Starmer says Reform’s pledge to restore two-child benefit cap in full is ‘shameful’ – UK politics live | Politics

Keir Starmer has said that Labour remains committed to its manifesto pledge to get rid of the lower, youth rate for the minimum wage.

The Times today says ministers are looking at dropping this pledge because of its potential impact on youth unemployment. (See 9.14am.) As Jessica Elgot and Tom Knowles report in our story, ministers are not minded to drop the commitment for good, but they are considering slowing the pace at which the lower rate gets equalised with the full, adult rate.

Asked about the story during his visit to South Wales today, Starmer said:

We’ve made commitments to young people in our manifesto, and we will keep to those commitments, including the commitment that we would make sure that the living wage would go up this April, which I can absolutely confirm to you will happen.

Starmer did not comment on when equalisation would happen.

In its manifesto, Labour said:

Labour will also remove the discriminatory age bands, so all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage, delivering a pay rise to hundreds of thousands of workers across the UK.

Labour figures in the county with the highest number of reinstated council elections, following the government’s recent U-turn, have said they fear the party will be “annihilated” when voters go to the polls in May, Hannah Al-Othman, Josh Halliday and Jessica Murray report.

Robert Jenrick’s first speech as Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson was more substantial than the usual Reform UK press conference speech. Some of it has been covered here already but, for the record, here is a fuller summary. The full text has been sent out to journalists, but it does not seem to be available on the party’s website yet.

For too many people right now, those same opportunities are fading.

Victims of a 30-year-long economic consensus which has failed …

… and mismanagement by a Westminster class who bet that because Britain was a rich and powerful country, it always would be.

They were wrong. In 1997, our people’s living standards were closing the gap with America.

Today, incomes are closer to Romania’s than the US.

There is nothing particularly new about this observation; Rishi Sunak also claimed that the UK had been led down by a failed, 30-year “status quo”. There are plenty of serious theories as to what went wrong, but Jenrick did not reference them in his speech. He just blamed high debt, high taxes and net zero.

• Jenrick said Reform UK would respect the bond markets, because the risk of not being able to borrow forced governments to act responsibly.

Now … Andy Burnham recently said the government shouldn’t be in hock to the bond markets and should ignore this flashing red light.

I say the opposite. If you need to borrow money to fund your spending, then you need to convince the lender you have the wherewithal to repay it.

I say the bond markets force the government to face up to trade offs. Reform respects and welcomes that.

Jenrick pitched this as a dig at Burnham, but in some ways it was also aimed at Nigel Farage; ditching Farage’s threat to abolish the OBR (see 10.34am) is also about respecting the bond markets.

Reform will make £25bn in annual savings through measures including ending universal credit for foreign nationals, raising the Immigration Health Surcharge and capping foreign aid at £1bn.

Because under a Reform government, the interests of the British people will always come first.

Additionally, Danny Kruger’s plan to streamline the civil service will generate £4bn in immediate savings from averted salary costs, plus £1bn in averted pension liabilities for future taxpayers.

Jenrick gave some detail of the proposed benefit cuts. See 11.45am.

• He said Reform UK would reform the Office for Budget Responsibility, but not abolish it. (See 10.34am.)

• He claimed Reform UK could revive the economy with stability, tax cuts and deregulation. On deregulation, he said:

A Reform government will leave you to run your business and to innovate. Rather than forcing the lanyard class to run it for you. They do not understand innovation and only stymie it.

That means no more mandates for HR or judges setting wages.

It means a return to meritocracy and the pursuit of excellence – so no more diversity targets on company boards.

We will scrap red tape, and take every effort to make life easier, no matter how small, from allowing shops to open late to allowing cafes and bars to offer outdoor seating without endless form-filling for officialdom.

He also called for more planning reform, saying his party would legislate for a third runway at Heathrow if it is not being built at the time of the next election.

Last month, the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, argued that globalisation had been weaponised by larger powers, becoming a source of weakness for dependent countries.

One line stuck out to me. He said “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

We agree.

Yes, free trade with our friends and allies is advantageous. But we must respond robustly when our rivals consistently cheat the system and leverage dependencies to our disadvantage.

