Markus Andrews

Senior members of Boris Johnson’s government believe it will take 10 years to complete his “levelling up” project, and admit there will be pain for voters along the way.Sweeteners in the form of tax cuts will be needed before the next election as a “thank you” to voters for the years of rising prices and squeezed incomes which lie ahead, one cabinet minister told The Independent.Speaking privately, ministers at this week’s party conference in Manchester said that the next general election will have to be delayed to the last possible moment in 2024 in the hope that voters will have time to notice improvements to their lives as a result of government plans.But all insisted that Mr Johnson himself will want to see the project through to the end, dismissing suggestions that he may give way to another leader in order to be able to return to more lucrative writing work and the speaking circuit.“Apart from anything else, he’s very competitive,” said one. “He’ll know down to the day, the hour and the minute when he will overtake David Cameron or Margaret Thatcher. He is in it for the long haul.”Mr Johnson’s continuation in office is regarded as key to the completion of the levelling up agenda, with oft-tipped potential successor Rishi Sunak described as “still very much a work in progress”.“There are faces for the future, but if Boris went under a bus tomorrow, we’d be in trouble,” said one minister. “There’s no-one else who can reach the voters he does.”The prime minister used his high-profile speech to Conservative conference on Wednesday to promise a Britain with a “high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity and low-tax economy”, but admitted there would be “stresses and strains” along the way.Mr Johnson has described the post-Brexit move away from an economy fuelled by the labour of millions of EU migrants to one which relies more on investment in homegrown talent and innovation as a “period of adjustment” but has so far refused to say how long the transition might take.But one cabinet minister told The Independent: “It will will take 10 years and there will be some pain along the way, particularly in the early part.“A lot of it depends on building infrastructure – roads and railways and so on – and it takes time to complete and time for people to feel the benefit.”Even if it goes smoothly, levelling up will be at least a “two-term project”, with the PM certainly not able to declare his goals achieved by the time of the next election, but maybe by the next-but-one, scheduled for 2029.Senior Labour figures have made clear that they expect Mr Johnson to call the next election in the spring of 2023, to get it out of the way before the findings of the public inquiry into his handling of coronavirus are published.But without exception, ministers who spoke to The Independent said they expect Mr Johnson to hold on as long as he can, in order to maximise the chances of capitalising on a “feelgood factor” from new roads, bus or rail links and broadband connections. One said he would “bet the house” on a May 2024 poll.In the meantime, there was a recognition that voters will face difficult times as the world emerges from the Covid crisis and Britain adapts to its non-EU status, with rising inflation, higher taxes, long waits for NHS treatment and changes in work patterns to be expected.Ministers themselves had been feeling some of the strains, with one saying their businessperson spouse had been complaining at the additional cost of finding staff for the company following the end of free movement.Although Mr Sunak told delegates at the Manchester conference that tax cuts would have to wait until the economy was on a “sustainable footing”, a cabinet colleague said that relief of some kind could be expected before the election – though probably not in the form of the reversal of Mr Johnson’s 1.25 per cent health and care levy on National Insurance contributions, which is likely to stay for the long term.“It’s the normal pattern that there are tax cuts before elections, and this time round we will want to give a thank you to voters for bearing with everything,” said one.Another said: “It’s going to be bumpy, Boris might need to rub some soothing balm on the voters.” More

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has criticised the Boris Johnson’s conference speech, arguing his jokes are going to “wear thin” when people across the country are hit in the pocket.Starmer said the “showman” prime minister keeps pretending “he’s just sort of just landed from the moon” – arguing Britain is in a cost of living crisis because of the way the Tories have governed.It comes as polling showed the public preferred the Labour leader’s conference speech in Brighton last week to the Conservative leader’s address in Manchester on Wednesday.Some 63 per cent of respondents agreed with what Starmer had to say, compared to only 51 per cent who agreed with what Johnson said, the Opinium survey found.The pollster also found 68 per cent of voters thought Starmer’s speech showed he cares about ordinary people, while only 37 per cent said Johnson’s speech showed he cared about ordinary people.