Michael Gove has been placed under investigation by parliament’s standards watchdog – UK politics live | Politics

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, was responding to Cleverly and she told him that his response was “too weak”, that the government was doing “too little, too late” and that the lack of urgency shown by the Home Office was “unfathomable”

She said she was “sick and tired of nothing changing”. People should not have to wait any longer, she said.

She said Labour wanted the government to introduce a mandatory framework for police vetting.

In response to Cleverly’s announcement that with certain offences, officers would be automatically suspended when charged (see 12.07pm), she said that was not enough. With these offences, officers should be suspended earlier.

She said she could not see why the government was not committing today to accepting the Angiolini recommendations. As an example, she cited recommendation six – that all allegations about indecent exposure or other sexual offences against serving officers – should be now be reviewed.

The first three recommendations cover indent exposure, and Cooper said the Home Office should be able to accept them immediately too.

She said the murder of Sarah Everard should have been a watershed. But it wasn’t, she suggested.

And she urged Cleverly to accept Labour’s proposal for a “Raneem’s law”.

In the Commons James Cleverly, the home secretary, is now making a statement about the report by Dame Elish Angiolini into the murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens.

The report was published earlier this morning. Vikram Dodd has a report on what it says here.

And the full report is here.

The report only covers part one of the inquiry, and it focuses on how Couzens was ablet to become and remain a police officer, and how red flags that should have shown how dangerous he was were missed.

Cleverly says:

Tragically the report identifies that Couzens was completely unsuitable to serve as a police officer and, worse still, there were multiple occasions where this should, could have been recognised.

Lady Elish found significant and repeated problems in recruitment and vetting throughout Couzens’ career, including overlooking his chaotic financial situation. This meant he was able to serve in a range of privileged roles, including as a firearms officer.

It is appalling that reports of indecent exposure by Couzens were not taken sufficiently seriously by the police and that officers were not adequately trained, equipped or motivated to properly investigate those allegations.

Had fuller inquiries been made in 2015 and 2020, Couzens could, perhaps probably would, have been removed from policing. Evidence of his preference for extreme and violent pornography and alleged sexual offending date back nearly 20 years prior to Sarah Everard’s murder.

And the inquiry found Couzens was adept at hiding his grossly offensive behaviour from most of his colleagues, but that he shared his vile and misogynistic views on a WhatsApp group. The other members of that group are no longer serving officers after a range of disciplinary processes.

Cleverly says the report makes 16 recommendations. The government will carefully consider them and respond in due course. The response will be prompt, he says.

But he says the government has already taken steps to improve vetting for police officers. He says funding has been provided to ensure that police get intelligence more quickly about potential problems with officers, the rules have been changed to ensure officers can be dismissed more easily, and police chiefs have been put back in charge of chairing misconduct panels.

He says there will be a new presumption that officers found to have committed gross misconduct will be sacked.

And he says he can announce today that for certain offences there will be an automatic suspension when people are charged.

He says the Everard murder started a national conversation about violence towards women and girls. He says they routinely feel unsafe. That is unacceptable, and change is needed, he says.

He says this has been made a priority – meaning it should be as important for the police as terrorism.

The Home Office has released a raft of data relating to asylum, immigration and small boats. The Labour party has been going through the figures and it claims the picture they present is damning.

Here are some of the findings it is highlighting.

• Only 2% of people who have arrived in the UK in small boats since 2018 have been returned, the figures show. That amounts to 2,580 people being returned, of whom 1,889 were returned last year.

• Almost 130,000 people are waiting for an asylum decision, the figures show. (See 10.18am.) Here is the table with the table with the figures.

• There are 45,768 asylum seekers in hotel accommodation, the figures show. Labour says Rishi Sunak is committed to ending the use of hotel accommodation. Here is the table with these figures.

• Almost 20,000 asylum seekers seem to have disappeared into the system, because their applications are marked as “implicitly withdrawn”, the figures suggest.

• More than 600,000 work visas were issued in 2023, the figures show. Labour says this is because of skill shortages in the UK.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said:

These damning statistics show how Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives have lost control of our immigration system and our border security – and have no plan to turn it around.

A year after promising to end their use, almost 46,000 people are still stuck in hotels. The Tories’ failure to clear the backlog and return small boats arrivals has blown a £4bn hole in the Home Office budget, paid at taxpayers’ expense. Meanwhile, work visas are soaring due to their failure to train people here in the UK.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, is has been placed under investigation by Parliament’s standards watchdog, PA Media reports.

The probe relates to Gove’s register of financial interests, according to the standards commissioner’s website.

The website does not give any more detail about the complain and details of investigations by the commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, are kept confidential until the inquiry is concluded. Those under investigation are barred from discussing the allegations.

But the Guardian last week reported that Gove failed to register VIP hospitality he enjoyed at a football match with a Conservative donor whose firm he had recommended for multimillion-pound personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Here is the Guardian’s story.

After the Guardian contacted Gove about his failure to register the hospitality, he said he would be contacting the parliamentary authorities himself about the omission.

A total of 128,786 people were waiting for an initial decision on an asylum application in the UK at the end of December 2023, down 20% from 160,919 at the end of December 2022, PA Media reports. PA says:

According to new figures from the Home Office, the total is also down 27% from the 175,457 people waiting for a decision at the end of June 2023, which was the highest figure since current records began in 2010.

The number of people waiting more than six months for an initial decision stood at 83,254 at the end of December, down 24% year-on-year from 109,641, and also 41% down from the record 139,961 at the end of June 2023.

There were 3,902 asylum applications in the legacy backlog that were still awaiting an initial decision at the end of December 2023, updated Home Office figures show.

Asylum applications made before June 28 2022 are counted as legacy cases.

The government had pledged to clear the legacy backlog by the end of 2023.

