Dowden suggests No 10 holding back messages from UK Covid inquiry to protect ‘intimate’ family information – live

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In the Commons Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary, is opening the Labour debate on Teesworks. Labour has tabled a “humble address” motion saying the government should publish its correspondence relating to the decision to set up a review of the funding of the Teesworks project in the Teesside freeport area.

Nandy started by saying that, in all her time as an MP, she had never seen such serious allegations raised about a project.

Simon Clarke, the former Tory business secretary, intervened to ask if Nandy was prepared to say that what happened amounted to corruption. He said Andy McDonald, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough, has used this word in the chamber, where he is protected by parliamentary privilege from being sued for libel. But he has not said that outside the chamber, Clarke said.

In reply, Nandy would not use the word corruption. She said the whole point was that “people on Teesside simply don’t know the answer to that question”.

And later she said:

The Labour frontbench hasn’t made allegations against Teeswork … and we will not do so before any investigation reports back. What we have asked for is honesty, transparency and clarity about what appears on the face of it to be an incredibly murky situation.

Labour has called for the National Audit Office to investigate what happened. Ben Houchen, the Tory mayor of Tees Valley, has also called for an NAO inquiry. But Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, has just committed to a review of the scheme by a panel.

Miche?l Martin, the t?naiste (Irish deputy PM) and foreign minster, has called for power sharing to be restored in Northern Ireland urgently. Speaking in Belfast, after meetings with party leaders from Northern Ireland, he said:

It’s very clear from all of the parties that there’s a genuine desire to get the executive back up and running.

We’re now past the local elections. It is, in my view, imperative that the mandate that the people of Northern Ireland have given to their political parties is reflected and manifested in the restoration of the assembly and the executive.

What was clear from our discussions today was the degree to which the situation has been compounded now by the budgetary situation – that came up in all of our discussions, that the situation is very serious from a financial perspective and the impact on public services and the impact that that is having on the people. And any delay in restoring the executive will make the challenge even greater subsequently.

That is why the need to move quickly and we want that sense of urgency transferred into the restoration of the executive and the assembly.

Asked if he had asked Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the DUP leader, if he would lift his party’s boycott of power sharing, Martin replied:

First of all he was adamant, as he has been with me consistently since the election, that he wants to go back, he wants the DUP back in the executive and back in the assembly. He says he has outstanding issues to deal with in respect of the wider issues that have been under discussion for quite some time.

My view is that this needs to be attended to with some degree of urgency now in terms of both the budgetary situation but also the need to have the mandate of the people reflected in the executive and the assembly coming back.

The Scottish government has said it is delaying the introduction of its deposit return scheme until October 2025 because the UK government is refusing to allow it to include glass.

The scheme would involve a 20p charge being added to drinks containers, with the money repaid once they were returned for recycling.

The Scottish parliament legislated for a scheme in 2000. It was originally due to come into force in August this year, but Humza Yousaf delayed the start date until 2024 when he became first minister in March.

Since then the UK government has in effect vetoed the scheme as originally planned by the Scottish government. Under the Internal Market Act it has the final say on regulations affecting UK trade, and it has refused to allow Scotland to go ahead with a scheme including glass.

In a statement at Holyrood, Lorna Slater, the Scottish Green MSP who serves as the Scottish government’s circular economy minister, said:

As of today, it is now clear that we have been left with no other option than to delay the launch of Scotland’s DRS, until October 2025 at the earliest based on the UK government’s current stated aspirations.

I remain committed to interoperable DRS schemes across the UK provided that we can work in a spirit of collaboration not imposition. I wrote again last night to the UK government, to urge ministers to reset a climate of trust and good faith to galvanise and retain the knowledge that has been built in Circularity Scotland and DRS partners in Scotland.

This parliament voted for a deposit return scheme. I am committed to a deposit return scheme. Scotland will have a deposit return scheme. It will come later than need be. It will be more limited than it should be. More limited than parliament voted for.