“The cost of living crisis I think is going to unfold as we go through the winter months, it’s going to hit millions of families very, very hard,” Starmer told ITV’s Peston.“And I think you know that the showman, the jokes are all very well but they’re going to wear thin when people are hit in their wallet and they’re going to be hit very, very hard in their wallet.”Asked if he agrees with Mr Johnson’s view that the UK has to move to a high-wage, high-productivity economy, Starmer insisted the Tories should have already achieved this after 11 years in power.“Look, the prime minister is playing this game where he’s pretending that he’s just sort of just landed from the moon and he’s looking around and saying, ‘things look pretty awful around here, we need a bit of levelling up, things are so awful’.“Of course, we want a high-wage, high-skilled, high-productivity economy – but we need a plan for that, and a plan for that isn’t fuel shortages, gaps on our supermarket shelves and pretending that this is some cunning plan to drive up wages and drive up skills.”On £20-a-week cuts to universal credit, Starmer claimed a more generous benefit system should not be funded by more borrowing. “We will balance the books … it will have to be paid for as day-to-day spending.”Starmer’s party drover a van around the perimeter of the conference venue in Manchester during Johnson’s speech on Wednesday – displaying a poster urging ministers to “cancel the cut”.Among the business leaders criticising Johnson’s speech, the Federation of Small Businesses noted that Labour, and not the Conservatives, are the only party with a “pro-small business policy”. More

Boris Johnson’s promise to “fix” Britain’s ailing social care sector will need billions of pounds more from his government and substantial council tax rises, a leading think tank has warned.Extra cost pressures faced by local authorities could easily push up council tax bills by 5 per cent a year – or £220 – by 2024-25, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.The think tank said even significant hikes in council tax would still leave local authorities with huge black holes in their budgets as they attempt to boost social care provision.During Wednesday’s Conservative Party conference speech, the prime minister promised to “get social care done” after “decades of drift and dither”.However, in a new analysis published on Thursday, the IFS said the extra £12bn a year promised by the government for the NHS and social care is “unlikely to be enough” to help councils carry out Mr Johnson’s plan.The economists said even an increase in council tax of 4 per cent next year would leave English councils facing a £2.7bn funding gap in 2022-23.“The recently announced social care reforms pose major challenges for councils across England,” said David Phillips, an associate director at the IFS.“The funding announced by government so far is unlikely to be enough to meet all of its objectives, in either the short or longer term.”The government has said it will provide £5.4bn over three years to begin the rollout of a new lifetime cap on care costs and more generous means-testing arrangements.But the IFS said the annual cost of meeting Mr Johnson’s ambitions is likely to be about £5bn a year – almost three times the average annual funding currently planned.The think tank warned that without additional funding, some councils might have to tighten the care needs assessments further to pay for the reforms – pushing out some of the poorest people in need of care.Mr Phillips said it could “see some poorer people who would now be eligible losing access to council-funded care so that coverage can be extended to other, typically financially better-off, people”.Mark Franks, the welfare director at the Nuffield Foundation health think tank, which funded the research, warned: “Even significant council tax increases risk not being sufficient to meet the future demand for local service provision, or address staffing issues in the adult social care sector.”The IFS also said the formulae used to allocate funding between councils in England are now out of date and “in desperate need of reform”.The population of Blackpool is estimated to have fallen by about 2 per cent, while the estimated population of Tower Hamlets has increased by more than 20 per cent since Whitehall officials set the current mechanism in 2013.Kate Ogden, a research economist at the IFS, said the funding system is “hopelessly out of date … This results in manifest unfairnesses in the distribution of resources between councils.” More

