Rishi Sunak faces questions over Nadhim Zahawi sacking – UK politics live | Politics

Q: What are your plans for rebuilding hospitals like the University Hospital of North Tees in Stockton, the one you visited this morning? And when will you pay nurses properly?

Sunak says the NHS capital spending budget is the biggest ever. Almost 100 hospitals are being upgraded. And there is the 40 hospital programme, he says, which involves builds and rebuilds.

(He does not describe this as the government building 40 new hospitals – which was the misleading formula used to describe the programme by Boris Johnson.)

On pay, Sunak says the government has followed the pay review process.

He says asking why nurses cannot be paid more is “a fair question”.

But, referring to the topics covered by earlier questions, he says there are many other demands on the money.

He can says the NHS is getting more money than before. “Overall the pie is as big as it’s ever been.”

But, withing that pay, they have to balance the needs of pay against other needs, like more MRI scannners.

And Sunak says he does not want to put people’s taxes up.

He also says his priority is to halve inflation.

If inflation is still high in a year’s time, it will be “awful for all of you”, he says.

Rishi Sunak began by summarising the NHS urgent care plan announced today.

He said it would lead to “the largest and fastest-ever improvement in emergency waiting times in the NHS’s history”.

UPDATE: Sunak said:

I think we will see – in fact I know we will see – the largest and fastest-ever improvement in emergency waiting times in the NHS’s history.

That is the ambition of our plan that we’ve set out today.

I feel really confident we can deliver it.

Rishi Sunak is holding a Q&A in Darlington.

It seems to be following the same format as that used in his first PM Connect event earlier this month – a short speech, questions from the audience, then questions from the media.

This morning the Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities has confirmed details of its plan – publicised by Michael Gove yesterday – to force developers to remove unsafe cladding from tall buildings or face sanctions that would in effect stop them building new homes. In a news release it says:

Developers today received legally binding contracts that will commit them to pay to repair unsafe buildings.

The government has set a six-week deadline for developers to sign the legal agreements and is warning that companies who fail to sign and comply with the terms of the contract will face significant consequences.

Legislation will be brought forward in the spring giving the secretary of state powers to prevent developers from operating freely in the housing market if they fail to sign and comply with the remediation contract …

Under legislation to be brought forward this spring, a responsible actors scheme (RAS) will be created, allowing the Secretary of State to block developers who have not signed the contract or failed to comply with its terms from carrying out development and from receiving building control approval. This will prevent them from operating as normal in the housing market for as long as they do not resolve the problems of the past.

The department says this will lead to a developers spending an estimated £2bn on cladding repairs or removals from buildings that are 11 metres high or taller which they developed or refurbished over the past 30 years.

Yesterday Steve Brine, the Conservative chair of the Commons health committee, said the Nadhim Zahawi affair showed how the Tories were suffering from “long Boris” because this, and other, scandals originated in events that happened during Boris Johnson’s premiership. It is a terrific phrase, and a variation on the “long Johnson” version used by my colleague Rafael Behr in a column last week (which itself may have been inspired by Robert Shrimsley’s “long populism” column in the Financial Times earlier this month).

George Osborne, the Tory former chancellor, made the same point on the Andrew Neil Show last night. He said:

The big question for the Rishi Sunak premiership was whether his high ratings could pull the Tory party up, or the Tory party’s low ratings would pull him down.

And at the moment he is being pulled down by a series of scandals which do not directly involve him, are hangovers, if you like, of the Johnson era.

Osborne said there were similarities between Sunak’s position and John Major’s in the 1990s.

I was the photocopy boy in Downing Street back in the ’90s when John Major had all these problems. And there are similarities in that John Major was likeable, conscientious, like Rishi Sunak, but ultimately, was not able to escape the downward pull of the Tory party. It’s still ‘we’ll see’ with Rishi Sunak, but he knows that as each week passes, as each new scandal unfolds, the window for action gets smaller and smaller.

Osborne also said that Sunak should do more to show that he was different from Johnson.

To my mind, the defining thing of his political career was his decision to resign as chancellor from the Boris Johnson government over sleaze, over integrity, but he’s never really talked about that.

