Labour asks Sunak to say how much money he ‘wasted’ by taking private jet from London to Leeds – as it happened

• The business secretary, Grant Shapps, will be able to decide statutory minimum service levels for a number of public services under the terms of a new anti-strike bill condemned by Labour as likely to increase stoppages.

• Trade unions are meeting to discuss holding a coordinated “day of action” across the public sector in an attempt to maximise pressure on the government to give workers a better pay deal.

• Labour has challenged Rishi Sunak to say how much money he “wasted” by using a jet to fly from London to Leeds for a health visit. (See 2.46pm.)

• Ministers have come under increasing pressure to say whether they will drop promises to implement major changes made after the Windrush scandal. As my colleagues Rajeev Syal and Amelia Gentleman report, stepping in for the home secretary, Suella Braverman, the junior Home Office minister Sarah Dines faced pressure from MPs across the house after telling the Commons she would not comment “on speculation in the Guardian”.

• Grant Shapps has indicated that he did not know Boris Johnson had been airbrushed out of a picture from Spaceport Cornwall before he posted it on Twitter.

• A Labour government would overhaul routes into work for sick or long-term unemployed people, including a guarantee that those who move into work will not have to face gruelling benefit re-assessments, Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, has said.

• Rishi Sunak has been told he risks “re-toxifying” his government’s record on LGBTQ+ rights and introducing “an effective trans travel ban” after the equalities minister announced a review of countries whose process for changing gender on legal documents is recognised by the UK.

A&E doctors have criticised plans to spend millions of pounds on treating patients in temporary cabins in hospital carparks to relieve the intense strain on emergency wards. (See 10am.)

The plan was a key element of the measures to address the crisis in the NHS that Steve Barclay, the health secretary, announced in the Commons on Monday.

But the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, which represents the UK’s A&E doctors, said that cabins do not work and will not reduce ambulance crews’ long waits to hand over patients.

Dr Adrian Boyle, the college’s president, said:

We urge the government not to revisit the pre-emergency department cohort areas that have been tried, tested and have not worked many times over. These are not effective and will not reduce ambulance waiting times.

These only move corridor care into ‘temporary structures’ built in car parks that become rapidly full. We know it is much safer to have post-emergency department cohort areas.

And Boyle’s deputy, Dr Ian Higginson, the RCEM’s vice-president, posted a message on Twitter saying plans like this “don’t work and don’t solve anything”.

The TUC has announced that it is holding a “protect the right to strike” day on Wednesday 1 February to mobilise opposition to the government’s anti-strike bill. Paul Nowak, the TUC’s general secretary, said:

On 1 February we will we hold events across the country against this spiteful new bill – which is unworkable and almost certainly illegal.

We will call on the general public to show support for workers taking action to defend their pay and conditions, to defend our public services and to protect the fundamental right to strike.

The TUC said that the day would involve events being held in different parts of the country and that further details of the events being planned would be announced later this month.

The strikes (minimum service levels) bill only runs to 12 pages (which, for a major government bill, is very short). It sets an outline for how minimum service levels would work, but the exact details of what minimum service levels would be (for example, how many ambulances would have to be available during an ambulance strike, or how many teachers would have to work during a teachers’ strike) are matters for consultation, and are not set out in the bill.

Under the current law, provided a union organises a strike in accordance with rules set out in the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1992, the union cannot be sued for damages, and workers cannot be sacked. This bill would change that because, to continue to enjoy those protections, unions and individuals would have to comply with the minimum service level (MSL) legislation.

How the new law would work – for government

The law would give the secretary of state the power “to make regulations providing for levels of service where there are strikes in relevant services, which are defined as ‘minimum service regulations’”.

In a briefing last week, the government said it would definitely use the new MSL powers in fire, ambulance and rail services, but in the other sectors covered by the bill (other areas of health, education, nuclear decommissioning and border security), it would look to negotiate voluntary minimum service level agreements first. But this distinction does not apply in the legislation.