Conservative MP Sir Peter Bottomley said that some MPs are finding it “really grim” to live on a salary of £82,000.The Worthing West MP said that the annual salary, which does not include expenses and perks, should be higher.The median salary in the UK is just over £31,000, according to the Office for National Statistics.In an interview with the New Statesman, Sir Peter insisted that MPs should get paid as much as GP – about £100,000 on average in England.An increase of £18,000 a year to MPs’ salaries would represent a pay rise of almost 22 per cent. The government this year offered NHS staff a rise of 3 per cent.Sir Peter said: “I take the view that being an MP is the greatest honour you could have, but a general practitioner in politics ought to be paid roughly the same as a general practitioner in medicine.“Doctors are paid far too little nowadays. But if they would get roughly £100,000 a year, the equivalent for an MP to get the same standard of living would be £110-£115,000 a year.“It’s never the right time, but if your MP isn’t worth the money, it’s better to change the MP than to change the money.” While Sir Peter said he did not struggle financially, he believed the situation was “desperately difficult” for newer MPs. He said: “I don’t know how they manage. It’s really grim.”His comments came as ministers pressed ahead with a cut Universal Credit that charities have warned will plunge thousands of people into poverty.Sir Peter said he believed the £20 benefit uplift – paid out to claimants during the Covid pandemic – should have been “tapered” off rather than completely removed from 6 October.The MP, aged 77, is Father of the House as he is the longest-serving current member of the Commons.Before he was an MP and serving in Margaret Thatcher’s government, he drove a lorry after graduating from University of Cambridge. He joined the Transport and General Workers Union and got into local politics.He recalled considering stepping down from Parliament during the interview in 1982 because of financial strains.His wife Virginia, with whom he had dependent children at the time, had given up paid work to run as a candidate on the Isle of Wight. She was elected to a different constituency in 1984 before she became a life peer in 2005. Sir Peter said: “MPs’ pay was low, and I wasn’t going to go either broke or crooked to keep going.” More

As Boris Johnson roused the Tory party faithful in Manchester with his speech about economic growth and rising wages, 200 miles away food bank users were streaming in. “Things are more expensive,” said Joan, sitting amid rows of tins, pasta and other produce in Dad’s House, a charity that runs a foodbank in southwest London. “Things are great for people who are working and don’t see all this. Because I never used to see this.”She started coming to the food bank earlier this year after losing her job as a nanny.“I used to give things to a food bank. I never used to come here myself,” she said.In his widely criticised speech on Wednesday, the prime minister mentioned the word “growth” six times and twice praised Britain as the fastest-growing economy in the G7.The Conservatives had “fixed the economy”, he told party members, moments before promising: “We are going to fix this economy.”He also said the “present stresses and strains” of the economy – labour shortages, soaring household energy costs and warnings over food supplies – were “mainly a function of growth and economic revival”.But visitors to Dad’s House told The Independent the economy is not working well for them. “It’s hard to keep your head above the water,” said John Krell, who is retired. “We have gas and electric going sky-high.”The 70-year-old said he has bought a headtorch “like you would wear in the mine” and goes to bed at 7.30pm to avoid putting the lights on.“What a life,” he says. “Who would’ve thought that, years ago.” Azahia Atnane has not been able to find a job. Her husband works part-time as a waiter but would like to be full-time.“There is no employment,” she says. Now, she is bracing herself for the impact of the cut in Universal Credit as its £20-per-week extra – introduced during the pandemic – is scrapped.Food banks were preparing for a surge in demand as the change in Universal Credit came into force from Wednesday, amid warnings vulnerable people could be plunged into poverty “almost overnight”. Billy McGranaghan, the founder of Dad’s House, told The Independent there had already been an increase in users over the past month – ten to 15 more each week.Among the new users are young people who had lost jobs in hospitality, he said.In his Tory conference speech, Mr Johnson said the government was tackling what he described as the UK economy’s “long-term structural weaknesses”.He said the country was having a “change in direction” with a move to a “high wage, high skill, high productivity” economy. More

