, people’s different roles were not frankly communicated as they needed to be. So, it wasn’t all joined up, I’m afraid.

This is an implicit criticism of Sue Gray, who was replaced on Sunday as Starmer’s chief of staff. Gray was in charge of the transition into government when Labour was in opposition.

Mandelson also praised Morgan McSweeney, Gray’s replacement, saying he would be “a very hard taskmasker” for people working in No 10.

Morgan McSweeney, I believe, he’s the sort of person who knows what excellence is and he will insist on having the best people in the jobs. He will always be available to them. He will always counsel them. He will always give them advice, but he will expect them to get on with their jobs and to deliver. And if they do, they’ll be fine and safe. And if they don’t, then I’m afraid they will be out. He’s a very hard taskmaster.

James Cleverly is seen by voters as the Tory leadership candidate most likely to become prime minister, according to new polling by Ipsos..

In its write-up, Ipsos says:

When asked which leadership candidate would be most likely to become prime minister if they become Conservative leader, one in five Britons say James Cleverly (21%) marking a 7-point increase since late September 2024 before Conservative party conference. Robert Jenrick trails behind at 10%, with Tom Tugendhat and Kemi Badenoch at 7% each. The main shift here being between those saying don’t know (-6) and those saying Mr Cleverly is most likely (+7).

However, more than one in four still say they don’t know (27%) and 28% think none of the candidates are likely to become prime minister.

But the polling also suggests, as the public heard and read about the last four candidates in the contest while the Tory conference was happening, all of them saw their net favourability ratings with the public at large go down. Cleverly’s ratings only fell by 2 points, from -16 to -18. But Tom Tugendhat’s fell by 6 points, and Kemi Badenoch’s and Robert Jenrick’s both fell by 8 points.

On this measure, Badenoch is the most unpopular candidate, with a net favourability rating of -26, followed by Jenrick (-24), Tugendhat (-19) and Cleverly (-18).

The UK population is estimated to have risen by 1.0% in the year to June 2023, the largest annual percentage increase since comparable data began in 1971, according to a report from the Office for National Statistics. In its report on the figures PA Media says:

Some 68,265,200 people were likely to have been resident in the UK in the middle of last year, up 662,400 from 67,602,800 12 months earlier.

The jump of 1.0% in the year to mid-2023 follows a rise of 0.9% in the year to mid-2022, according to the ONS.

It means the UK population is estimated to have increased by 1.28 million in the two years to mid-2023.

The rise of 662,400 in the 12 months to June 2023 is also the largest annual numerical increase since comparable data began in 1971.

Net international migration was the main contributor to the rise in population for all four countries of the UK in the year to mid-2023, the ONS said.

Asked about the figures at the Downing Street lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said Keir Starmer was determined to bring net migration down. The spokesperson said:

The PM and the home secretary have been clear that overall net migration does need to come down, and we should end the situation where legal migration is used as an alternative to tackling skill shortages in the UK.

And indeed, we’ve made announcements recently to achieve this, including the Migration Advisory Committee conducting annual assessments to highlight key sectors where labour market failures have led to rocketing overseas recruitment and the fact that rules around migrant sponsorship will be toughened to ensure employers guilty of flouting employment laws are banned from hiring from abroad.

According a Financial Times report, the UK government’s borrowing costs have risen sharply, “fuelled by investor concerns about the Labour government’s budget, pushing the gap with Germany to the widest in more than a year”.

In their report, Ian Smith and Sam Fleming say:

With three weeks to go to Rachel Reeves’ first Budget, bondholders say the UK chancellor will have to walk a “tightrope” if she is to proceed with her borrowing and investment plans without triggering a gilt sell-off.

The spread between UK and German benchmark 10-year bond yields has already risen to 1.94 percentage points, its highest since August 2023, on worries Reeves will increase debt, as well as concerns about persistent inflation, investors say.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing this morning the PM’s spokesperson said he did not accept the claim that uncertainty about what the government would do was pushing up borrowing costs. He said:

I wouldn’t accept that characterisation … One of the first steps of this government is to restore economic stability, The budget will absolutely deliver on that, delivering on the robust fiscal rules that were that were set out in the manifesto. That includes moving the current budget into balance, that includes debt as a share of the economy.

