PMQs and MPs debate EU withdrawal bill – as it happened

While we wait on the result of the vote, here’s some more news from parliament.

This evening, it emerged Labour MP Ivan Lewis is under formal investigation following a complaint about his conduct, but the former minister has not been suspended by the party.

Read more here:

Action in the chamber.

New clause 30 would transfer the EU Protocol on animal sentience set into UK law, so that animals continue to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law.

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell is calling on Philip Hammond to end seven years of austerity with an “emergency Budget” for public services, the Associate Press reports.

Mr McDonnell will say the chancellor needs to set out a “genuine and decisive change of course” when he lays out his Budget plans in the Commons next week.

In a speech setting out Labour’s fiscal priorities, he will call on the government to lift the public sector pay cap, “properly” fund public services - including health and education - and “pause and fix” universal credit.

He will also urge ministers to embark on a large-scale public house-building programme as well as providing additional investment for infrastructure across the whole country.

Mr McDonnell is expected to say:

In his first year as chancellor, Philip Hammond has demonstrated that he completely fails to understand how working people are struggling after seven years of Tory austerity.

Next week the country needs an ‘emergency budget’ for our public services that are in crisis, not a budget desperately designed to save the jobs of a weak prime minister and her embattled chancellor.

There has to be a genuine and decisive change of course.

The government is not expected to lose tonight, but there is interest in the voting as it will reveal if some Tories are voting with the opposition.

As the Independent’s John Rentoul notes, it’s tight.

MPs are still debating EU withdrawal bill amendments, but we are expecting a vote shortly.

So far, the government has seen off the attempts to amend key Brexit legislation despite tighter votes and fresh Tory angst.

Away from Brexit, British politicians are continuing to react to Australia’s historic vote for same-sex marriage equality.

Strong support for Caroline Lucas’s amendment.

The chamber has now moved on to an amendment which aims to keep existing environmental principles from A191 of Treaty on Functioning of the EU put forward by Matthew Pennycook, the shadow Brexit minister.

It’s all getting a bit cosy in the chamber as MPs continue to discuss Caroline Lucas’s new clause 30...

The EU withdrawal bill debate has paused while MPs vote on whether to debate new clause 25 (NC25). The debate should restart in a few minutes.

Kerry McCarthy’s NC25 would establish a mechanism by which ministers could change some aspects of EU law being incorporated into UK law outside the time limits in the bill, subject to enhanced scrutiny.

More from our Brexit policy editor, Dan Roberts, on today’s meeting between Theresa May and Manfred Weber, a key ally of Angela Merkel:

Philip Hammond will use next week’s budget to offer young people the chance to get on the property ladder, the Press Association reports.

The chancellor said addressing the cost of property was a “very complex challenge” but he wanted the next generation to have the same opportunities as older Britons to own property.

Speaking before the November 22 budget, Mr Hammond said:

The prime minister made clear at the party conference that she regards dealing with the challenges in the housing market as a key thing that she is going to focus on in the coming years.

In the budget, I will set out how we intend to take that plan forward.

There is no silver bullet, there isn’t a single thing that solves the challenge of affordability in the housing market - we are a crowded island and this is a very complex challenge.

But we have done a lot of work on this and next week we will start to set out our plan for addressing the housing challenges in this country, making sure that the next generation has the same opportunities as their parents did for home ownership and the accumulation of personal wealth through assets.

Earlier today, thousands of students marched in London to demand education reform ahead of next week’s budget. Here are the photos from today’s protest:

At PMQs Jeremy Corbyn raised the case of a lettings agency in Lincolnshire that has issued pre-emptive eviction notices to tenants because universal credit is being rolled out in the area. That means tenants will be evicted if they cannot pay their rent. The agency, GAP Property, said it was taking this action as a precaution because experience suggested the UC rollout would lead to some tenants falling into arrears.

My colleague Jessica Elgot has written up Corbyn’s revelation here.

At HuffPost Paul Waugh has spoken to the GAP Property director, Guy Piggott, and he has said he is glad Corbyn raised the case at PMQs. Piggott told HuffPost universal credit needed to be reformed. He said:

It seemed like Theresa May was saying it’s alright, don’t worry. That’s just not good enough in a town like Grimsby. It’s so poor here, the average wage is about £17,000.

