Over a fifth of hospitality firms have cut their hours over the past three months in a bid to cut energy costs, the Office for National Statistics has revealed.
The ONS has released a report saying food and drink service firms, such as pubs, restaurants and bars, are more likely than firms in any other sector to cut trading to deal with mammoth increases in energy bills.
It says 21% of firms in the sector have cut their trading hours as a result, even if they are still operating for the same number of days.
Meanwhile, 6% of businesses in the sector say they have cut trading by two or more days a week over the past three months.
Suella Braverman has been tweeting about the new small boats deal with the French.
And these are from her French opposite number, G?rald Darminin.
Some 853 people were detected crossing the English Channel in small boats on Sunday, the Ministry of Defence said. It follows 972 crossings on Saturday.
As PA Media reports, the cumulative number of crossings this year now stands at a provisional total of 41,738.
Total crossings last year were 28,526.
There were 26 boats detected on Sunday, which suggests an average of around 33 people crossed the Channel per boat.
Lucy Moreton, an official with the ISU, the union for borders, immigration and customs staff, told Times Radio the new UK-France deal on asylum seekers would not address the core problem.
She said that interrupting migrants to “just let them go to try again” would not have the required impact and nothing in the deal suggested that “the French are going to move away from that position”. She went on:
The sticking points just simply have not been addressed.
As PA Media reports, the ISU professional officer added that intercepting migrants so they do not try to get to the UK again was not something the French “have ever wanted to do”, as from the French perspective “they are going the right way and it’s entirely understandable that they are not very keen to interrupt that”.
She said the UK needed to deal with the issue itself by resourcing “the court system far better than it has been” in order to process claims in a shorter space of time.
As my colleague Rajeev Syal reports, more than 40,000 people seeking asylum in the UK have waited between one and three years for a decision on their claim, new figures show.
Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has signed the new UK-France agreement on Channel crossings with her French counterpart, G?rald Darmanin, this morning. She said that it wasn’t a quick fix, but that it would lead to a significant increase in the number of French officers patrolling beaches. She said:
We must do everything we can to stop people making these dangerous journeys and crack down on the criminal gangs.
This is a global challenge requiring global solutions, and it is in the interests of both the UK and French governments to work together to solve this complex problem.
There are no quick fixes but this new arrangement will mean we can significantly increase the number of French gendarmes patrolling the beaches in northern France and ensure UK and French officers are working hand in hand to stop the people smugglers.
Good morning. Rishi Sunak will be arriving in Bali later for the G20 summit, but he has been speaking to the journalists travelling with him on his plane about a deal announced this morning with France, to increase cooperation on tackling people using small boats to cross the Channel. Here is our story, by my colleagues Jessica Elgot (who is with Sunak) and Peter Walker.
Sunak told reporters there was no “single thing” that would solve the small boats problem, but he said he was “confident we can bring the numbers down over time”.
But the government won’t say what difference it expects the deal with the French announced today to make. James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, has been giving interviews this morning and he has been dodging questions on this point. On the Today programme he said that cooperation with the French was already making a difference and that 29,000 people had been stopped from getting to the UK this year – almost twice as many as in previous years. But when Today’s Mishal Husain asked him what impact the new agreement was likely to have on the number of crossings (“I’m sure that you have a way of measuring that,” she said, optimistically), Cleverly declined to give a figure. He replied:
It’s really important you understand that we are we are dealing with an evolving situation … It’s very, very difficult to predict exact numbers. It depends on so many variables, but the important thing is that we are working more closely [with the French] …. more French officers on the beaches as a direct result of the agreement that the home secretary and the French interior minister have signed today.
I will post more from his interviews shortly.
Here is the agenda for the day.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
12.45pm: Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, gives the keynote speech at the Centre for Policy Studies Margaret Thatcher Conference on Growth.
2.30pm: Home Office questions in the Commons.
4pm: James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, gives evidence to the Commons foreign affairs committee.
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