Angela Rayner attacks Oliver Dowden over Tory record on NHS waiting lists and child poverty – live

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Starmer delivers the line briefed overnight (see 9.02am) about Labour being “the builders, not the blockers”. He goes on:

In this new, more volatile economic era, businesses need a government that gets involved.

There’s no future in a stand-aside state. That won’t deliver the stability and the certainty, won’t manage the tide of change that is coming.

It’s simple really: every business in this room has a strategy for growth, a nation needs one too.

Starmer says problems with the planning system are a key reason for Britain’s low productivity. He says:

Some nation will lead the world in offshore wind, why not Britain?

I’ll tell you one reason why not, our planning system.

I met the people running the National Grid recently and you know what they said to me, they said: if we want to get anywhere near our goals on net zero, we need to build more infrastructure in the next 7 years, than we have in the last thirty.

Let that sink in.

And yet – what’s the average time it takes to build an off-shore wind far? 13 years… an entire Tory government.

And now housebuilding – crashing to a record low. Onshore wind – just two turbines built last year.

Critical infrastructure like HS2, built more slowly and expensively because of the red tape.

And the net result, an economy stuck in second gear. A doom-loop of low growth, low productivity and high taxes. A generation and its hopes, an entire future – blocked by those, who more often than not, enjoy the secure homes and jobs that they’re denying to others.

The evidence could not be clearer, there are 38 countries in the OECD, and we are the second worst when it comes to the effectiveness of our planning system.

And just think – some people still call our problems the “productivity puzzle“. We know the problems – we’ve just got to show a bit more bottle to fix them.

Starmer tells the BCC that the future is full of opportunities as well as risks.

We’ve got to navigate our way through revolutions in technology, in energy, in medicine and, with an ageing society, even in who we are.

Climate change is a recipe for global instability. The shape of power in the world is changing, there is war on our continent, and because of all of this, we must square up to a new economic era.

Where the old assumptions – on labour, on energy, on trade and goods – no longer apply. No doubt about it – your company risk registers will be long, but the way I see it – there are also opportunities to be seized, new markets to open up, a more prosperous future that can be won.

Keir Starmer is addressing the BCC conference now. He starts by talking about growth, and explaining why one of his “missions” for Labour is for the UK to have the highest sustained growth in the G7 in the next parliament. He says:

I know what a lot of people in Westminster say about growth. They say it’s an abstract concept, doesn’t resonate, doesn’t connect with peoples’ lives, I don’t accept that.

Growth is higher wages. Growth is stronger communities. Growth is thriving businesses. It’s more vibrant high street, less poverty, more opportunity, warmer homes, healthier food, better jobs.

It’s public services that are well funded. It’s holidays, meals out, more cash in your pocket – an end to the suffocating cost of living crisis, our ticket to win the race for the future and the biggest single thing we need to lift our sights, raise our ambitions, and get our hope, our confidence and our future back.

Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, has accused advisers working for the party of briefing against him.

In an interview with Times Radio, Burnham said that he was not accusing Keir Starmer, members of his shadow cabinet, or Labour HQ, of being responsible for negative stories about him.

But he implied that some of Starmer’s younger aides were to blame. He said:

Whenever I go out there with something positive, the negative Westminster briefing machine somehow flicks into gear. All that I’d say is, leave me alone.

I’ve been out there being supportive of the party and working for a majority Labour government as everyone is, but I’m doing my thing. I’m building a really powerful positive agenda for Greater Manchester, and to have the kind of old ways of Westminster trying to cut across that with their negative briefing – you know, their insecurity – I honestly don’t know what purpose they think it serves.

Burnham did not name any of those he believed were responsible for those briefings in the interview. But he said:

It’s not Keir or the shadow cabinet or the party, but it’s those people – I know who they are and you know who they are – the unelected people in their 20s or 30s who think they know it all and they’re the kind of bee’s knees etc. And they go around sort of briefing against elected politicians.

Mark Serwotka has announced that he will retire from his post as general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services union at the end of the year. The PCS is the biggest civil service union and Serwotka has led it since 2000, being re-elected four times.

In a statment he said:

Today PCS is in the best place it has been for many years. We have withstood attacks on our union from Conservative governments and we are now growing.

Nusrat Ghani, a business minister, told MPs that the government is making “strong representation” to the EU about the Brexit trade rules that could make car exports to the EU prohibitively expensive from 2024.

In response to an urgent question on the issue, she said:

I can provide assurances that I and the business and trade secretary [Kemi Badenoch] have raised these issues with our colleagues across government and had productive conversations with our counterparts in the European Union.

We are aware of the concerns from the UK car makers about the challenges and of course we continue to make strong representation.

But Ghani would not say whether this meant the UK was seeking to reopen the Brexit trade deal.

Asked about the issue, Downing Street said raw material costs had increased for all car manufacturers. (The rise in costs means UK manufacturers are having to source more components from outside the UK, which means higher tariffs apply, which means exports may no longer be viable.) A No 10 spokesperson said:

We recognise that for a number of reasons raw material costs for manufacturers have spiked since we signed the [trade and cooperation agreement]. That’s a problem for manufacturers across Europe not just here in the UK …

That’s why the business secretary has raised this already with the European Commission. It’s been raised at official level as well and we hope to come to a resolution with the EU on this.

Asked whether the January 2024 deadline (for when the new tariffs will apply) could be pushed back, the spokesperson said:

We’re looking to what solutions we can put in place to a problem that we know exists. I’m not going to get ahead of the conversations we’re having with the EU.

The Department for Transport has announced that the government will spend up to ?200m ensuring that single bus fares in England continue to be capped at ?2 outside London until the end of October 2023, and then at ?2.50 until 30 November 2024.