Boris Johnson’s conference vision for a “high wage economic revival” in the wake of supply chain chaos has been condemned as “economically illiterate” by think tanks and trade organisations. Addressing the Conservative party faithful in Manchester on Wednesday, Mr Johnson said he wanted to stop businesses reaching for the “same old lever of uncontrolled immigration” and attacked them for failing to invest in UK workers. But trade bodies said that the Prime Minister had misunderstood the key issues and one think tank accused him of using “dogwhistle” rhetoric about migrants. Despite not addressing ongoing problems with petrol shortages, Mr Johnston did point the finger at hauliers for failing “to invest in people, in skills and in the equipment”. He highlighted the lack of truck stops causing HGV drivers “to urinate in the bushes”. Paul Mummery, a spokesperson from the Road Haulage Association, said the government had a responsibility to step in to improve these conditions. He said: “The PM is basically blaming the road transport industry for these spartan conditions. That’s not down to the industry. “There’s a reason why there are few decent safe parking spaces for truckers – local authorities don’t want them in their area. Lorry firms don’t build truck stops so he is absolutely wrong to be blaming us for the lack of facilities.”The free market think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, condemned the speech as “vacuous and economically illiterate”, saying: “Shortages and rising prices simply cannot be blustered away with rhetoric about migrants. “It’s reprehensible and wrong to claim that migrants make us poorer… This dogwhistle shows that this Government doesn’t care about pursuing evidence-based policies.”Richard Griffiths, chief executive of the British Poultry Council, said that the sector needed time to respond to the lack of EU workers and some “breathing space” to encourage investment in automation. He said: “Over the last twenty years, we’ve been fortunate enough to use non-UK labour in order to grow the sector. “We ran out of UK labour in the areas in which we operate. Non-UK workers have allowed the poultry sector to grow. This has been good for continued growth. This isn’t a case of cheap labour.”The government has promised 5,500 emergency visas for the poultry sector to get turkeys ready for Christmas, but the scheme is not live so EU workers are not yet able to apply. Thatcherite think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs, warned that the Prime Minister’s strategy “to make things more expensive will not create a genuinely high wage economy, merely the illusion of one.”The Confederation of British Industry said that Mr Johnson’s words needed to be “backed up by action on skills, on investment and on productivity.”Trade union head, TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady, said Mr Johnson should not be “slashing universal credit in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis” if he was serious about “levelling up” the country. The speech comes as farmers begin to cull hundreds of pigs because there aren’t enough people to process them. Nick Allen, from the British Meat Processors Association, warned on Wednesday that British meat would soon become a niche product that only the wealthiest in the country could afford. Mr Allen said that retailers have started to abandon British farmers and begun import cheaper European pork. He said: “We would love to be in the situation to pay more and train more people and actually we would like the time to have a really good shot at that. We’re not against that, but it takes eighteen months to train butchers… you can’t just haul people off the street and expect them to do these jobs, and we are not self-sufficient in food.”He added: “British production will become a niche product that the wealthier in the country can afford and most of the food will be imported cheap food.”Tesco CEO, Ken Murphy, said on Wednesday that the supermarket had ordered ten percent more turkeys this year to mitigate any problems. It is turning to Spanish farmers to supply British consumers with their Christmas food, increasing the number of rail containers of fresh produce from the country from 65,000 to 90,000 by the end of the year. Mr Murphy told reporters: “We have planned to within an inch of our lives how much we will have coming through, and how we are going to make sure we have the right number of drivers in the right place to move it.” More

Boris Johnson is reportedly planning to increase the minimum wage in the UK in order to move the country towards a “high wage, high skill, high productivity economy” as the gradual recovery from the coronavirus pandemic continues.Mr Johnson gave his address to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester on Wednesday, delivering a speech loaded with fruity turns of phrase, knowing historical allusions and jokes at the expense of his Cabinet colleagues but light on new policy, on the same day that his government’s cuts to Universal Credit came into effect.That decision sees an estimated 6m unemployed and low-paid workers losing out on £20 a week in benefits after an “uplift” was introduced at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak last March to support families when lockdown sparked a wave of redundancies, furlough and lost income.Under pressure to reverse the cut from political rivals and charities, who warned of dire consequences like 500,000 people, including 200,000 children, being driven into poverty, Mr Johnson’s administration remained unmoved, insisting it is employers paying higher wages, not claimants receiving taxpayer-funded benefit rises, that will put Britain back on its feet after being blasted by the “fiscal meteorite” of the coronavirus.His deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, repeated the message in an interview with Sky News on Wednesday morning, declaring: “As we come through the pandemic, with youth unemployment going down, employment going up, we need to transition. We don’t want to see people reliant on the welfare trap.”Mr Raab also spoke of a need to wean Britain away from the “cheap drug of unskilled labour from abroad” in the wake of Brexit, suggesting more enticing salaries was the key to making the most of the UK’s native workforce.Those remarks coincided with the publication of a story in The Times suggesting Mr Johnson is only weeks away from signing-off on a minimum wage rise.The newspaper reported that the lowest earners on the National Living Wage, paid to those over the age of 23, could soon receive £9.42 an hour, an increase of just over five per cent.Currently, the minimum wage rate is £8.91 per hour for those 23 and over, £8.36 for those aged 21-22, £6.56 for those aged 18-20, £4.62 for under 18s and £4.30 for apprentices.The rates usually change on 1 April every year.Any increase would be to the above, which is set by the government, as opposed to the voluntary Living Wage, which is set by the Living Wage Foundation and currently stands at £10.85 for London-based workers and £9.50 for those living anywhere else in the UK.Pressed about the possible hike in the hourly floor rate by ITV News ahead of his conference speech, the prime minister did not rule out a minimum wage rise, saying: “We will take guidance from the Low Pay Commission, and we will see where we get to.”That advisory body is set to submit its proposals to the government by the end of October and previously trailed that same £9.42 per hour figure in a report published earlier this year.“We are dealing with the biggest underlying issues of our economy and society. The problems that no government has had the guts to tackle before,” Mr Johnson said during his speech, determined to articulate his “levelling up” agenda and paint a positive picture of post-Brexit Britain.How persuaded you were rather depended on your willingness to overlook the Universal Credit cut, increased National Insurance demands, empty supermarket shelves, queues at the petrol pump and a looming cost of living crisis placing millions of people up against it as the cold winter nights draw in, almost none of which the PM deigned to mention during his latest comic turn in Manchester. More

Priti Patel has been accused of weaponising violence against women to justify new laws that will “curtail freedom and deepen inequality.”The End Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition, which includes Rape Crisis, Refuge, Women’s Aid and other organisations supporting victims, called for laws championed by the home secretary in her Conservative Party conference speech to be scrapped.Ms Patel announced an inquiry into Sarah Everard’s murderer, saying that “such unconscionable crimes and acts of violence against women and girls have no place in our society”.“That is why I have redoubled my efforts to ensure women and girls feel safer,” she added.“The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill extends whole life orders to child murderers and ends automatic halfway release for serious sexual and violent offenders … women and girls have said enough is enough and the Conservative Party agrees.”EVAW called for the bill, which also contains new restrictions on protest and laws that discriminate against Travellers, to be dropped.“We object to the weaponisation of VAWG [violence against women and girls] as a justification for both the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which will curtail our collective freedoms and deepen inequality, and the Nationality and Borders Bill, which will criminalise women and girls crossing borders to seek safety,” a statement added. “We join a wide cross-section of society in calling for both bills to be scrapped.”EVAW said it believed the proposed laws would have “no meaningful impact on responses to violence against women”.The collective also said it rejected proposals to “overhaul” the Human Rights Act, which were announced by new justice secretary Dominic Raab in his conference speech.“It is the only legal tool that allows the public to hold the police to account for serious failings, as we saw in the case of John Worboys,” the statement added.Priti Patel announces inquiry into Sarah Everard murderIn the Worboys case, victims of the serial sex attacker won a case against the Metropolitan Police by arguing that failures to properly investigate his crimes breached their human rights.EVAW also joined a range of victims’ groups and advocates to express concerns about the scope of the Sarah Everard inquiry announced by the home secretary on Tuesday.It will initially focus on Wayne Couzens before being widened out to “wider issues across policing” – possibly including vetting, professional standards and workplace behaviour.The inquiry is not currently on a statutory footing, meaning that it will rely on voluntary cooperation from the Metropolitan Police and compel evidence. More