How the new law would work – for employers

Under the law, the government will set minimum service levels. But it will be up to the employer to tell unions how many workers would have to show up on a strike day to ensure MSLs are achieved.

It would do this through work notices. The explanatory note with the bill say:

Work notices are the mechanism that puts minimum service levels into practice for particular strikes in relevant services. The work notice may be given by the employer to the trade union and will identify the people required to work to secure that the levels of service set out in the minimum service regulations are provided on a strike day.

The bill says employers would have to issue a work notice after receipt of notice that a strike is going ahead, but at least seven days before the strike starts (or later, if the union agrees). The employer is not allowed to say that more people are needed to work than are “reasonably necessary” for the MSL to be maintainted.

How the new law would work – for unions and employees

Under the bill unions would have to take “reasonable steps” to ensure its members comply with the work notice. If the union fails to do this, it could be sued for damages for the consequences of the strike – although it would only be liable for damages caused by its not complying with the law; it would not not have to pay damages for losses that would have been suffered by the employer anyway.

And workers who go on strike on strike day would lose their automatic protection from unfair dismissal if the work notice says they should be working, provided that “their employer has (before the strike day) given the employee notice of the work specified in the work notice that they are required to carry out on the strike day and a statement that they must comply with that work notice”.

GPs fear that the government’s plan to discharge thousands of hospital patients into care homes could lead to family doctors becoming even more overloaded.

The Royal College of GPs today voiced concern that the move to help the NHS cope with its intense winter crisis by freeing up hospital beds will add to the pressure on already-overstretched GP surgeries.

The health secretary, Steve Barclay, yesterday announced plans for the NHS to spend £200m buying up places in care homes to take 2,500 discharged patients who were deemed medically fit to leave. That would ease hospital overcrowding and reduce the amount of time ambulance crews spend outside A&Es waiting to unload a patient.

Prof Kamila Hawthorne, the chair of the RCGP, told the Guardian she supported the policy in principle as “the right thing to do”. However, family doctors are already “working to our limits right now” and could not easily become responsible for even more patients, many of whom are likely to be frail and elderly.

She said:

NHS pressures are being felt right across the health service, including in general practice. GPs and our teams have a vital role supporting patients in the community, including when they have been discharged from hospital and when they are waiting for hospital treatment.

But we are working to our limits right now, making more consultations every month than before the pandemic, yet with fewer trained, full-time equivalent GPs. It is the right thing to do to look for ways to safely move patients out of hospital when they are well enough to leave but not necessarily well enough to go home and look after themselves, both to create capacity in hospitals for the many other patients who need beds but also because it is more cost-effective and generally because people want to be cared for closer to their homes.

But, Hawthorne added:

Any such initiative must be properly resourced and staffed otherwise it is just shifting unsustainable pressures from one area of the health service to another, and again risking patient safety.

The government has now published the strikes (minimum service levels) bill.

The bill itself is here.

And the explanatory notes are here.

Labour has challenged Rishi Sunak to say how much money he “wasted” by using a jet to travel from London to Leeds yesterday. (See 12.31pm.) Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, said:

Families will be rightly angered by this show of extravagance by Rishi Sunak.

Patients and staff are crying out for action from this government in the midst of a crisis in our NHS while the prime minister jets from London to Leeds for a photo op.

The prime minister must come clean about how much taxpayers’ money was wasted on this 36-minute plane journey for a three-hour visit at the height of a cost of living crisis.

As ITV’s Anushka Asthana reports, the GMB union has issued a response to Grant Shapps’s claim earlier that the GMB, and other unions representing ambulance staff, have been putting lives at risk because of their failure to negotiate national-level minimum service standards on strike days. (See 1.15pm.) It says this is an “outrageous slur”.

Trade unions are to meet to discuss holding a coordinated “day of action” across the public sector in an attempt to maximise pressure on the government to give workers a better pay deal, my colleague Denis Campbell reports.

