Key events
Campaigner Alan Bates to appear before Post Office Horizon IT inquiry
At 10 o’clock the next state of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal inquiry starts, and I will be following it closely here. Alan Bates – the real life character featured in the ITV drama that did so much to focus attention on the scandal will take the stand at Aldwych House and tell his story. Our First Edition newsletter today featured Rupert Neate talking to our colleague Jane Croft, who has been covering the story since 2018, about it. Here is a snippet:
“The impact this scandal has had on thousands of people’s lives has been truly devastating,” Jane says. “These are ordinary people, without money and connections that have been caught up in this real David and Goliath battle.”
In personal impact statements to the inquiry, the victims have spoken about losing everything. “It’s not just their money,” Jane says. “It’s their liberty, their partners, their families, their homes. Some spoke about their children being bullied at school, being shunned by their local community, and being referred to as ‘the postmaster who stole old people’s pensions’.”
“They want justice and for the truth to come out,” Jane says. “It feels like the Post Office knew the Horizon IT system wasn’t working properly, but they continued to prosecute these innocent people anyway.”
In 2015 the Post Office told a House of Commons inquiry: “There is no functionality in Horizon for either a branch, Post Office or Fujitsu to edit, manipulate or remove transaction data once it has been recorded in a branch’s accounts.” This was untrue, a high court judge ruled in a landmark court case four years later.
A recording from 2013, unearthed by Channel 4 News, shows Susan Crichton, the Post Office’s head lawyer, confirm that former chief executive Paula Vennells had been briefed about a “covert operations team” that could remotely access the Horizon system and adjust branches’ accounts. In 2015 Vennells told the Commons business select committee that “we have no evidence” of miscarriages of justice.
Vennells, who has handed back a CBE awarded to her for “services to the Post Office and to charity”, will give evidence, live-streamed here, for three days from Wednesday 22 May.
Nadhim Zahawi, the former chancellor who was one of the MPs questioning Vennells in 2015, has called for a “thorough police investigation”.
“I don’t think it’s good enough that we keep falling back on ‘let the inquiry do its work’ – this is much more serious,” he said. “There needs to be an investigation into corporate manslaughter and individuals at the Post Office.”
Read more here: Tuesday briefing: What to expect from the next phase of the Post Office inquiry
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves also repeatedly attacked Conservative plans over non-dom tax status. Having defended the status against calls for abolition for years, in March Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt announced it would adopt Labour’s policy and scrap the status. However, the way they are planning to do so has been criticised for including a significant number of loopholes.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast this morning, Reeves said:
The government’s plans that they announced in March about non-doms, they said they were taking our policy, well it turns out they’ve taken it but left a load of loopholes in it. And so if you are a non-dom you can still get out of paying inheritance tax: in the first year of their policy there’s a 50% discount, we don’t get 50% discounts on our taxes.
People who go out and work today – teachers, plumbers, doctors, they don’t get a 50% discount – why should some of the wealthiest people in the country get that discount? We would abolish that and we would put that money into frontline public services, where it belongs.”
Shadow cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson said ahead of the March budget that it would be an “abject humiliation” for the Tories if they implemented Labour’s policy.
Non-dom status allows foreign nationals who live in the UK, but are officially domiciled overseas, to avoid paying UK tax on their overseas income or capital gains. Rishi Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty, has previously enjoyed non-domiciled status. In April 2022 she agreed to pay UK tax, saying her arrangements were not “compatible with my husband’s job as chancellor”.
Back with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves for a moment, one other theme she picked up in her media round this morning was that by investing in HMRC she expected a Labour government would do a better job of bringing in tax revenue than under the current administration. Labour has said it will invest up to £555m a year in boosting the number of compliance officers.
She told viewers of BBC Breakfast:
You can ramp it up pretty quickly. At the start you might need to bring in extra resource but then you need to train people up within the government to do this work.
This isn’t rocket science, previous governments have managed to close that tax gap, as it’s called.
Labour’s shadow financial secretary to the Treasury James Murray also touched on the topic when he was on Sky News this morning. He said:
We’ve got to invest in and improve the customer service at HMRC because, you know, we had this urgent question in parliament just before the recess, which was about HMRC closing its phone line for six months a year. Because the service was so bad, they just decided to close the phone line. And we say, look, you have to invest in digital solutions and modernise HMRC.
Braverman: Conservatives are heading for an election defeat
Former home secretary Suella Braverman has said that the Conservatives are heading for a certain defeat in the next election, but appeared to rule out standing against Rishi Sunak in a leadership contest in the short-term.
Speaking on LBC, PA Media reports Braverman said:
I’m very concerned, I’m very concerned about what poll after poll demonstrates, and it’s my job – and I sought to do this as home secretary – to speak honestly, to speak the truth, even if it may be uncomfortable.
I owe that to the people who have sent me to parliament, and I owe that to you, and so the honest truth is that we are heading for a defeat, to put it mildly, at the general election.
I very much hope that we change course and that we improve the offer to the British people. Ultimately, measures on tax cuts, measures on migration, measures on national security and social cohesion are insufficient by this government.
We need to go further, we need to demonstrate to the British people that we’re on their side, that we’re serious about stopping the boats, that we’re actually serious about curbing unprecedented levels of illegal migration, and unfortunately we haven’t managed to do that.
She added “I’m not thinking about any kind of leadership campaign. Rishi Sunak is our prime minister, I fully expect him to lead us into the next general election.”
Braverman departed as home secretary during Liz Truss’s short term as prime minister for causing a security breach by sending official documents from a personal email account. Rapidly reinstated into the same job by Rishi Sunak when he formed his first cabinet, she was sacked by him in November for writing an article criticising London’s police which had not been agreed in advance by No 10.
