Rishi Sunak facing new byelection challenge as Scott Benton resigns as an MP – UK politics live | Politics

Rishi Sunak faces another probable byelection drubbing following Scott Benton’s resignation as an MP, Christopher Hope from GB News reports.

Benton, MP for Blackpool South, was suspended from the Commons last month for 35 days after undercover reporters from the Times recorded him offering to engage in lobbying activities that would break Commons rules.

His suspension triggered the recall process, allowing voters in his constituency to sign a petition if they wanted a byelection. The petition was not due to close until 22 April, but Hope says Benton has announced his resignation as an MP today. Hope quotes Benton as saying:

It’s with a heavy heart that I have written to the chancellor this morning to tender my resignation as your MP.

I’d like to thank the hundreds of residents who have sent supportive messages, cards and letters over the last few months and who have urged me to continue and fight the next election.

By resigning today, Benton should enable the byelection to be held on Thursday 2 May, the date of the local elections.

Benton had a majority of just 3,690 over Labour at the 2019 general election and Keir Starmer’s party should be able to win the seat very easily. Holding the byelection at the same time as the local elections, which are also expected to involve terrible results for the Tories, will at least mean Sunak won’t have to worry about a byelection disaster in mid summer.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, has apologised for what has been described as a “minor” breach of the rules requiring MPs to register their financial interests.

He issued the apology in a letter to the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Daniel Greensberg, who launched an investigation following a Guardian report saying Gove had received VIP hospitality at a Queens Park Rangers (QPR) football match that he had not declared.

After being contacted by the Guardian, Gove declared the two tickets he had received for the chairman’s box, for Gove and his son. He said the hospitality had not orginally been declared due to an “oversight”.

Gove also established that on two other occasions he and his son had been given tickets for the chairman’s box that had not been included in the register, and he declared those too.

The value of the three pairs of tickets not declared at the right time was £650, £552, and £552.

Greenberg said that these three interests, and a fourth (Gove being an unpaid governor of the Ditchley Foundation) should all have been declared promptly in the register of members’ interests. But he said these were “minor” breaches of the rules, and he dealt with them through the “rectification” process, which avoids the need for a reference to the Commons standards committee.

The original Guardian story, by David Conn, pointed out that when Gove attended a QPR match in August 2021, he was spent time with David Meller, a donor to the Conservative party whose fashion products company had been awarded £164m PPE contracts after Gove referred them to the government’s so-called VIP lane for PPE proposals during the pandemic. Conn said Meller’s son Johnny organised the tickets.

In his declaration, Gove said the tickets were paid for by QPR football club.

David Meller did not respond to Conn’s request for a comment, and Johnny Meller said he did not remember going to the match with Gove. Gove and other ministers have always said that decisions to actually award PPE contracts were taken by civil servants, not members of the government.

Greenberg did not ask Gove about the Mellers in his correspondence with Gove about the undeclared tickets, and Gove did not mention this aspect of the Guardian’s report in his replies either.

Downing Street has rejected suggestions that the government has abandoned plans to cut ground rents to zero.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, reportedly wants to cut ground rents to an effective rate of zero (“peppercorn”), but the Sunday Times said yesterday that he was being overruled by No 10 and the Treasury, who are worried about the consequences.

In their story, Harry Yorke and Melissa York reported:

The plan was to add the provision to the [leasehold and freehold reform bill] after a consultation, which closed in January. This would have gone further than the cap on ground rents for new homes, introduced in 2022, and reforms in 1993 to enable leaseholders to reduce their ground rent to a peppercorn when extending their lease by 90 years.

However, the proposal was quietly abandoned after Gove and officials at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities met fierce resistance from the Treasury. It follows an intensive lobbying campaign by pension funds, some of which have invested billions in buying up freeholds for blocks of flats.

The Treasury has been warned that pressing ahead with Gove’s plans could wipe out between £15bn and £40bn of investment, which could significantly affect individual pensioners. Pension funds are big investors in housing and ministers are also concerned about the knock-on effects for investment in new developments. Housing campaigners say the potential impact has been greatly exaggerated.

At the No 10 lobby briefing, asked if leasehold reform had been abandoned, the PM’s spokesperson replied: “No.” He went on:

We are committed to strengthening protection for leaseholders and bringing forward reforms through the leasehold and freehold reform bill. The bill is continuing to progress through the House of Lords and will have its second reading later this week …

We have just consulted on a range of options to cap the ground rents for existing leases and are currently considering responses to that consultation and will set out our policy response to that in due course.