A government led by Nigel Farage will never display the weakness Keir Starmer has towards China.

Jenrick ignored the fact that, in his speech, Carney was talking as much, or more, about the US as about China when he made this point. As for whether Farage would “never display weakness” towards Trump, on this Jenrick was silent.

As Jessica Elgot points out (see 3.20pm), overall this was a very Tory speech. This was even apparent in Jenrick’s references. At various points, he quoted approvingly Disraeli, Peel and Rab Butler. He said Peel was “his inspiration”, describing him as the “architect of the Victorian age of stability and prosperity”.

But Peel was also the prime minister who split the Conservative party for a generation (over repealing the Corn laws – the 19th century equivalent of joining the EU customs union, which wasn’t a Faragist cause).

A similar split is already under way. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, after the Liberal party split, people would talk about the Lloyd George Liberals and the Asquith Liberals. Jenrick’s speech took us one step closer to the world where it makes sense to talk about Badenoch Tories and Farage Tories.

Although Reform UK had mostly dropped its plan to lift the two-child benefit cap before Robert Jenrick became its Treasury spokesperson (see 2pm), it was only today that the party committed to restoring it in full.

This is also the Conservative policy, and Anna Turley, the Labour chair, has “united the right” on this issue.

In a statement, she said:

Robert Jenrick has united the right behind a cruel child poverty pact that would see nearly half a million kids pushed into poverty. Farage’s party is stuffed full of former failed Tories who are now hell bent on continuing their damaging legacy, with working people and their children set to pay the price.

Labour chooses the other road – lifting almost half a million kids out of child poverty – and that’s what we’re doing this year. It’s the right thing to do for them, their families and our economy. It’s appalling that Reform and the Tories would undo that change and leave a lost generation of kids in every corner of Britain.

These are from my colleague Jessica Elgot on Robert Jenrick’s speech this morning.

Robert Jenrick announces Reform UK will keep the OBR and Bank of England independence, with an emphasis on fiscal discipline, signified by restoring the two child benefit cap. The speech is essentially the same as every Tory chancellor’s conference speech in the last 10 years.

Feels like we are going to watch the Tory-fication of Reform over the next couple of years as an effort to reassure middle England voters, especially working people. But will lead to some inevitable tensions…

Liz Truss, the former Tory PM, has implicitly criticised Robert Jenrick for saying Reform UK will maintain the Office for Budget Responsibility and Bank of England independence. After Jenrick’s speech, she posted this on social media.

The Treasury and its associated bodies (OBR and Bank of England) are the most powerful institutions in the British state – more so than the Home or Foreign Office. I saw this up close.

They are ideologically committed to EU alignment, mass migration and Keynsian economics.

If their power structures aren’t dismantled, nothing will change.

For Jenrick, criticism from Truss is probably very welcome. His speech today was intended to show that Reform UK is committed to economic stability. (See 10.34am.) He served in Truss’s government as a health minister, but since then he has been very critical of her mini-budget, and he has said that Kemi Badenoch should have thrown Truss out of the Conservative party – claiming Badenoch’s failure to do so was one reason why he defected to Reform UK.

Robert Jenrick has said Reform UK would keep the Bank of England’s 2% inflation target.

Asked about this, the Reform Treasury spokesperson said:

I’ve been very clear, of course we’re going to keep the target in place and it’s incredibly important to us. Reform serves working people. We want to make sure we keep their bills down.

Robert Jenrick made it clear today that Reform UK would restore “in full” (see 11.45am) the two-child benefit cap – the policy originally proposed by George Osborne that limits child-related universal credit payments to the first two children a family has. The government is in the process of passing legislation to abolish the cap. But the Conservative, and now Reform UK, want to restore for everyone.

Last year Nigel Farage said his party would get rid of the cap to help encourage poorer families to have children. But this was unpopular with anti-welfare rightwingers, and Reform soon said that what Farage meant was that Reform would only lift the cap for British parents with both parents working full-time. This was the policy when Reform last discussed it two weeks ago.