Alan Brown, for the SNP, says the new legislation is part of a “rightwing culture war” which “stinks”.

He says there are no ambulance strikes in Scotland because the Scottish government has managed to avoid them.

Pointing out that this is GB-wide legislation, he says the only way Scotland can become a country that respects workers’ rights is for it to be independent.

In response, Shapps says in some countries the emergency services are banned from going on strike in the first place. So this is a “very moderate” approach, he says.

And he points out that teachers are on strike in Scotland.

Grant Shapps is now making a statement to MPs about industrial action.

He says the government supports the right to strike, but wants to take into account the interests of the public too.

He says the British people need to know that, if they need an ambulance, one will turn up. And they need to know that, if they need a train or a bus, they can get one. He says the poor are more reliant on public transport.

He praises the Royal College of Nursing for the way it negotiated minimum service levels with government ahead of its last strike. He goes on:

A lack of timely co-operation from the ambulance unions meant employers could not reach agreement nationally for minimum safety levels during recent strikes and health officials were left guessing at the likely minimum coverage, making contingency planning almost impossible and putting everyone’s constituents’ lives at risk.

The ambulance strike planned for tomorrow still does not have minimum safety levels in place and this will result in patchy emergency care for the British people, and this cannot continue.

(The unions representing ambulance workers says they negotiate safety agreements on a local, trust-by-trust basis, as they did during the last strike.)

That is why the government is legislating, he says.

He says, while the bill is being passed, the government will consult on what a minimum level of service should look like in fire and rescue, ambulance services and rail.

Other countries have similar legislation, he says.

He says, if MPs object to minimum safety levels, they should explain to their constituents why, if they have a stroke on a strike day, there will be no minimum standards in place.

Members of the opposition who object to minimum safety levels, well, they’ll need to explain to their constituents why it is that if you have a heart attack, a stroke or life-threatening illness on a strike day there are no minimum safety standards in place.

(The legislation refers to minimum service levels, but ministers say this is about minimum safety levels.)

Sarah Dines, the Home Office minister, is replying to Stephen Kinnock.

She says successive governments have failed the Windrush generation. She says this government is putting that right.

In response to the question about the government abandoning its pledge to implement all the Windrush recommendations, Dines says she will not comment on leaks.

A Labour government would overhaul routes into work for sick or long-term unemployed people, including a guarantee that those who move into work will not have to face gruelling benefit re-assessments, Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, has said. My colleague Jessica Elgot has the story here.

At the lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson also defended Rishi Sunak’s decision to use a jet to travel from London to Leeds for a health visit yesterday. The spokesperson said this was the most efficient use of Sunak’s time.

The website Joe has the full story. This is from Joe’s Ava Evans.

At the No 10 lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson was asked to justify Grant Shapps’ decision to airbrush Boris Johnson out of a picture he posted on Twitter related to the satellite space launch from Cornwall. The spokesperson did not accept that this was an example of “Stalinist revisionism”. But he also admitted he had not seen the pictures and, in response to a further question saying the government was supposed to be opposed to online disinformation, the spokesperson said he would look into the matter.

This is from the BBC’s Ione Wells.

According to Noa Hoffman from the Sun, Shapps says he used the picture without knowing that Johnson had been airbrushed out.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesperson would not say what proportion of a union’s membership would have to be working during a strike under the government’s minimum service levels legislation. He said the government would consult on this, and it would vary from sector to sector.

But, echoing what Grant Shapps said on his media round this morning (see 9.21am), the spokesperson said that the government was hoping unions would agree minimum service levels voluntarily, instead of having to have them imposed by statute. He said:

What this legislation aims to do is when, should unions progress with strike action and then should those unions not agree to set safe working levels, as we have seen some unions do – the RCN is a good example where they took a responsible step – then this acts as a safety net to provide that minimum level of safety to the public.

Government inaction has contributed to some of the 25,000 excess deaths in England and Wales since the summer, Tony Blair’s thinktank has said today.

