5.16am EDT
05:16
Alexandra Topping
The chair of a group of MPs has accused the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, of treating her second role as minister of women and equalities as a “side hustle”.
A damning report from the women and equalities committee accused the government of sidelining the push for equality, and said it risked “regression on equal rights after decades of progress”.
The report calls for the creation of a cabinet-level minister to reduce inequality, and said hard-won progress was at risk if the role of women and equalities minister was given to “secretaries of state with all-encompassing, non-complementary ‘day jobs'”.
Caroline Nokes, chair of the women and equalities committee, said that in Truss’s first full week as foreign secretary, the minister had said she was unable to attend the committee’s questions because of conflicting commitments.
Nokes said:
It is obvious that the current setup of Cabinet leaves no space or time to really address inequality in the UK.
By effectively treating the role of women and equalities minister as a side hustle, the government is demonstrating its lack of willingness to invest energy in creating change.
Read the full story here:
5.13am EDT
05:13
A minister has denied that Brexit was part of the problem for recruiting HGV drivers in the UK, instead arguing that being divorced from the European Union had helped enable some of the solutions.
Transport secretary Grant Shapps told Sky News:
I’ve seen people point to Brexit as if it is the culprit here. In fact, they are wrong.
Not only are there very large and even larger shortages in other EU countries like Poland and Germany, which clearly can’t be to do with Brexit, but actually because of Brexit I’ve been able to change the law and alter the way our driving tests operate in a way I could not have done if we were still part of the EU.
Shapps said the coronavirus pandemic was actually the “principal cause” of the driver shortage as he stressed it was a “global” problem.
Put to him on Sky News that it was “disingenuous” to suggest Covid-19 was the only reason for the lack of HGV drivers, the Transport Secretary said:
Covid is the main reason. It is a global problem and Europe is hit particularly bad.
We’ve got, for example, in Germany a 60,000 shortage and Poland a 123,000 shortage of lorry drivers, so as I say it is the principal cause of the problem and we are working very hard to change it, including changing the law in order to provide more tests for HGV drivers and encouraging people back into the market.
But you are right, there are longer-term problems, which is that it is difficult – it is a long day’s work, it is hard work, it is a skilled job and, actually, it has been underpaid up until now, so we very much welcome the salary going up, the wages going up, and that’s attracting more people back to the sector.
Meanwhile, Labour party chair Anneliese Dodds said the government’s handling of Brexit was partly to blame for adding extra pressure on the HGV sector.
Speaking to Sky News, Dodds said:
There have been big failures in planning for this situation and the additional red tape that has been created, which was not inevitable, it was not an inevitable result of Brexit in many cases, but that hasn’t been tackled by government.
I talk to advanced manufacturers in my patch for example, and they tell me that now they have got to fill in dozens of pages of paperwork and that is quite a tall order for a HGV driver if they have got to be dealing with all of that, as well as getting goods from one place to another.
So undoubtedly the government’s method of implementing Brexit has had an impact overall on the system, but there are other factors that are in play here.
And I think their failure to consider whether they need to ask that Migration Advisory Committee about a different approach to shortage occupations – I really do think they should be engaging with business on this and listening to them.
4.40am EDT
04:40
Grant Shapps has said he will move “heaven and Earth” so that petrol and other goods can continue moving around the country easily.
The transport secretary told the BBC’s Today programme:
Well, look, I’ll move heaven and Earth to do anything that’s required to make sure that lorries carry on moving our goods and services and petrol around the country.
I’ll do anything which actually helps. The big query actually is where is the blockage? What we do know is that there are a lot of people who have their HGV licences but many of which will have lapsed to come out of the market, often because there has been cheaper European labour.
We want to get those people back in.
Shapps said a lot of European lorry drivers, who have settled and and pre-settled status, are overseas and the Government was trying to “entice” them back to the UK, PA news reports.
He told the Today programme:
Critically, they’ve already got the rights to come here and do it. Ironically, of course, every time you say, ‘let’s open it up to Europeans, eastern Europeans’ and you undercut the marketplace, this is how we’ve ended up with this systemic long-term problem, because salaries have been reduced to a point where people are saying ‘Well, that job’s not for me’. Part of it is this conditions.
Questioned if he would have a standby plan to deploy army drivers to deliver fuel, he responded:
Anything that’s reasonable, and probably that’s not the solution in terms of sheer numbers. We’re not in a position where, previously, drivers have just stopped driving. We will always look at all the different things which are required.
4.25am EDT
04:25
Labour announces housing policy plan ahead of conference
Labour plans to slash affordable rents and give first-time buyers exclusive rights to purchase new-build homes for six months, it will announce this weekend, as it bids to steal the Conservatives’ claim to be “the party of homeownership”.
Lucy Powell, shadow housing secretary, will say a government led by Keir Starmer will restrict to 50% the number of properties in a development that can be sold to overseas buyers, which in some city locations has created “ghost towers” as investors leave homes empty. Labour also wants to give councils powers to force landowners to sell vacant sites to build new housing at lower prices than the compulsory purchase system currently allows.
The policy package will be announced at Labour’s conference in Brighton and amounts to a direct challenge to Michael Gove – the secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities. Labour claims his decision to pause unpopular planning reforms has left the government without a strategy for meeting its housebuilding targets.
Labour is also keen to capitalise on what it perceives to be government weakness over its handling of the building safety crisis with hundreds of thousands of leaseholders, including people in shared ownership affordable housing schemes, facing bills in the tens of thousands of pounds.
“Labour is the party of homeownership, the Tories are the party of speculators and developers,” Powell said. “They treat housing as a commodity, not the bedrock of stable lives and life chances.”
But the Conservatives are also poised to make changes to housing policy, starting with reissued planning reforms. Putting Gove in charge of levelling up and housing policy has been widely viewed as Boris Johnson giving one of his most trusted ministers the remit for issues seen as crucial to the next election.
A lack of access to affordable housing is viewed as a key driver of inequality, both between regions and across generations. One of Gove’s new junior ministers is Neil O’Brien, the Tory MP who previously acted as Johnson’s official adviser on levelling up. He proposed reforming compulsory purchase powers for councils in a 2018 paper on solving the housing crisis titled “Green, pleasant and affordable”.
Read more from my colleagues Robert Booth and Peter Walker here:
Welcome to today’s liveblog. I’m Nicola Slawson and I’ll be taking you through today’s politics news. If you want to contact me, you can email me on nicola.slawson@theguardian.com or find me on Twitter @Nicola_Slawson.
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