My message to Theresa May is this: ‘You’ve got to sort it out. Consider what it does to a family living hand to mouth. Imagine if you’ve got no savings, if all of your money stops and from the middle of December your next pay is February, what would you do about feeding yourself, keeping your house warm?’

It’s great Jeremy Corbyn has raised it, he’s done the right thing in alerting people. I agree the welfare state needs to be reformed but you have to do it in a more sensitive way. Nobody’s given any thought into how this affects the most vulnerable.

According to the Evening Standard’s Joe Murphy, the number of Tory MPs who might vote against the government’s plan to fix 29 March 2019 as the Brexit date in the EU withdrawal bill has risen to 21.

Car manufacturers need to know by March if UK vehicle certification will still be accepted in the EU after Brexit, a senior vice president of Honda has warned. As the Press Association reports, with the UK set to leave the bloc in March 2019, Ian Howells told MPs on the Treasury committee it would take around nine to 12 months to set up type-approval in another country. March 2018 is “the sort of time-frame we would be talking about” for getting clarity on the issue, he said.

Cars built in the UK are tested by the vehicle certification agency (VCA), whose approval is accepted across the EU, but manufacturers have warned this will no longer be the case if Brexit happens without an agreement. Howells warned that such a scenario would mean Honda could not export cars built at its Swindon factory to the EU without obtaining type-approval from elsewhere.

If you don’t have type-approval you can’t sell. It’s as simple as that. It is structurally a very important thing for us to have.

He also told the committee that delays at customs following the UK’s withdrawal from the EU could lead to the firm having to change its policy of relying on components being delivered only when they are about to be required.

Are there things we have to rethink, particularly around how we manage our supply chain flow and how our manufacturing operations work from a just-in-time point of view? Quite clearly the contingency that we are looking at would be that we would have to increase the amount of inventory that we hold on the UK mainland as opposed to importing it on a more regular basis. That impacts our productivity and efficiency.

We’d like to see certainty very quickly.

Patel says, when the UK leaves the EU, it can reduce regulations that add costs.

But in some areas will be able to go further, she says.

She says the UK is a proud country with a great democratic history. This is one of the best parliaments in the world, she says.

Thousands of students are marching through the streets of central London this afternoon, as pressure mounts on the government to reform education policies, ahead of next week’s budget.

The demonstration, endorsed by Labour, began peacefully, apart from one incident with a rival demonstrator. In a pre-recorded video message encouraging students to attend the demonstration, Jeremy Corbyn said:

The political establishment has betrayed young people. Since 2010, the Tories have made unprecedented cuts to further education. They’ve taken away bursaries for nurses and they’ve abolished grants for the poorest students.

Now the Tories think that capping university fees at £9,250 will be some sort of remedy to all this. What an insult. Everyone should access to free education, from the cradle to the grave, without being forced into debt and anxiety.

Organisers claim around 10,000 students are attending the demonstration, which is not being endorsed by the National Union of Students, but the actual number could be far lower.

In a noisy atmosphere complete with samba band and cheeky placards, students have been chanting: “education for the masses, not just for the ruling classes” and “no ifs, no buts, no education cuts”.

Robert Buckland, the solicitor general, is speaking for the government in the EU withdrawal bill debate now. He says he wants to stress that “in now way whatsoever” will the Brexit process to be used to undermine rights.

He says many of the amendments being debated today, that are intended to introduce safeguards in this respect, are unnecessary.

Dominic Grieve, the Conservative former attorney general, has just finished speaking in the EU withdrawal bill debate now. He said that he accepted the concerns about the potential for rights derived from EU law being watered down at some point in the future because the safeguards in this bill were insufficient. But he said he would like to work with ministers on how this problem could be addressed.

He said he found yesterday’s exchanges “hugely instructive”. MPs had a “cogent and sensible debate” and there were signs that MPs from different sides of the House might be able to reach a “degree of consensus”, he said.

The Times columnist Rachel Sylvester says the Telegraph “mutineers” front page may inadvertently be flagging up an alternative, and rather better, cabinet.

Matthew Pennycook, a shadow Brexit minister, is opening the EU withdrawal bill debate.

He says amendments like Labour’s NC58 (see 2.04pm) are designed to ensure that rights that people have from EU law, which are meant to be protected under the bill, don’t get “chipped away” in the future.

Here is the letter sent out by a lettings agency that Jeremy Corbyn mentioned at PMQs. (See 12.11pm.)