And we got the very first hint of it at prime minister’s questions this week where he started to say, ‘I resigned from the Johnson government’. I think you’re going to hear a lot more of that. I think he’ll have learned lessons even from the Zahawi affair, that you need to act more quickly than he did – and I think that he’s going to try and define himself now as ‘the sleaze buster’, but it’s extremely hard.

Nadhim Zahawi has been sacked from his post as Conservative party chair, which came with a government job as a minister without portfolio in the Cabinet Office, but that is not enough for some opposition parties. The Liberal Democrats say he should stand down as an MP. In a statement this morning Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, said:

Nadhim Zahawi failed to pay the taxes he owed, refused to come clean, and then threatened campaigners and journalists with legal action simply for trying to uncover the truth.

It shows that Zahawi is simply not fit to represent his constituents in parliament. If he refuses to stand down as an MP, Rishi Sunak surely has no choice but to withdraw the Conservative whip.

Even some of Zahawi’s colleagues think he should leave parliament. Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the treasurer of the backbench 1922 Committee, told Radio 5 Live last night that Zahawi ought to stand down at the next election.

But this morning Helen Whately, the social care minister, said there was no need for Zahawi to quit parliament. Whately was the government representative on the morning media round and, as my colleague Peter Walker reports, she said it was for Zahawi’s constituents to decide if he should continue to represent them.

Good morning. It was widely predicted that Nadhim Zahawi would lose his job as Conservative party chair after the investigation into his tax affairs, but I don’t think anyone in the Westminster politico-media world was expecting a sacking at 9am on a Sunday morning. Normally that’s a dead zone for No 10 announcements. The timing seemed contrived to imply decisiveness, and to show that Rishi Sunak was taking the initative.

But the departure of Zahawi has not stopped the opposition, and others, criticising Sunak’s handling of the affairs. The story has moved to the “raises questions about his judgment” phase of scandal coverage and Labour has written an open letter to Sunak with a string of as-yet unanswered questions. It says the scandal “leaves many unanswered questions”. Here is the letter.

Conventiently, Sunak will be answering questions this morning. He is doing a Q&A in the north-east of England this morning where some of this is bound to come up.

But it is not just Labour asking questions about the process. Zahawi is said to be furious about his treatment, and Steven Swinford in the Times says Zahawi is considering publishing his own response to the Sir Laurie Magnus report into his tax affairs, which he considers flawed. Swinford says:

Zahawi is said to be furious and believes he has not been given the chance to put his case across. He had one 30-minute meeting with Magnus last Wednesday and only saw details of Magnus’s report when it was published on Twitter.

Allies of Zahawi have disputed Magnus’s timeline. Magnus says that Zahawi failed to inform the Cabinet Office of the settlement he reached with HMRC until January. Those close to Zahawi claim that he did so in September, before his appointment as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster by Liz Truss and as chairman of the Conservative Party by Sunak.

They say he has text messages and emails to support his claim, which he is said to have shown to Magnus. Zahawi is also said to have been infuriated by the manner of his dismissal shortly before 9am on a Sunday morning. Zahawi was still sending material to Magnus on Saturday night and was given half an hour’s notice that he was being fired.

“It’s an outrage, the timing is deliberate and brutal. He had a half-an-hour meeting on Wednesday in which he gave his side of things and that was it. People deserve their right of reply. A response to the report is a possibility.”

The Daily Telegraph and the BBC have both had similar briefings.

The Spectator has published a list of its own questions for Sunak, based on the premise that Zahawi did not get a fair hearing.

Today Sunak wants to talk about plans he is announcing to commission thousands of extra hospital beds and hundreds more ambulances to cut A&E waiting times by next winter. But the din of scandal means he is not getting the hearing he wants either.

Here is the agenda for the day.

After 9.30am: Rishi Sunak does a Q&A in the north-east of England, after visiting a hospital.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2pm: The National Education Union holds talks with Gillian Keegan, the education secretary.

After 3pm: Peers debate the report stage of the public order bill.

After 3.30pm: MPs debate the remaining stages of the strikes (minimum service levels) bill.

I’ll try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

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