More broadly, the budget will be about fixing the foundations of the economy, delivering stability, because it’s only with economic stability that we’ll get the growth and investment that the economy needs, that public services need, and deliver the higher living standards for people across the country.

Graeme Wearden has more on the government’s rising borrowing costs on his business live blog.

Yesterday Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communictions chief, said a big reason why the government was in political difficulties was the fact that it decided to wait almost 16 weeks from the election before holding a budget.

On the Today programme this morning Liam Byrne, the Labour MP and former Treasury minister who chairs the Commons business committee, defended the government’s decision to wait that long.

Byrne said that, although there were “virtues getting the budget done fast”, there were also good reasons for waiting until the end of October.

Campbell said that after the elections in. 1979, 1997 and 2010, budgets were held respectively five weeks later, eight weeks later and six weeks later.

But now the Office for Budget Responsibility has to publish an economic assessmement alongside the budget, and that takes at least 10 weeks, Byrne said.

He also said there was an interest rate cut at the start of August, public sector pay deals were only agreed at the end of July, and new planning rules were published at the start of August. All these factors influence the budget, he argued. He went on:

You definitely can do these things fast – Liz Truss did it in 18 days – but I think the whole country will thank the chancellor for not doing a Liz Truss, because now is the time to be strategic and not slapdash.

The budget will be on Wednesday 30 October.

Yesterday, in response to a question from Andrew Mitchell, his Tory shadow, about whether the Chagossians were consulted about the government’s deal handing over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, David Lammy, the foreign secrtary, said: “Of course we kept the Chagossians informed all along the way.”

Chagossian Voices, a group representing Chagossians, says Lammy was not telling the truth.

We will be writing to @DavidLammy and The Speaker of HOC. It was claimed in Parliament today that he and his team had met Chagossian groups to discuss the sovereignty negotiations. Neither we, nor any other groups we know have met him or his team to discuss this since the election. We learned about the announcement at 9.00am last Thursday in an email from the BBC.

At a meeting with Chagossian groups about community support for Chagossians with FCDO Minister Doughty on 30th September (the first and only meeting) attendees were told he could not talk about the negotiations and they even confirmed this in an email (last four lines of extract…

The Foreign Office has been approached for a comment. I will post their reply when I get it.

Political parties will be required to justify offering peerages under new rules being drafted by the government to overhaul the image of the House of Lords. As Jessica Elgot reports, the move – which could involve similar citations as those when people receive honours from the monarch – is in response to a number of controversial appointments over the years including those of two of Boris Johnson’s key aides and of Evgeny Lebedev, the Independent’s largest shareholder. Jess’s full story is here.

Today the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) thinktank has published a report saying Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, should change the government’s fiscal rules and adopt a new measure of debt. Richard Partington has written about it here.

On the Today programme this morning Mohamed El-Erian, one of Britain’s leading economists, also said the fiscal framework needs to change. El-Erian, who is president of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and chief economic adviser to Allianz, a fund manager, called for “a rational adjustment to the fiscal rules”. He explained:

Right now the government’s operating with a very arbitrary fiscal framework that it has inherited. It tends to be biased against investment, and it tends to undermine the one thing this country needs most, which is productivity and growth.

I would like to see the anti-investment biases taken out, so it means don’t treat spending on current consumption as the same as spending on investment. They are fundamentally different in terms of the impact.

He also said the rules should be changed so they don’t “apply arbitrary time horizons that have nothing to the underlying economics”. Currently the debt rule just says debt should be falling as a proportion of the GDP in the fifth year of the forecast period – which means between year 4 looking ahead and year 5 looking ahead. It is a rolling target, and so every year year 5 is another five years in the future. El-Erian said:

These are changes that are supported by the vast majority of economists, and they will be better for a government that’s seeking growth, because that is what we need.