In the Commons the Conservative MP Anna Soubry says her office has had to report threatening tweets to the police that were made after the Daily Telegraph included her in its list of “Brexit mutineers”.

John Bercow, the Commons speaker, says threats should not be made against any MP. He says the press in this country is flawed, but it is also free, and that is how it should be.

He says any threats to someone like Soubry are “repugnant”. But there are also “doomed to fail”, he says.

Thousands of British nationals living in Zimbabwe must be given “all the assistance that they need” following a military takeover in Harare, Labour has said. In an urgent question in the Commons, the shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry described the situation as “highly volatile” and urged the government to do all it could during a “dangerous period”. Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, said there had been no reports of “any injuries or suffering” involving the 20,000 British nationals in Zimbabwe.

As usual, I overlooked the questions from Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, because I was writing the snap verdict. So here it is.

Blackford started by asking May if she agreed that public servants in the emergency services were doing a good job. She agreed. So why are the Scottish fire and police forces the only ones in the UK paying VAT, he asked. He urged her to scrap it. May replied:

The chief secretary has made clear that officials in HMT will look at this issue ... Very constructive representations have been made by my Scottish colleagues on this particular issue.

Let’s just be clear, before the Scottish government made the decision to make Scotland’s police and fire services national rather than local bodies, they were told this would make them ineligible for VAT refunds and they pressed ahead.

I’ve taken the quote from PoliticsHome.

May says she hopes the Australian government will act on the postal vote in favour of same-sex marriage very soon.

Labour’s Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi thanks May for campaigning in his constituency at the election. Labour’s majority went up. Will May assure him that Slough’s rail link to Heathrow will be a priority.

May says the government is electrifying the Great Western mainline, which will help her constituency, Maidenhead, and Slough.

Labour’s Angela Eagle says earlier this year May said she was the only person who could provide strong and stable leadership in the national interest. With her cabinet crumbling, how is it going?

May says Eagle is a member of a party that cannot even decide what it wants from Brexit.

May says the government is clear about wanting to protect the green belt.

Labour’s Lucy Powell says it is almost six months since the Manchester terror attack. Manchester has had to spend almost £17m as a result. Yet is has not been reimbursed. Will it be?

May says that is an important issue. She says the government will respond by the end of next week. She expects the majority of that funding to be supplied to Manchester.

Sir Vince Cable, the Lib Dem leader, says David Davis said in the City yesterday that freedom of movement would be maintained for bankers after Brexit. Why won’t it be preserved for other sectors, like agriculture, too?

May says the migration advisory committee is going to make recommendations on immigration after Brexit.

Labour’s Tracy Brabin says a constituent is having to get her ID verified by her doctor because she does not have photographic ID for her universal credit claim. Will May allow legacy identification from past benefits?

May says it is important to have proper ID for benefits. She urges Brabin to take this up with the DWP.

Zac Goldsmith, a Conservative, asks about the successful elections in Somaliland. The winning candidate has said he will legislate against female genital mutilation, inspired by a British campaign.

May says Goldsmith raises an important point. She is glad Somaliland is tackling FGM.

Stephen Lloyd, a Lib Dem MP, asks if May feels a sense of shame about benefit cuts.

May says universal credit will people to keep more of what they earn. It is the right reform, she says.

Paul Masterston, a Conservative, asks about a Romanian who attacked a girl in his constituency. What can be done to protect the public from people like this?

May says the Home Office is looking to deport this individual. She wants to maintain cooperation on security with the EU after Brexit, she says.

Labour’s Marie Rimmer asks about stabbings in her constituency. What will the government do to get more police on the streets?

May says she is concerned about these attacks. Police budgets have been protected. And a higher percentage of officers are now on the streets.

Labour’s Mary Creagh says Boris Johnson told the foreign affairs committee two weeks ago that he had seen no evidence of Russian meddling in the election. But May herself warned about Russia’s activities on Monday, and new evidence has emerged recently. Has Johnson been kept in the dark?

May says the examples she spoke of in her speech did not relate to the UK. She says the security and intelligence committee is being set up today.

Michelle Donelan, a Conservative, asks if May will consider getting medical students to sign a contract saying they must work for the NHS for the first five years after training, to stop the brain drain abroad.

May says the department of health is looking at this idea.

The SNP’s Stephen Gethins asks about a company in his Fife North East constituency which is under threat.