It said many of these deaths “could have been avoided” if the government had done more to prepare for the winter crisis.

This morning the Office for National Statistics published its regular weekly death figures for England and Wales. It says that 9,517 deaths were registered in the week ending 30 December, and that this was 1,592 more than the five-year average for this time of year. These deaths are classified as excess deaths. The ONS says:

The number of deaths was above the five-year average in private homes (36.9% above, 684 excess deaths), hospitals (14.8% above, 537 excess deaths), care homes (20.4% above; 371 excess deaths) and other settings (0.2% above, 1 excess death).

In response, the Tony Blair Institute issued this statement from Dr Martin Carkett, a lead health expert at the thinktank. He said:

ONS figures released today show there were a further 1,592 excess deaths in England and Wales in the final week of 2022, above the five-year average. In total, there have been more than 25,000 excess deaths since the summer, many of which could have been avoided. This is the human cost of government inaction in the face of an entirely foreseeable crisis.

As part of its future of Britain project, the thinktank published a report in the summer on what could be done to avert a winter crisis in the NHS. Carkett said:

We set out 12 recommendations for government to take to focus leadership, minimise demand on the service, improve patient flow and efficiency and maximise capacity. And we called on the then PM to set up a winter crisis taskforce and confirm additional funding early to relieve pressure on hospitals.

While the government have taken forward some of these proposals, there is more that must be done now if we’re going to turn the tide, including extending free Covid-19 and flu vaccination to all over-18s.

In the longer-term the government needs to end this cycle of crisis by fully harnessing the possibilities of technology and moving faster on preventative care.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said that between 300 and 500 people a week could be dying unnecessarily because of the crisis in A&E departments.

But in his interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, when he was asked about this claim, Rishi Sunak said the NHS itself did not recognise those numbers and that he would “be careful” about relying on them.

The National Education Union, which is currently balloting its members on strike action in England and Wales, has not ruled out teachers going on strike over the exam period.

Asked if this was a possibility, Kevin Courtney, the NEU’s joint general secretary, told Sky News this morning:

We don’t want to strike during the exam period. But nothing is ruled out.

If there were exams on, then teachers are preparing the children for those exams for a long period beforehand. You can have a strike on an exam day and not disrupt the exams.

In truth, though, we’ve never done that before. So, it would be quite a big step. We don’t want to take it but I’m saying at this point that we’re not ruling anything out.

Courtney said that, for the union to call of its strike, the government would have open serious talks about a compromise pay offer. He said:

We will stop … if there are talks that we judge to be serious, where the government is actually intending to make a move, not some dog and pony show where it’s just them trying to present themselves to the media as talking.

The anti-strikes bill being published today is aimed particularly at firefighters. Fire and rescue is one of the areas where minimum service levels will definitely be set; in other areas, the government says mandatory MSLs will just be a last resort, because it is hoping the voluntary agreements can be reached. (See 9.21am.)

Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, said the bill was a “shameful attack” on democratic rights and he called for a “mass movement of resistance” against it. He said:

This represents one of the most shameful attacks on the democratic rights and liberties of working people in decades …

This is an attack on all workers – including key workers, who kept our public services going during the pandemic.

It’s an attack on Britain’s Covid heroes and on all workers. We need a mass movement of resistance to this authoritarian attack.

In an interview with LBC this morning Grant Shapps, the business secretary, defended the NHS’s decision to put temporary cabins in car parks for patients as a means of dealing with the A&E overcrowding service.

Yesterday the government said it was spending £50m in England “to expand hospital discharge lounges and ambulance hubs”. The Times says in practice this means some patients being put in cabins in hospital car parks.

In their splash story Kat Lay and Chris Smyth report:

NHS patients face being treated in temporary cabins set up in hospital car parks under plans to tackle the crisis in the health service …

[Steve Barclay, the health secretary, told MPs] the government would now fund “more physical capacity in and around emergency departments”, and said that temporary structures could provide this “in weeks not months”.