The prison system in England and Wales was “teetering on disaster” when Labour came to power, James Timpson, the prisons minister said today.

Speaking at his first Prison Governors’ Association conference in Nottingham since he took on the role, Timpson said:

It has not been easy to rehabilitate offenders in a system teetering on disaster.

We have to take the tough decisions bringing changes to release to ease the pressure on our prisons. It was quite frankly a rescue effort. If we had not acted our justice system would have grinded to a halt – we would have faced a total breakdown of law and order.

We only have to look at the recent disorder on our streets to see how close to catastrophe we came. We brought the violence to an end, but in the process we came dangerously close to running out of prisons entirely.

The last government allowed prisons to run so hot for so long, it was nothing short of a disgrace. We had no choice but to introduce emergency measures. To attempt to delay any further would have allowed our justice system to collapse.

The government will rebuild and reform the system. We will accelerate the prison building programme to make sure we have the cells we need.

Timpson was a surprise appoinment when Keir Starmer formed his government after the election. He used to run the eponymous family shoe repair business that has a good reputation for employing ex-offenders, and having him in charge of prisons has led to speculation that Labour’s policy in this area will end up being more progressive than the Conservatives’.

UK ministers are considering allowing the use of a bee-killing pesticide next year despite promising during the election to ban it, Helena Horton reports.

Conservative members were more likely to be turned off by what they saw of Robert Jenrick at the party conference than impressed, a survey suggests.

Jenrick arrived at the conference as the clear bookmakers’ favourite. But, according to a ConservativeHome survey of Tory members, only 23% of them said that what happened at conference made them more likely to support him – and 43% said they were less likely to support him afterwards.

Tom Tugendhat experienced a similar loss of support – but he is expected to be out of the contest by the end of today anyway as the candidate most likely to be eliminated in today’s ballot of MPs.

Conservative members favour Kemi Badenoch for next leader, according to numerous ConHome surveys, and proper polling, but 35% of respondents said conference made them less likely to support her, while 30% said the opposite.

The survey suggests the big winner was James Cleverly. Some 55% of Tories said conference made him a more attractive candidate, while only 14% said it didn’t.

The survey also suggests that, by a large margin, he was seen as delivering the best speech on the final day. Badenoch came second.

As a result of what happened at conference, Cleverly has now become the clear bookmakers’ favourite. This chart from the PoliticalBetting.com website, showing the implied chances of winning, illustrates how that has happened.

ConservativeHome has a panel of Tory members and it regularly surveys them on leadership preferences. In the past it has been a reliable guide to Tory leadership elections – always pointing to the right winner, if not by the correct margin.

Jenrick came first in the last two ballots of Tory MPs. Some rightwingers are supporting him because they thought Badenoch would not make the final two (because she is a lot more popular with members than with MPs) and because they thought Jenrick would beat any of the likely “left” candidates in the final two. But a survey at the weekend suggests that is no longer true, which could provide an opening for Badenoch.

In Tory terms, Badenoch and Jenrick are the two “right” candidates, while Cleverly and Tugendhat are the two “left” ones. In non-Tory terms, they are all quite rightwing.

Keir Starmer’s decision to accept clothing freebies “looks greedy”, Boris Johnson, the former Tory PM has claimed. As Jamie Grierson reports, Johnson, who is doing interviews to promote his much-ridiculed memoir, seems to have forgotten his own record of freebie-harvesting on a lavish scale.

Here is John Crace’s digested read of the Johnson book, which is well worth a read (John’s article – not the book, I’m told).

During her morning interview round Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, also all but confirmed that HS2 will be extended to Euston station in London.

When Rishi Sunak announced that the last government was cancelling the Birmingham to Manchester leg of HS2, he said that it would definitely run to Old Oak Common, a station in west London.

He also indicated that the final stretch, a 4.5 mile tunnel from Old Oak Common to Euston, would go ahead too. But he said this was dependent on the project attracting private sector funding, which meant the government could not 100% confim it would be completed.