Asked to confirm that there would be a cap on ground rents, the spokesperson replied:

We have said that we do not believe it is fair that leaseholders face unregulated ground rents. That is why we have consulted on a range of options to cap ground rents for existing leases.

Noa Hoffman from the Sun thinks the compromise outcome will involve a transition to peppercorn rents – but over a very long period.

There has also been no final decision made yet, but the expectation (as The Sun reported last week) is a very slow transition to peppercorns

Downing Street has insisted that £100,000 a year is a high salary, while defending Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, over comments he made last week implying that it wasn’t.

At the No 10 lobby briefing, the prime minister’s spokesperson said that Hunt had been talking about a specific individual when he claimed £100,000 a year did not go far.

In a post on X at the end of last week, describing some calls with constituents, Hunt said:

Finally I spoke to a lady from Godalming about eligibility for the government’s childcare offer which is not available if one parent is earning over £100k. That is an issue I would really like to sort out after the next election as I am aware that it is not huge salary in our area if you have a mortgage to pay.

Hunt defended his comment in an interview yesterday, saying: “What sounds like a large salary – when you have house prices averaging around £670,000 in my area and you’ve got a mortgage and childcare costs – it doesn’t go as far as you might think.”

Asked if the prime minister thought £100,000 was not a high salary, the PM’s spokesperson said:

Clearly 100,000 pounds is a high salary.

The chancellor responded to questions on this at the weekend.

It is clear that he was referring to the views of an individual constituent whose personal circumstances I obviously can’t comment on.

Heather Stewart has a good explainer here explaining why, by any measure, £100,000 is a high salary.

Andrew Bowie, the energy minister, said the government should have revived investment in nuclear energy “years ago” in an interview this morning.

While doing an interview round on behalf of the government, Bowie told Times Radio that the government is investing £350m in nuclear energy. But it should have happened sooner, he said.

I make no bones about it. We should have done this years ago. We are running to catch up, but we have just this year delivered our civil nuclear roadmap. We’ve announced our intention to build a third gigawatt project. We’re investing £350m in new nuclear power to ease Vladimir Putin out of the nuclear fuels market. We are absolutely committed to delivering small modular reactors through our competition, which will conclude this year.

But of course, this should have been done years ago, which is why we’re having to take the action in the way that we are right now.

This is the second time this month Bowie has criticised his government’s record. After the budget he said the extension of the windfall tax to energy companies was “deeply disappointing”. Bowie is MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, where the windfall tax is seen as a threat to jobs in the North Sea oil and gas industry.

In normal circumstances a minister might expect to be sacked for a comment like that, but No 10 later said Bowie was keeping his job because he had subsequently clarified his remark.

Rishi Sunak has restated the government’s view that China represents an “epoch-defining challenge”, and insisted that the UK has “very strong” abilities to resist cyber-attacks.

In a clip for broadcasters on his visit to Barrow-in-Furness (see 11.28am), asked about the announcement being made by Oliver Dowden later, he said:

We’ve been very clear that the situation now is that China is behaving in an increasingly assertive way abroad, authoritarian at home and it represents an epoch-defining challenge, and also the greatest state-based threat to our economic security.

So, it’s right that we take measures to protect ourselves, which is what we are doing.

And on cybersecurity, he said:

When it comes to cyber, we have the National Cyber Security Centre, which is world leading.

Indeed, when I’m out and about across the world, other leaders want to learn and talk to us because they believe that our capabilities in this country are very strong.

The term “epoch-defining challenge” is one that Sunak used to describe China in March last year, when the government published its updated integrated defence and security review. At the time the government was under pressure from some Tory MPs to call China a threat. It did not use that term, but “epoch-defining challenge” was a mild hardening of the language that had been used previously.

Rishi Sunak is in Barrow-in-Furness today where he is announcing what No 10 is headlining as a £200m investment intended to support nuclear submarine industry in the town.

But it’s £20m a year for a decade, which does not sound quite so impressive. And residents in the town could be forgiven for thinking anything announced by Sunak today will have little bearing on how much the government is actually spending in their community in 2034.

In a news release explaining the investment, No 10 says:

The UK’s ambitious defence plans are underpinned by major new investment in Barrow. To unlock Barrow’s huge potential and support a growing workforce, the government will commit an initial £20m for immediate projects, including supporting people towards work, community projects and completing construction on the A595 Grizebeck bypass, and a minimum of £20m a year over 10 years to improve health outcomes, build more homes, develop the transport network and support local schools.