My colleague Martin Pengelly in Washington has had an early sight of the new Liz Truss book, the apocalyptically titled Ten Years To Save The West from the woman who had 49 days in Downing Street. Here is a snippet from his piece:
When the queen died so soon after Truss had become her 15th and final prime minister, Truss writes, the news, though widely expected after the monarch’s health had deteriorated, still came “as a profound shock” to Truss, seeming “utterly unreal” and leaving her thinking: “Why me? Why now?”
Insisting she had not expected to lead the UK in mourning for the death of a monarch nearly 70 years on the throne and nearly 100 years old, Truss says state ceremony and protocol were “a long way from my natural comfort zone”.
Other prime ministers, she writes without naming any, may have been better able to provide “the soaring rhetoric and performative statesmanship necessary”.
Read more here: Liz Truss says in book Queen told her to ‘pace yourself’, admits she didn’t listen
Labour’s shadow financial secretary to the treasury James Murray was also on the media round this morning, and while on Sky News, that David Cameron visit to meet Donald Trump led to an awkward exchange where Kay Burley was pushing him to say whether shadow foreign secretary David Lammy should also be making overtures to the presumptive Republican nominee for the US election in November.
Murray said:
I know David’s been to America quite a bit. He’s got colleagues on both sides of the aisle. There’s Republicans as well as Democrats. You know, he’s built those bridges because I think he recognises that we need to have an alliance. I don’t know his diary. But you know, if we get into government, if president Trump is reelected, we need to have a relationship with the US whoever is in the White House.
David Cameron has held talks with Donald Trump in Florida. In a statement on Monday, a Foreign Office spokesperson said: “Ahead of his visit to Washington, the foreign secretary will meet former President Trump in Florida today. It is standard practice for ministers to meet with opposition candidates as part of their routine international engagement.”
Cameron’s counterpart, US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, met with people from the opposition Labour party on his last visit to the UK.
Cameron will head on to Washington where he is expected to hold talks with Blinken, the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. He is also hoping to meet the House speaker, Mike Johnson. We are expecting at least some public words from Cameron during the day.
Labour figures continue to be asked in the media about Angela Rayner’s housing arrangements from a decade ago. Speaking on BBC Breakfast, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said Rayner was “a good friend and a colleague of mine and I have full faith and trust in her.”
Speaking on the Today programme when asked about the issue, Reeves told listeners:
I think she was on this programme and answered questions about the sale of her house almost a decade ago now, when she was married to her former husband.
So these allegations are from something that happened a decade ago. She has sought legal advice since Michael Ashcroft wrote this book.
She’s confident and I’m confident that she has paid her tax, but today is about asking the wealthiest in our country to pay their fair share of tax to fund our public services.
Reeves: Labour spending plans will make ‘massive difference’ to the lives of people
Rachel Reeves has said Labour’s spending plans will make a “massive difference” to the lives of people, promising two million additional appointments a year in the NHS, 700,000 emergency dental appointments, free breakfast clubs in all primary schools as well as investment in scanners and new technology in hospitals.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, despite cautioning that should it form the next government, Labour would face “the worst economic inheritance since the second world war.”
She said:
I’m under no illusions about the scale of the challenge that I would inherit if I become chancellor. Both the economic inheritance that I’ve spoken about with debt, living standards and taxes, but also the inheritance in terms of the state of public services on their knees after 14 years of Conservative government, particularly our NHS.
That is why the focus today is about how we can raise that additional £5bn by the end of the parliament. Numbers that don’t just come from me, but which come from the National Audit Office, and a speech given in January this year about the money that is on the table that we could bring in through cracking down on tax avoidance by properly resourcing HMRC.
Nick Robinson suggested the figures were insignficant compared to the total government budget, descrbing them as a “rounding error” and “loose change down the back of the treasury sofa”.
Phillip Inman
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has said an incoming Labour government would launch a £5bn crackdown on tax avoiders to close a gap in its spending plans exposed by Jeremy Hunt scrapping the non-dom regime to finance tax cuts.
Warning households and businesses that Labour was prepared to adopt tough measures to tackle tax fraud and non-compliance, Reeves said the funding would be used to pay for free school breakfast clubs and additional NHS appointments.
Labour’s plan will reduce “the tax gap” – the difference between the amount of money HMRC is owed and the amount it actually receives – to previous levels after it increased by more than £5bn over the past year.
Reeves will also raise £2.6bn over the next parliament by closing what she described as loopholes in the government’s plans to abolish exemptions for non-doms – people who are not “domiciled” in the UK for tax purposes.
The government reforms will allow non-doms to use family trusts to avoid inheritance tax and to have a 50% discount in the first year of when new rules apply. Reeves said she would ban the use of trusts to avoid the tax and scrap the 50% discount.
It comes a month after Labour’s spending plans were thrown into question by Hunt adopting two of the party’s top revenue-raising policies at the budget to fund a cut in national insurance.
Read more of Phillip Inman’s report here: Labour plans £5bn crackdown on tax avoiders to close non-dom spending gap
Welcome and opening summary …
Good morning. Labour has been setting out plans to try to recoup more money from tax avoidance in an attempt to show that it has the money on hand to fund its pledges without breakign the fiscal rules it has set for itself. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has been doing the media round today, more on that in a moment. Here are your headlines today …
Westminster, the Scottish parliament and the Senedd are in recess, but there is some business scheduled at Stormont.
The main event today though will be when the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry resumes in London. Alan Bates, former subpostmaster and founder of the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance appears. The inquiry, chaired by the retired judge Sir Wyn Williams, began in 2022.
It is Martin Belam here with you again today. I do try to read all your comments, and dip into them where I think I can be helpful, but if you want to get my attention the best way is to email me – martin.belam@theguardian.com – especially if you have spotted my inevitable errors and typos, or you think I’ve missed something important.