Companies including EDF, Centrica and Octopus express ‘alarm’ over bill allowing ministers to overrule Ofgem
The UK’s big energy suppliers have urged the government to reverse part of its energy prices bill, saying it grants “extensive” new powers to ministers and puts billions of pounds worth of investment in jeopardy.
The bill, which is making its way through parliament, was introduced as part of efforts to reduce household costs and address the broader energy crisis.
Continue reading...PM wants to prevent panels on 58% of farmland but business secretary says renewables need to be boosted
Liz Truss is facing a rebellion from Jacob Rees-Mogg’s business department over plans to ban solar power from most of England’s farmland.
The prime minister and her environment secretary, Ranil Jayawardena, want to ban solar from about 41% of the land area of England, or about 58% of agricultural land, the Guardian revealed earlier this week.
Continue reading...Statement from No 10 comes straight after PM told MPs she was ‘absolutely’ committed to avoiding public spending cuts
Sajid Javid, the former Tory chancellor, has been speaking at an event organised by the Legatum Institute thinktank this morning. As Chris Smyth from the Times reports, Javid said the turmoil in the markets was caused by the fact that the tax cuts in the mini-budget went “way beyond” what Liz Truss promised during the leadership campaign, and by the fact that her energy bills bailout was also much bigger than expected.
The government has drawn up a plan to cap the unit cost of gas and electricity for two years. Labour proposed its own plan to freeze energy bills, but it only proposed a commitment for six months.
Continue reading...Government says change would apply to all new regulations and it would look to raise in threshold in future
Ministers are seeking to exempt firms with up to 500 staff from new regulations, with unions warning that they could soon be spared from reporting on gender pay gaps and executive pay ratios in a “cynical and reckless” move.
Liz Truss announced on Sunday that companies with up to 500 staff would now be treated the same way as small businesses with fewer than 50 staff, which are exempt when new regulations are introduced.
Continue reading...Energy secretary considers bypassing local planning rules as backbenchers voice opposition
Ministers face a furious backlash from Conservative MPs after overturning a manifesto pledge to pause fracking until it is proved safe, and then indicating drilling could be imposed without local support.
Outlining a return to shale gas extraction in England after three years, Jacob Rees-Mogg dismissed worries about earthquakes caused by the practice as “hysteria”, claiming this was often down to a lack of scientific understanding.
Continue reading...The chancellor says the move will save 28m people £330 on average next year
Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time, a demographic milestone for a state that was designed a century ago to have a permanent Protestant majority, my colleague Rory Carroll reports.
Thérèse Coffey is deputy prime minister as well as health secretary. Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this morning, and responding to a question from the former Labour MP Ed Balls, who was presenting, she said that as deputy PM whould be would “chairing things like the home affairs committee and different elements like that”. But she rejected claims this meant she would be doing the health job part time. She said:
I’m conscious that in two weeks we’ve already pulled together our plan for patients and we will continue to develop that.
I don’t think it will be a case of being part-time ... We don’t have fixed working hours.
Continue reading...‘It’s a nonsense’: government facing claims of manipulating questions to get desired result from survey on ‘Brexit bonus’
It was meant to be one of the sure-fire wins for Brexit, but plans to bring back imperial measurements face criticism over claims of a biased government review.
Ministers were keen to launch a review to revive imperial measurements – such as pounds and ounces – and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), now overseen by Jacob Rees-Mogg, conducted a government consultation over the summer. However, the questions appeared to have something missing.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Despite ‘Global Britain’ rhetoric, Brexit opportunities minister refused to sign off budget to revive pandemic-hit industry
Jacob Rees-Mogg is blocking a major government-backed tourism campaign – despite being a vocal advocate of “Global Britain”.
The planned advertising blitz is aimed at bringing back tourists from key international markets including India, China, Australia, Japan and Canada to boost visitor numbers in the wake of the pandemic.
Continue reading...Jacob Rees-Mogg accused of pursuing agenda of ‘punishing civil servants who work from home’
Plans to sell off £1.5bn worth of government-owned buildings are based on “fantasy” job cuts to the civil service and ignore the role of hybrid working, critics have said.
They took aim at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s crackdown on what he called “under-utilised” property, under which the number of offices operating at the heart of Westminster would more than halved.
Continue reading...Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman, Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss, Tom Tugendhat and Nadhim Zahawi garner enough support
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Brexit opportunities minister, and Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, have just told Sky News that they are backing Liz Truss for the Tory leadership.
Rees-Mogg says Truss had been his strongest supporter in cabinet in terms of seeking Brexit opportunities. He went on:
When we discussed taxation, Liz was always opposed to Rishi’s higher taxes. That again is proper Conservatism. And I think she’s got the character to lead the party and the nation.
Liz Truss is the best candidate. She’s a proper Eurosceptic. She will deliver for the voters. She’ll deliver for the voters. She believes in low taxation.
Continue reading...Exclusive: At least two ministers have railed against proposal while others say goal is impossible
A cabinet row has broken out over Jacob Rees-Mogg’s plans to axe all remaining EU laws in under four years, given concerns about the feasibility of combing through at least 2,000 pieces of legislation while the civil service faces severe cutbacks.