As PA Media reports, the Commons’ public accounts committee issued a report in February stating it was “highly sceptical” that the Department for Transport would be able to attract private investment on “the scale and speed required” to make extending HS2 to Euston “a success”.

Labour has inherited the last government’s plans and has not yet said the Euston stretch will definitely go ahead.

But, in an interview on Times Radio this morning, asked if the Euston leg was affordable, Haigh replied:

We will be making an announcement on that soon. But it certainly would never have made sense to leave it between Old Oak Common and Birmingham.

Asked if the announcement may come in the budget, she said: “It may be made around those decisions.”

Keir Starmer does not have a problem with women, the transport secretary, Louise Haigh, has said, adding that the prime minister had promoted a number of women – but she admitted the government had made “missteps”. Jessica Elgot has the story.

Good morning. Labour has already been in office for almost 100 days, but in some respects it still feels like we’re at the start of a new political season. This morning Keir Starmer is chairing his first cabinet since Morgan McSweeeney replaced Sue Gray as the key aide in No 10 (a move which could have radical implications, as Pippa Crerar reports here), this afternoon Tory MPs are holding another ballot to elect their next leader, and, with the conference recess over, MPs are getting down to a busy three months of parliamentary business, with the budget only three weeks away tomorrow.

Labour won a big majority at the election, but the big story of politics in recent years is the fragementation of the electorate, and this morning the thinktank UK in a Changing Europe has published a major report on the attitudes and voting behaviours of ethnic minority Britons. For anyone interested in this topic, it has lots of very good data, but two findings in particular stand out.

• Labour will not be able to rely on ethnic minority voters as a ‘bloc’ of support in the future, the report says. In his introduction James Kanagasooriam, the pollster from Focaldata who produced the data used in the report, says that it is still the case that, overall, ethnic minority Britons are much more likely to vote left than right than white Britons. He says:

At the 2024 election, the combined vote share of Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats was 66% among ethnic minorities, while that for the Conservatives and Reform UK was 26%. Among white voters, the equivalent figures were 53% and 41%. Any discussion over Labour’s problems with minority voters and Conservative gains needs to be tempered by these facts.

But he goes on:

At future elections, Labour cannot rely on ethnic minority voters as a ‘bloc’ of support. It is true that the Labour Party still convinces a far greater proportion of minorities with ‘warm’ views of the party to vote for it than the Conservative Party does. But among many ethnic groups, there is a fundamental disjunction between opinion on the salient issues of the day and voting patterns. Our polling suggests that Labour support among ethnic minorities is an ossified cultural and historical legacy that could disappear very quickly.

This chart shows how ethnic minority voting behaviour changed between 2019 and 2024.

• Having a degree makes white voters more leftwing, but ethnic minority voters more rightwing, the report says. In his introduction Kanagasooriam describes this as the Lee Anderson-Rishi Sunak factor in Tory support. He explains:

The demography of right and left is vastly different between white and non-white voters. White voters differ hugely on their educational profile, with non-graduates drifting right over the last 20 years, and graduates to the left. Amongst non-white Britons, graduate level education makes you proportionately more likely to be Conservative. Class cleavages and patterns that have disappeared from the voting patterns of white Britons exist and are indeed getting stronger amongst non-white voters. The Conservative Party will continue to have its esoteric coalition of affluent minorities and nongraduate whites and Labour the opposite. In other words, the Lee Anderson - Rishi Sunak spectrum is a feature, not a bug, of right-wing politics.

And this chart illustrates the point.

There is a summary of the report here, the main 77-page document is here, and the technical appendix is here.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

9.30am: The Office for National Statistics publishes its latest population estimates.

11am: The four Tory leadership candidates – James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat – are due to take part in a private hustings for Tory MPs, before the third ballot for MPs opens.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 12.30pm: MPs begin a debate on a Tory opposition day motion, criticising the plan to impose VAT on private school fees.

3pm: Economists from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Institute for Government give evidence to the Lords economic affairs committee about the government’s debt target.

3.30pm: Bob Blackman, chair of the 1922 Committee, is due to announce the result of the third ballot of Tory MPs for the Tory leader.

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