Interestingly, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has joined Sunak for the visit. This is not a Treasury announcement, it’s a tiny sum of money, and it’s not as if Hunt has a constituency interest, because his seat is in Surrey, which is the other end of England. But perhaps No 10 think Hunt makes a good impression on voters, and that it helps Sunak to be seen alongside him. Yesterday Hunt was doing a Sunday media round, which is unusual for a chancellor less than three weeks after they delivered the budget.

Barrow and Furness was a Labour seat for most of the postwar period, but in 2019 it was won by the Conservative, Simon Fell, with a majority of 5,789.

UPDATE: At the No 10 lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson said the Barrow investment was worth £220m, and he defended the decision to make a commitment over 10 years. See 1.21pm.

David Cameron, the foreign secretary, is addressing Tory MPs at a private meeting of the 1922 Committee this afternoon. Because he is a member of the House of Lords, there is no mechanism for the Commons as a whole to question him and, despite the Commons procedure committee publishing a report in January recommending a solution to this problem, the government has given no indication that it intends to accept this proposal.

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesperson, said it was “outrageous” that Cameron was able to avoid scrutiny from MPs in this way. In a statement she said:

When we’re facing such serious national security threats, it is outrageous that only Conservative backbenchers will hear from the foreign secretary and have the chance to question him, not all MPs.

MPs have been calling for David Cameron to answer questions in the House of Commons. With serious concerns about the threat to our democracy from the Chinese government, the foreign secretary must make that happen as a matter of urgency.

A reader asks:

How serious is the hack on the Electoral Commission website, since the electoral register is publicly available? If those who have their addresses left off the public register have had their details accessed that is different. Do you know the details?

This what the Electoral Commission said itself about the seriousness of the hack in a Q&A published last year.

We know it can be troubling to hear that your data may have been accessed. We regret that sufficient protections were not in place to prevent this cyber-attack and apologise to those affected.

The data contained in the electoral registers is limited, and much of it is already in the public domain. According to the risk assessment used by the Information Commissioner’s Office to assess the harm of data breaches, the personal data held on electoral registers, typically name and address, does not in itself present a high risk to individuals.

It is possible however that this data could be combined with other data in the public domain, such as that which individuals choose to share themselves, to infer patterns of behaviour or to identify and profile individuals.

The commission said that details of people whose names are not on the register, because they register to vote anonymously, were not accessed during the cyber-attack.

The Home Office has launched a social media advertising campaign aimed at discouraging people in Vietnam from trying to enter the UK illegally on small boats. In a news release the Home Office explains:

Using real testimonies from those who regret coming to the UK illegally, the adverts highlight the risks and consequences people face if they turn to criminal gangs and attempt the dangerous journey.

A migrant, referred to as K, shares his reality of sleeping in a camp in Calais for 5 nights under the supervision of armed guards, before taking the long journey across the Channel to the UK. He says: “Never again would I risk my life in a small boat, even if you bribed me.”

An increasing proportion of small boat migrants are Vietnamese, and they are 1 of the top 10 nationalities for migrants crossing the Channel illegally.

The latest phase of the campaign, which will begin today, will harness social media adverts on Facebook and YouTube to directly target people who may be considering making dangerous and illegal journeys to the UK …

The campaign warns prospective migrants of the reality of living in the UK illegally with no right to be in the UK and no access to public services or funding.

It includes testimonies from Home Office Immigration Enforcement and Border Force officers, who all too often encounter illegal migrants who have been sold into modern slavery or illegal working by their smugglers.

The Home Office claims a similar social media campaign in Albania contributed to 90% reduction in small boat arrivals from Albania last year.

Jo Stevens is joining Keir Starmer on Anglesey today on a visit to promote Labour’s clean energy mission. Vaughan Gething, the new first minister of Wales, and Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary for climate change and net zero are also there, and they are announcing that Great British Energy, the new, state-owned energy company that Labour plans to set up, will make a significant investment in floating offshore wind. Labour says this announcement “marks the first major investment commitment that Great British Energy will make once established by an incoming UK Labour government”.

In a news release issued overnight, Labour says:

Wales has the potential to be a world leader in the development of new floating offshore wind technology, which a recent government-backed taskforce says could unlock up to £43bn of GVA [gross value added – a measure of economic growth] to the UK economy and create around 30,000 jobs by 2050.