May says she raised it with Nicola Strugeon when the spoke yesterday.

Corbyn says 5,000 teachers should have an idea of the funding problems their schools face.

He says public services are in crisis. But a super-rich few dodge their taxes. The Tories cut taxes for the few, and services for the many. Isn’t the truth that this a government that protects the super-rich, while the rest of us pick up the bill for poverty and the slashing of services.

May says the government has taken an extra £160bn in from tax avoidance measures. The tax gap is at the lowest level ever. If it were still at the level it was under Labour, it would take up the entire schools budget. Labour has backtracked over Brexit. They would lose control over the public finances. Corbyn may have brought momentum to his party, but he would bring stagnation to his party.

Corbyn says it is strange that the chief executive of NHS Provider says we are in the longest squeeze in NHS history. The number of people waiting a long period has gone up. As Tories jeer, he says Labour are the opposition (which is why he is asking these questions). He asked about school budgets recently. This week 5,000 head teachers wrote to the chancellor saying they wanted the money taken out of the system to be returned. Will the money be returned to school budgets?

May says Corbyn has got something right today: “We are the government, and he is the opposition.” He says there are 1,000 more patients seen in A&E within the four-hour standard every day compared to 2010. This is the first government for decades that has gripped the need for a fairer funding formula. And to have one, you need a strong economy. She says May is planning a run on the pound, the government is building a country fit for the future.

Corbyn says he is happy to show her that letter. Other letting agencies may do the same. Food bank use has gone up by 30% in areas where UC has been rolled out. And it is estimated child poverty will rise as a result. If those reasons are not enough to justify halting the roll out of UC, he doesn’t know what reasons are.

He says Simon Stevens said last week the NHS needed more money. Can May spend the next week ensuring that budget gives enough money to the NHS.

May says UC is keeping more people in work, and able to keep what they earn. On the NHS, he quotes Stevens saying the quality of care, and outcomes in the NHS, are improving. Over the last three years access to primary care services is improving. Cancer survival rates are up. That is the good news, she says.

Corbyn says we need to think about the safety of people in high-rise blocks.

He turns to universal credit, quoting from a letter from a lettings agency in Lincolnshire, where UC is being rolled out. The agency is telling tenants to move out because it will not be able to cope with the UC-generated rent arrears.

May says concerns have been raised about people on UC managing their budgets. But after four months the number of people on UC in arrears has fallen by one third. He invites Corbyn to send her the letter. At a previous PMQs she asked to see a letter he quoted. He never sent it.

Corbyn says one minister said he was “mystified and disappointed” at the closure of Uxbridge police station. That came from Boris Johnson, he says. He says the real reason it is closing because of a £2.3bn cut to police budgets in the last parliament. And they will be cut by another £700m by 2020. There are fewer firefighters in England. But last year deaths by fire increased by 20%. May said money would be no object to safety after the Grenfell Tower fire. Will May back the campaign to retrofit sprinklers?

May says the police and crime commissioner for London is the mayor. And Sadiq Khan is a Labour mayor, she says, although Corbyn may think Khan is not Labour enough for him. There is more money and officers for each Londoner than for anywhere else in the country.

On fire, she says the government takes the Grenfell Tower fire seriously. That is why the inquiry was set up, and building regulations are being reviewed.

On sprinklers, she says she wants homes to be fit. Some owners do retrofit sprinkers. Others take other measures. Look at what Labour councils do. She says Haringey, Lewisham, Lambeth and Islington have all queried the case for sprinklers.

Jeremy Corbyn also wishes the Queen and Prince Philip a happy platinum wedding anniversary.

He mentions the victims of the Iran earthquake, and says he hopes the UK is sending help.

And he offers sympathy to Carl Sargeant’s family following his death.

Crime is up, he says. Will May get the chancellor to give the police the funding they need to keep us safe.

May says the UK will do what it can to help the earthquake victims. And she offers her condolences to Sargeant’s family.

On crime, she says as measured by the crime survey it is down by nearly one third.

Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative, praises May’s stewardship of the economy. The deficit is down and debts are oversubscribed. Will May invest in the economy and build more homes?

May says Tugendhat has made an important point. The government is doing that, she says. We are seeing billions being spend on rail, and the biggest road building programme for a generation.

Theresa May starts by congratulating the Queen and Prince Philip on their platinum wedding anniversary on Monday.