The Brexit opportunities minister is pushing for the laws carried over after Brexit to expire by a “cliff-edge” deadline of 23 June 2026, marking 10 years since the EU referendum.
Continue reading...Latest updates: Jacob Rees-Mogg says ‘we need to look at whether these rules were right in the first place’
Jacob Rees-Mogg has become the second minister to distance himself from the comments connecting food bank usage with an inability to cook made on Wednesday by Lee Anderson in the House of Commons.
Anderson caused outrage after suggesting food bank usage has risen in part because of “generation after generation” of people who are unable to cook or budget properly.
Rees-Mogg told Sky News:
Somebody in my position cannot possibly say things like that, I can’t cook myself and it wouldn’t be right for me to lecture people on how to live their lives.
I think human nature is about empathising with people who live different lives from oneself.
Prospect represents highly skilled civil servants, many of whom have better paid comparators in the private sector. We also represent roles across the private sector and quite frankly would not expect to see those employers behave in the way the government is towards its civil servants.
To be clear: without these civil servants you will not be able to effectively help our country recover from the pandemic, nor tackle the cost-of-living crisis. It will also not be possible to achieve your levelling up ambitions
Continue reading...Former Brexit minister says UK ‘cannot be defeated’ by Brussels in provocative Telegraph column
The former Brexit minister David Frost has said the UK should not fear a trade war with the EU.
In a provocative newspaper column, he said the UK “cannot be defeated” by Brussels and needed to “make sure it is ready” for the consequences of a unilateral move to scrap parts of the Northern Ireland protocol.
Continue reading...Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves says action is needed, ‘not just warm words’
The Downing Street lobby briefing has just ended. And we’ve learned that Boris Johnson has not received a fine over the party in the Downing Street garden on 20 May 2020 – or at least not yet.
There has been speculation that he will be fined for this because at the end of last week it emerged that other people who attended the event in response to an invitation from Johnson’s then principal private secretary, Martin Reynolds, are being fined. The invitation told people to BYOB (bring your own bottle).
I, and others in Whitehall, have been clear that the prime minister himself had no direct involvement in decisions around Nowzad.
Continue reading...Culture secretary hits out after minister leaves notes for civil servants in empty Whitehall offices
Nadine Dorries has criticised Jacob Rees-Mogg, the minister responsible for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency, of foisting a “Dickensian” approach to working from home on the civil service.
Rees-Mogg, who has previously been called “the honourable member for the 18th century” has written to cabinet ministers urging them to coerce staff into a “rapid return to the office” and has been leaving notes in empty Whitehall workspaces with the message: “I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.”
Continue reading...Cabinet minister accused of ‘crass’ behaviour in his campaign to get staff back in the office
Jacob Rees-Mogg has been called “condescending” after leaving notes deemed to be passive-aggressive on civil servants’ desks in an effort to stop them working from home.
As part of his campaign to push workers back into offices, the cabinet minister has toured Whitehall buildings and published a league table of government departments based on how many staff are present.
Continue reading...Brexit opportunities minister says people will find Partygate scandal ‘fundamentally trivial’ in the context of war in Ukraine. This live blog has now closed.
“I think people respect honesty,” says Rishi Sunak. A few weeks ago this would have been seen as an obvious dig at Sunak’s boss, but it did not sound like that today. He was talking about Treasury policy in the early days of the Covid pandemic, and how he felt it was important to admit that government policy would not be able to save all jobs.
Now he’s talking about the family dog. He was oppoosed to getting a puppy for a long time, he says, but when he became chancellor, he was spending so much time at work that he lost the moral authority to say no.
Continue reading...Chris Heaton-Harris takes over as chief whip in shake-up as PM seeks to reassure mutinous Tories
Boris Johnson has made Jacob Rees-Mogg the new minister for “Brexit opportunities” and installed a key loyalist as his chief whip in a reshuffle intended to shore up his position after weeks of terrible headlines.
Rees-Mogg, who was Commons leader, is moved to the Cabinet Office to take on a newly created role as Brexit opportunities minister, a cabinet-level job that also includes “government efficiency”.
Continue reading...More than 90 Tory members do paid work on the side compared with very few Labour politicians, finds analysis
More than a quarter of Tory MPs have second jobs with firms whose activities range from gambling to private healthcare, making more than £4m in extra earnings in a year, Guardian analysis has found.
The register of MPs’ interests shows that more than 90 out of 360 Tories have extra jobs on top of their work in parliament, compared with three from Labour. They are overwhelmingly older and 86% are men. The highest earners were all former cabinet ministers.
Continue reading...As No 10 ham-fistedly let the scandal spread, was this about saving an old Brexit ally or protecting the PM himself?
A Conservative MP who entered parliament in 2010 began to receive what he described as a series of “unusually persistent” texts from his Tory whip last week. The member in question had been part of the Conservative intake that followed the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009.
The arrival of this new group at Westminster – many of them with impressive previous careers outside politics – was supposed to demonstrate, as David Cameron said at the time, that his party was reforming its ways, ridding itself of sleaze.
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