These delays and dilutions lie squarely in the hands of UK government that has sadly seemed so far more intent on sabotaging this parliament than protecting our environment.

This is the second time this year the UK government has blocked a legislative move by the Scottish government. Using a different process, it also stopped the gender recognition reform bill becoming law.

The leftwing Labour Beth Winter has complained that “unacceptable obstacles” led to her losing the battle to be her party’s candidate in a new seat.

Winter was defeated by Gerald Jones in the contest to be Labour’s candidate in Merthyr Tydfil and Upper Cynon. Jones, a shadow Welsh Office minister, is seen as much more loyal to Keir Starmer than Winter, a member of the Corbynite Socialist Campaign Group.

Some MPs in all main parties are having to compete against each other for the right to represent new constituencies because new boundaries are coming into force at the next election. But Wales, which is losing eight of its 40 current seats, is affected particularly severely.

The new Merthyr Tydfil and Upper Cynon seat takes in most of Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney, Jones’s current seat, but it also includes more than half of Winter’s seat.

According to a report for LabourList, it has been claimed Jones won by 231 votes to 215.

In a statement following the selection result, Winter said:

I’m disappointed by this result and by the unjust manner in which it came about, which leaves major questions outstanding …

Unacceptable obstacles were placed in the way of this grassroots campaign, undermining the democratic process.

The online-only process was bulldozed through in just two weeks, with no face-to-face hustings.

This was not a fair contest, and I will be taking advice and soundings in the days ahead about my next steps.

Under Starmer, Labour has repeatedly been accused of organising selection processes in such a way as to exclude or disadvantage leftwingers, and to promote “centrists” aligned with Starmer’s politics.

Momentum, the leftwing Labour group, said:

Once again a Labour party selection is shrouded in controversy. Whether it’s Jamie Driscoll in the north-east or Beth Winter in Cynon Valley, the Labour leadership is taking a sledgehammer to the democratic rights of local Labour members in order to purge socialists and install his loyalists. Sadly, we have witnessed more irregularities in this selection contest.

In his second response to Angela Rayner at PMQs, Oliver Dowden, the deputy PM, implied that the government was taking the Covid inquiry to court to contest its demand for unredacted WhatsApp messages because it wants to stop the inquiry seeing messages containing private medical information and “intimate” family details. (See 12.06pm.) He said:

We will provide the inquiry with each and every document related to Covid including all internal discussions in any form as requested while crucially protecting what is wholly and unambiguously irrelevant because essentially [she] is calling for years worth of documents and messages between named individuals to be in scope and that could cover anything from civil servants’ medical conditions to intimate details about their families.

This is a more detailed explanation of why the government wants to hold back “unambiguously irrelevant” material than we have had before. In the Commons on Monday Jeremy Quin, the Cabinet Office minister, implied that the government’s priority was to avoid setting a precedent that could lead to private messages about policy discussions being disclosed in future to public inquiries on wholly different topics. He said:

Whereas it is entirely right that any material in any way related to Covid is available to the inquiry, we believe there is value to challenge and debate inside government being unclouded by the knowledge that other discussions could be disclosed regardless of their relevance to any future inquiry.

The Kiss star Gene Simmons said he witnessed “controlled chaos” during his “insane” visit to the Commons today to watch PMQs, PA Media reports. PA says:

The hard rocker, in the UK for the band’s End of the Road tour, was a guest of the DUP MP Ian Paisley and received a private tour before making his first trip into the Commons chamber.

Simmons, speaking in central lobby, told the PA news agency: “What I just saw in there was controlled chaos. It was the clash of wills but respectful – the right honourable so and so, it was fascinating. In America, it’s like the middle finger is a salute. I think Americans can take a big lesson in civility in how to make democracy actually work and still respect the other side.”

According to Kate Ferguson from the Sun on Sunday, many Conservative MPs no longer see the point of coming to PMQs.

They are probably not alone. Even at the best of times, PMQs is rarely a source of enlightenment, and today’s exchanges came close to being one of those events with a negative information function; you end up knowing less at the end of it than you did before, not more.