It would be a struggle to find anyone who comments on politics professionally who will say things are going well for the government. In fact the consensus view at Westminster (not that the consensus is always right) is that the government is in a bit of a mess.

And yet the Tories are neck and neck with Labour in the polls, as our figures today confirm. (See 10.54am.) Why? Here are three blogs and articles that offer an explanation.

• Daniel Finkelstein in today’s Times (paywall) suggests the Westminster sex scandal and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour are two of the biggest explanatory factors.

The sex scandals in Westminster are not regarded as a party political issue. Indeed, people often don’t know which party an accused MP comes from. When the former foreign secretary Robin Cook had an affair, the Tories thought that at last attention wold turn to Labour sleaze. In fact, because all the sleaze stories had been about Tories, voters just assumed Cook must be a Conservative. In today’s case, people regard all the accused as generic MPs. As a result, the sex scandal has reinforced the notion of politics as disreputable and that paying any attention to it is a waste of time. This partly accounts for the frozen polls.

The second reason why Labour isn’t thrashing the Tories at the moment is Jeremy Corbyn. Because he did much better than expected at the election, and Mrs May performed much worse, the suggestion has taken hold that he is an asset for Labour.

It is certainly true that voters regard him as authentic and likeable and think his heart is in the right place. It is also true that his presence has consolidated the left-wing vote and encouraged turnout among some left-wing voters. His poll ratings have dropped off a bit since the heady days immediately after the election, but this may be because he is a lot better on the stump than trying to be an alternative prime minister in the Commons.

• The elections analyst Matt Singh, on his Number Cruncher Politics blog, offers a similar explanation.

The most common explanation on psepholoical Twitter is that people are “tuning out”. That’s intuitive because the main policy issue at the moment is Brexit, a lengthy process that doesn’t lend itself to “new news” very often. After all, if Matt Chorley is bored with Brexit, there probably isn’t much hope for the person on the street.

Next, the fundamentals haven’t shifted much. MORI’s gross satisfaction ratings, the spread of which tends to be a very strong predictor of election results, moved dramatically in the runup to the election, but have barely changed for either leader since (other pollsters have found broadly similar patterns).

The fact is, although Jeremy Corbyn’s personal numbers are now higher, both in absolute terms and relative to Theresa May, there are still plenty of voters that haven’t warmed to him. Does that mean there’s a “ceiling”on the Labour vote and a “floor”under the Conservative vote? I don’t know. But if the opposition can’t make significant ground given all of the tailwinds it currently has, it’s possible.

• And Katy Balls in the i thinks the economy is a decisive factor.

It’s the economy that still gives the Conservatives the upper hand – even if it is in a precarious position. The 1992 comparison offers an economic lesson to the Chancellor as he puts the finishing touches to his Budget next week. The trigger to Major’s downward ratings was Black Wednesday, when the government was forced to withdraw the pound sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. As a result, interest rates temporarily rose to 12 per cent. The Tories never recovered from losing their reputation of economic competence.

May still has it – even if the £1bn DUP deal has dented it and Brexit could puncture it if handled badly. As things stand, voters still say the Tories lead the way on economic competence. Until that changes, whether it’s through Labour winning the argument or the Tories losing the plot, don’t expect the polls to shift significantly. If Philip Hammond gives in to demands from some in his party for a radical Budget to end austerity with a borrowing binge, there may be a shift – it just might not be the one he is looking for.

Sky’s Beth Rigby says the amount of time people have to wait before they get their first universal credit payment, which is currently six weeks, is going to be cut, either by one week or two weeks.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live this morning Sir Vince Cable, the Lib Dem leader, said that it was “foolish” of the government to table an amendment to the EU withdrawal bill fixing 29 March 2019 as Brexit day. Cable said:

Whether we have a fixed date of March 3, or it’s June in the same year, is a trivial issue.

This idea of the fixed date was not put there because of business lobbying, it was put there because the hardliners - you know, the Duncan Smiths and the Rees-Moggs - wanted to be absolutely clear there was no backsliding.

Within the bigger Brexit debate it’s not the big picture. But it is something that does reduce the flexibility of the negotiations.

It’s a foolish thing to have done, and it does demonstrate the extent to which the government is under pressure from its own extreme Brexit, Ukip-type people.

The Scottish government has won its minimum alcohol pricing case at the supreme court, my colleague Severin Carrell reports.