This backlog had stood at 98,659 applications at the end of June 2022.

One asylum application does not always equal one individual, as an application can cover a group of people.

Jeremy Hunt is being urged by business leaders to fix the UK’s broken childcare system to secure a boost to the economy worth £11bn by enabling more parents and carers to work, Richard Partington reports.

After his roundtable with police officers yesterday, where he made the comment about “mob rule” replacing democratic rule, Rishi Sunak gave a lengthy speech last night at a dinner for the Community Security Trust, a charity providing security for Jewish schools and synagogues. In it he elaborated on what he sees as the threat to democracy posed by pro-Palestinian activism. The full text is here on the No 10 website, but here are the key points.

As prime minister, I’m not prepared to stand by, and watch MPs forced out of public service because of fears for their safety.

Nor I am prepared to allow this pattern of increasingly violent and intimidatory behaviour seemingly intended to shout down elected representatives and hijack the democratic process through force itself.

It is as un-British as it is undemocratic.

And it cannot stand …

We will never give in to the threats of violent extremists.

We will not be cowed into changing the way our parliamentary democracy operates.

We will do whatever it takes to defend our democratic processes just as we will do whatever it takes to keep you safe.

It’s not enough merely to strengthen our physical security we must also be far bolder and more assertive in defending our British values.

We’ve got to end this passive tolerance of words and actions that go against what we stand for.

Yes, you can march and protest with passion; you can demand the protection of civilian life but no, you cannot call for Jihad there is no “context” in which its acceptable to beam antisemitic tropes onto Big Ben and there’s no cause you can use to justify the support of proscribed terrorist groups, like Hamas.

And yes, you can freely criticise the actions of this government, the Israeli government or indeed any government.

But no, you cannot use that as an excuse to call for the eradication of a state – or any kind of hatred or antisemitism.

These statements are fundamental to the liberal democratic values that define Britain.

They are the very essence of our identity of who we are as a country.

To belong here is to believe these things; to stand up for these things.

And it’s time we were much, much clearer about this.

Sunak seemed to be referring to the sort of words or behaviour covered by the legislation covering “glorifying” terrorism, but he did not show much allowance for the argument that “tolerance” of words and action you disagree with is also a fundamental liberal, democratic value.

What is happening right now on campuses is simply not acceptable.

Jewish students are being targeted, threatened, and assaulted simply for being Jewish.

The chaplain at the University of Leeds having to take his family into hiding after death threats because he’s an IDF reservist.

Iranian generals – let me say that again – Iranian generals – giving antisemitic speeches as people abuse the right to freedom of speech as a cover for hate speech.

This cannot go on.

Where people break the law on our campuses they will be met with the full consequences.

And where they create a culture of intimidation we will hold the university leadership to account.

University leaders must take personal responsibility for protecting Jewish students in their institutions.

Good morning. When Rishi Sunak (eventually) decided to take action against Lee Anderson after he claimed that the city of London, and Sadiq Khan, its mayor, were under the control of Islamists, people asked why he was not prepared to discpline, or even criticise, the former home secretary Suella Braverman, who had said something even stronger. “The truth is that the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now,” she said in a Telegraph article. It was assumed that Sunak did not want to pick a fight with her because she has too much support within the party.

Now it seems there is another explanation: Sunak did not criticise Braverman because he broadly agrees with her. That is the implication of a No 10 briefing last night, which included this quote from what Sunak told a policing roundtable earlier in the afternoon. He said:

There is a growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule. And we’ve got to collectively, all of us, change that urgently.

We can make a start today with the new Democratic Policing Protocol …

We simply cannot allow this pattern of increasingly violent and intimidatory behaviour which is, as far as anyone can see, intended to shout down free debate and stop elected representatives doing their job.

That is simply undemocratic.

So it’s right that the protocol commits to additional patrols, provides clarity that protests at elected representatives’ homes should be treated as intimidatory.

And we’ve provided additional funding for protective security.

But we also need to demonstrate more broadly to the public that you will use the powers you already have, the laws that you have.

Campaigners and MPs have dismissed the claim that “mob rule is replacing democratic rule” as hypberbolic, alarmist and illiberal – and, frankly, just wrong. It is also an unusual electoral gambit, given that you might argue letting the country descend into “mob rule” would not reflect well on the political party in charge over the past 14 years.

This is from Tom Southerden, law and human rights director at Amnesty International UK.

Talk of ‘mob rule’ wildly exaggerates the issue and risks delegitimising the rights of peaceful protest.

Freedom of expression and assembly are absolutely fundamental rights in any free and fair society. The UK has undergone a major crackdown on protest rights in recent years, with peaceful protest tactics being criminalised and the police being given sweeping powers to prevent protests taking place.

This is from the SNP MP John Nicholson.

Beyond startling. Hysterical, fear mongering nonsense. There is no “mob rule” in England.

Unless one regards the Tory Party as an unruly mob. Probably consensus on that.

And this is from the Labour MP Chris Bryant.

Take me through this. Sunak thinks we have mob rule. He’s the prime minister. So, like, he’s in charge, yeah?

Here is Rajeev Syal’s overnight story about the row.

I will post more reaction shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Oliver Dowden, deputy PM and a Cabinet Office minister, takes questions in the Commons.

10.30am: The report into the circumstances that allowed Sarah Everard to be murdered by a serving Metropolitan police officer, Wayne Couzens, will be published. James Cleverly, the home secretary, is due to make a statement to MPs about the outcome of the inquiry, carried out by Elish Angiolini, at around 11.30am.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Noon: Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions at Holyrood.

After 12.30pm: Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, is expected to make a Commons statement on the Defending Democracy Policing Protocol.

Also, in Rochdale people have started voting in the byelection. Polls will close at 10pm, and the result is due in the early hours tomorrow morning.

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