That is because neither Oliver Dowden nor Angela Rayner were particularly effective at their messaging. For Dowden, it was only his second time at PMQs, and (again) he only really succeeded in not showing Rishi Sunak up. Rayner has delivered some terrific PMQs performances in the past, but she didn’t today.

Rayner started with the Covid inquiry, and a very short question highlighting the hypocrisy of the Tories taking the Covid inquiry to judicial review when their 2019 manifesto included a pledge to stop JR being abused. It was a good opener, but she did not have a powerful follow-up on the Covid inquiry – Nick Robinson (see 9.39am) and Kay Burley (see 9.54am) did a better job at exposing the weakness of the government’s legal position this morning – and from there she embarked on a scattergun approach, where it was not always clear what her main attack line was. For example, when she asked about value for money and the Covid inquiry, it was not clear whether she was asking about the government taking legal action, or the ?1m legal fees for Boris Johnson.

The ?1m figure seems to have come from this Daily Mirror story. It seems to have been little more than a guess. But Rayner’s reliance on tabloid cuttings for her pre-PMQs briefing is nothing compared with Dowden’s. His entire script seemed to have been inspired by what he read in the Sun or the Daily Mail, and most of it was unconvincing (which was why today’s PMQs was an information black hole).

He complained about the Welsh Labour government not launching its own Covid inquiry, even though the UK one will specifically cover what the Welsh government did. He complained about Rayner claiming AirPods on expenses, even though the claim was approved, and Rayner paid the money anyway when this became a news story. He complained about Labour taking money from a Just Stop Oil backer, when his party’s own record on dodgy donations is probably far worse.

When Rayner asked about the government dropping plans for a register of children missing from school, he claimed it hadn’t. When a Tory MP asked exactly the same question later, he gave a more considered reply, which showed that Rayner was indeed onto something.

Dowden’s most audacious attack line came towards the end, when he claimed that Labour’s proposed climate investment pledge – a ?28bn annual commitment on climate projects – would put up the cost of mortgages by almost ?1,000 a year. This is based on a “Treasury analysis” that mysteriously seems to have surfaced only in the Daily Mail.

Rayner had one more question to go. She could have tried to contest this claim but instead she ignored it – which perhaps serves as further proof that Labour is getting increasingly nervous about this pledge, and that it might get watered down or ditched. This enabled Dowden to recover some ground, but overall it was not an encounter where either of them emerged with great credit.

Fleur Anderson (Lab) asks if the government will introduce a proper windfall tax on energy companies.

Dowden says the government introduced a higher windfall tax than Labour was proposing. And he says the OECD today has given the highest growth update to the UK.

And that’s it. PMQs is over.

Sir Bob Neill (Con) asks for an assurance that the election in Spain will not hold up the negotiation of a treaty concerning Gibraltar.

Dowden says the government remains committed to that.

Mohammad Yasin (Lab) asks about a planning dispute in his constituency.

Dowden says Labour claims to favour more development. But as soon as developments are proposed in Labour constituencies, MPs oppose them.

Ashley Dalton (Lab) asks when the government will take responsibility for the attainment gap falling over Covid and not recovering.

Dowden says, before the pandemic, the attainment gap had narrowed. If Labour cares about education, it should urge the unions to call of their strikes, he says.

Gareth Bacon (Con) asks if Dowden agrees it would be disgraceful for a political party to accept public money from a company that received huge sums from the fulough scheme.

Dowden criticises Labour for taking sums from someone who supports Just Stop Oil.

Simon Baynes (Con) asks Dowden to congratulate a choir in his constituency.

Dowden says choral music is one of our greatest contributions to global culture. He congratulates the choir on making the semi-final of Britain’s Got Talent.

Hilary Benn (Lab) asks about Huntingdon’s disease. Will the government support better access to mental health services for people with the disease?

Dowden says he completely agrees with Benn about the impact of this disease. Investment in mental health has increased, he says.