But the Tories do not accept that Farage has ditched what he said last year. In a response to the Robert Jenrick speech, Kevin Hollinrake, the Tory chair, said:

One week Nigel Farage says Robert Jenrick is a fraud, next week he’s Reform’s economic guru. You cannot trust a word he says.

Reform’s economic policy changes by the week. Just two weeks ago, Rob Jenrick voted to lift the two-child benefit cap. Today he claims he would reinstate it. They make even Keir Starmer look consistent.

Within Reform, no one agrees on anything. Danny Kruger wants to scrap the two-child cap. Richard Tice wants to scrap the OBR. Suella Braverman wants to pursue ‘socialist’ policies.

But none of it really matters. Reform is a one-man band. The only view that counts is Nigel Farage’s and he wants more welfare.

Speaking to the media in South Wales, Keir Starmer has defended the government’s decision to U-turn over the plan to postpone elections in 30 council areas in England.

He said it was the councils themselves that asked for elections to be postponed, and he said the government was responding to legal advice that changed. He said:

It’s important to remind ourselves that the decision to cancel was a locally led decision, in the sense that each authority could decide.

And, yes, Labour authorities came forward to say, ‘please delay’, but so did Tory authorities, so did Lib Dem authorities.

In relation to the position, we took further legal advice and, as you would expect as a government, having got further legal advice, we followed that legal advice.

At least one council leader has claimed she was encouraged by the government to ask for elections in her area to be delayed.

Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.

Seven councillors elected to represent Reform UK on its ‘flagship’ county council in Kent have joined the new hard-right party set up by Rupert Lowe to rival Nigel Farage’s.

They include a number who parted company with the Reform UK group after leaked video obtained by the Guardian showed the council leader, Linden Kemkaran, telling that her councillors would have to “fucking suck it up” if they didn’t like decisions.

Oliver Bradshaw, one of the councillors who have now joined Restore Britain, said:

Reform UK in Kent has forgotten who sent them there,

When Reform was elected in May, it had two pledges, cut waste and put the residents of Kent first.

Instead, £200k is being spent on political assistants and DOLGE [Reform’s Department of Local Government Efficiency], a department the administration itself admits ‘hasn’t cut waste’.

Farage told a press conference on Monday that Lowe’s new party wouldn’t last long.

The Conservatives have joined Nigel Farage (see 11.24pm) in criticising the government for its oppostion to the attempt by a small group of Chagossians to settle on an atol among the Chagos Islands. Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said:

We warned that [the Chagos Islands treaty] would put Chagossians at risk of repression by the Mauritian government. And now our own government is doing Mauritius’s bidding, threatening Chagossians with prisons sentences or crippling fines for landing on the Islands.

This is shameful. Chagos is British, not Mauritian. Starmer should show some backbone for once and stand up to those who threaten to harm to our national interest and our security.

Keir Starmer has responded to the Robert Jenrick speech. Referring to Jenrick’s commitment to bringing back the two-child benefit cap in full (see 11.45am), Starmer said in a post on social media:

Shameful.

I’m incredibly proud that this government has scrapped the cruel two child limit.

Reform wants to push hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

UPDATE: And, speaking to reporters in South Wales, Starmer said:

This is shameful from Reform – a total disregard for the lives of young people.

I hope that they absolutely never get to be in power, because this is an indication of the sort of Britain that they want to see, a Britain which plumbs its children back into poverty.

I do not think that’s what this country needs and I don’t think it’s what this country deserves.

Q: Was Nigel Farage wrong when he described the OBR as a Blairite quango? And what do you mean by saying you would get more people in?

Jenrick said the OBR should not be a retirement home for people who used to work at the Resolution Foundation.

And it came second from bottom in a list of accurate forecasters, he said.

So there would be changes, he said. He said there was a need to get better people in.

But he said the OBR was set up to instil “fiscal rectitude”. He said Reform UK were in favour of that.

Q: In the past Nigel Farage said the future of the triple lock was up for debate. It sounds like you don’t agree?

Jenrick said the party would say more about this in due course. But it would always protect pensioners, he said.