However, in recent years, floating offshore wind in Wales has been let down by a lack of support from the UK government. Not a single floating offshore wind project was successful at the government’s last failed renewables auction. The Port of Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, saw its bid to act as a hub for developing offshore wind technology short-sightedly rejected by the government …

Ministers have the opportunity to unlock investment in three floating wind farms this year, in Scotland, north England and the Celtic Sea. But research from RenewableUK has found that budget restrictions will likely mean only one of these projects will go ahead, stifling investment in the emerging sector that would lead to new jobs as well as cheaper bills.

And Keir Starmer said:

In an increasingly insecure world, with tyrants using energy as an economic weapon, Britain must take back control of our national energy security. After fourteen years of a Tory government kowtowing to fossil fuel dictators, Labour’s plan for energy independence would get Putin’s boot off our throat and power up communities across Britain.

Labour and the Tories are both claiming the other party is making Britain dependent on Vladimir Putin for energy. Tories justify this on the grounds that Labour has ruled out approving further drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea once its in power. Labour defends its claim on the basis that the Tories have been dragging their feet on renewable energy.

In his interview on the Today programme this morning, Luke de Pulford, the executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac), also said that the UK government had been slow to blame China for cyber-attacks on MPs, and on British institutions more generally. Peter Walker has the details here.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are both far away from Westminster this morning. Sunak is in Barrow-in-Furness, promoting a £200m investment in nuclear submarines, and Starmer is on Anglesey, promoting Labour’s plans for offshore wind. In London it looks as if the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, will be grabbing the headlines. He is making a statement to MPs about Chinese cyber-attacks on the UK and, as the Sun reports, he is expected to blame Beijing for a hack on the Electoral Commission’s network that meant details of 40 million voters were accessible.

Cash Boyle has details here.

Dowden is expected to announce new sanctions against some Chinese officials. But it remains to be seen whether this will be enough for the China hawk faction in his party, some of whom are understood to have been personally targeted by Chinese hackers.

In an interview on the Today programme this morning Luke de Pulford, director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac), said that he wanted the government to use powers under the National Security Act 2023 to label China as a particular risk. He explained:

[The act] has two categories of countries in it: countries in the enhanced sphere [those that pose a higher risk] and countries in the political tier. Ludicrously there’s still a debate over whether or not China will be in the enhanced tier. I know that some within government wants China to be labelled as that enhanced tier. That should certainly happen.

Being in the enhanced tier would mean groups or individuals acting on behalf of China in the UK would be subject to tighter controls. There are more details here.

Simon Clarke, the former levelling up secretary, posted a message on X this morning saying it was time for Britain to “end our naivety on China”.

We have to end our naivety on China. Every time we talk about a reset, there is fresh evidence of malign activity. Hong Kong. The Uighurs. Taiwan. Attacking our democracy. If we blame ourselves for not seeing Putin’s true nature, why make the same mistake with Xi?

Giving interviews this morning, Andrew Bowie, the energy minister, implied Clarke was pushing at an open door. He claimed the government would “stop at nothing” to protect people from cyber attacks. He told LBC:

The fact is that this government has invested a lot of time, money and effort in ensuring that our cybersecurity capabilities are at the place they need to be, we’ve increased the powers of our intelligence and security community to be able to deal with these threats.

And we will stop at nothing to ensure that the British people, our democracy, our freedom of speech and our way of life is defended.

But Bowie is not the minister in charge. We will have to wait until Dowden addresses the Commons before we learn exactly how robust the government’s response will be.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak is on a visit in Barrow-in-Furness, where he will record a pooled TV interview.

Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit on Anglesey with Vaughan Gething, the new Welsh first minister, where they will highlight Labour’s plans for offshore wind and give interviews.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Lunchtime: Four parliamentarians – the MPs Iain Duncan Smith, Tim Loughton and Stewart McDonald, and the peer David Alton – are getting a briefing from a parliamentary security official about Chinese efforts to hack their emails. They are expected to hold a press conference afterwards.

2.30pm: Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, makes a statement to MPs about cyber-attacks against the UK from China.

4.30pm: Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, gives evidence to the Commons health committee.

5pm: David Cameron, the foreign secretary, speaks to Tory MPs at the 1922 Committee.

If you want to contact me, do use the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.