In a statement to MPs about this, Richard Holden, a transport minister, said: “Since the ?2 cap was introduced it has saved passengers millions of pounds, boosted businesses and put bums on bus seats right across the country.”

Here is a Guardian video showing some of the highlights from this morning’s home affairs committee hearing where Matt Twist, the temporary assistant commissioner for Met operations, and Graham Smith, the chief executive of Republic, were giving evidence about the policing of the coronation.

At a visit to Glasgow Girls FC this morning, Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, was asked about Humza Yousaf‘s Today programme interview, in which he was probed about the latest revelations around the police investigation into SNP finances – that it took two weeks for the Crown Office to sign off on the police warrant to search the home of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon and her husband, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell.

Yousaf told Today that, when he was knocking doors recently, “nobody mentioned to me the police investigation … they did mention how high their energy bills were.”

After meeting the coach and players at Budhill Park in the east end of Glasgow, Sarwar said:

What he’s hearing on the doorsteps is up to him. Individual households right now are thinking about how to put food on the table for their kids. They’re thinking how they’re going to pay the next energy bill. And instead they see a SNP that is mired in scandal and division, financial mismanagement, dysfunctional government, and they see a Tory party that’s going more and more down towards a divisive culture war, using often racist rhetoric.

Sarwar said voters were concluding “these people are deluded, they have no understanding of what happens in our lives”.

Asked about Keir Starmer’s comments earlier today about the possibility of renegotiating Brexit (see 11.31am), Sarwar was clear:

I would not have any credibility had I said, ‘Let’s not re-open the yes/no question, but let’s reopen the leave/remain question. But do we recognise that it’s a mess? Absolutely. Do we have to fix the mess? We do.

Meanwhile the Scottish Convervatives are demanding that the police probe into the SNP finances should be investigated by a parliamentary inquiry.

And here is my colleague Peter Walker’s story about PMQs.

When Rishi Sunak was doing an MBA at Stanford business school, he took a course called Paths to Power. According to one account, one of the aims of this course is to ensure that students “never have to leave a position involuntarily” and they are taught to avoid grooming potential successors. Sunak seemed to have absorbed this lesson well. This was Oliver Dowden’s first outing as deputy prime minister at PMQs and one bonus for No 10 is that – on the basis of this outing, at least – Sunak (unlike Keir Starmer) is never going to have to worry about being outshone by his deputy.

Dowden started with a half-decent joke about Ed Davey. (See 12.05pm.) But after that it was downhill all the way. The humour got worse, the attack lines were at best stale, at worst ancient, at times he sounded tone deaf (Dowden is working class, but it was a mistake to try playing this card against Angela Rayner, who had a much more deprived childhood than he did), and he did not have good answers to what she was saying about poverty, or the NHS. The best measure of how poor it was was that he resorted to banging on about Jeremy Corbyn, not just once, but twice. Sunak has stopped doing this at the dispatch box now, because attacking the last Labour leader is a giveaway about the lack of dirt on the current one.

Rayner is now now shadowing her third deputy PM (Th?r?se Coffey, in case you’ve forgotten who the other one was), and her experience showed. This was by no means her best PMQs, but she was in control throughout. Her best material came when she was talking about this week’s National Conservatism confernce. She said:

The Tories have picked their side, there for the vested interests, for oil companies and the bankers, for those that are profiting from the crisis and not suffering from it. Whether it’s failing the millions of people anxiously waiting for treatment or overseeing a rise in child poverty, and while his colleagues spout nonsense at their carnival of conspiracy, I want to know when will his party stop blaming everybody else and realise that the problem is them?

Sunak’s main achievement as PM, in party terms, has been to give the impression that the Conservative party is no longer in operating in lunatic mode. Three days of NatCon have left that more open to question.

Does it matter that Dowden as a deputy PM, at least at the dispatch box, sounds like a bit of a dud? Probably not much, but sometimes a deputy can enhance the appeal of a party, because they possess attributes that complement the leader. Tony Blair benefited hugely from having John Prescott, someone with a very different background, and a reach into a different wing of Labour, by his side. Rayner is an asset to Starmer for the same reason (although in private their relationship may be more fragile than the Blair/Prescott one – Prescott had no ambitions to be PM). Dominic Raab may have been of less use to Boris Johnson, but by most accounts he did a good job standing in for Johnson when he was ill with Covid. Perhaps Dowden is playing a valuable role behind the scenes? Another potential benefit he brings is that he is not privileged (his dad worked in a factory, and he went to a comprehensive school) and so his class outlook is different from Sunak’s. But he sounds relatively posh, and so unless voters actually know something about him, many will assume he is just another privileged Tory.

Virginia Crosbie (Con) says this week is Wales tourism week. Will Dowen thank all those working in the sector. And doesn’t the tips bill show the government is supporting this sector?

Dowden says he has spent many happy family holidays in Wales, and will go again next year.

And that’s it. PMQs is over.

Chi Onwurah (Lab) says half the children in her constituency are growing up in poverty. Why is the government making it so hard for children?

Dowden says the government has lifted 1.7 million people out of absolute poverty.

(Absolute poverty is a measure of poverty based on what the poverty level was at the start of a government’s period in office. Over time, because of inflation, absolute poverty almost always declines.)

Simon Clarke (Con) says Labour should apologise for talking down the Teesside freeport project. He says it was always meant to include private sector involvement.

Dowden defends the project, and says Labour’s decision to talk it down is inexcusable.

This may be a hostage to fortune. This week the Financial Times published the results of an extensive investigation by Jennifer Williams suggesting there are serious questions to answer about how this project has been funded, and whether it has been a good use of public money. The National Audit Office has been urged to investigate.

Matt Western (Lab) says Rishi Sunak had to be airlifted to a pharmacy in Southampton recently after suffering from electoral misfunction.