He said trusts could use their “discretion” on how to use the buildings to ease A&E pressures, which could include the creation of new “discharge lounges”. Such buildings are most likely to be set up in hospital car parks.

Asked about the story on LBC, Shapps said:

I’m in favour of the NHS doing whatever it needs to do to clear those backlogs. If that means temporary, modular, whatever, or using clinics closer to people or whatever else is required, I mean, for heaven’s sake, let’s get on and do those things.

The TUC has described the government’s anti-strike law as a “sack key wokers bill” and restated its claim that it will be “almost certainly illegal”. In a statement Paul Nowak, the new TUC general secretary, said:

This legislation would mean that when workers democratically vote to strike, they can be forced to work and sacked if they don’t comply.

That’s undemocratic, unworkable, and almost certainly illegal.

Conservative ministers have gone from clapping key workers to sacking key workers. They seem more interested in scheming up new draconian restrictions on the right to strike than addressing the real concerns of public sector workers.

Let’s be clear. If passed, this bill will prolong disputes and poison industrial relations – leading to more frequent strikes.

That’s why MPs must do the right thing and reject this cynical ‘sack key workers bill’.

And here are some more lines from Grant Shapps’s interviews this morning about the strikes (minimum service levels) bill.

• Shapps said that he hoped many of the powers in the bill would not actually be used. As the government explained in its briefing last week, the government will set minimum service levels for fire, ambulance and rail services. But in the other sectors (other areas of health, education, nuclear decommissioning and border security), although the government will legislate to give itself the power to impose minimum service levels, it will in the first instance try to negotiate voluntary agreements for these with unions. Shapps told the Today programme:

What I’m going to do in this legislation is take the primary power, if parliament grants it, but then in secondary – so this is a further stage of consultation if you like – allow each different area of public service to consult and decide how to actually implement this and over what period of time.

The ideal outcome would be to have the power but never need to use it, because I think anyone listening to this knows it’s reasonable to ask and expect, for example, the ambulance unions to agree to some sort of national level in return for what we fully support which is the right to strike.

He said, in the current dispute, the Royal College of Nursing agreed at a national level minimum safety levels. But he said the same did not happen with unions representing ambulance staff. (Those unions insist that minimum safety standards were agreed before their last strike, but on a local, case-by-case basis.)

• He dismissed claims that the bill could increase the chances of nurses being sacked for going on strike. He told Times Radio:

This sort of talk that somebody will be sacked is no more true than it would be under any employment contract and that’s always the case when people have to stick to the law.

• He stressed that the government was not banning strikes in the emergency services (even though this is what some people were calling for when the bill was being drafted).

Good morning. Last week the government published details of its planned anti-strike bill, which will require unions to maintain minimum services levels in transport, health, education, fire and rescue, nuclear decommissioning and border security when strikes are taking place. It is highly controversial and today Grant Shapps, the business secretary, is publishing the actual bill.

It is called the strikes (minimum service levels) bill. Ministers have been arguing that it is all about minimum safety levels, but as the title of the bill shows, it is all about minimum service levels – which means it has wider application.

The legislation builds on measures set out in the transport strikes (minimum service levels) bill, which was published during Liz Truss’s short-lived premiership but which never got debated by MPs. (It has been superseded by the new bill.) In an official impact assessment of the Truss bill, the government warned that this measure could lead to “an increased frequency of strikes”. Another risk was unions staging more industrial action just short of a strike, the document said. (Or, in its own words, it said “a further significant unintended consequence of this policy could be the increase in staff taking action short of striking.”)

In an interview on the Today programme this morning, Shapps said he did not accept that the bill would make strikes more likely. When pressed on why the government’s own impact assessment said the opposite, he played down the significance of the document. He said:

Well, impact assessments do the job of, if you like, having a look all around and seeing, what would be the risks, what are the opportunities and so they often say these things.

He also claimed that legislation of this kind worked effectively in other countries.

When it was put to him that the government was ignoring its own assessment of what these laws would do, Shapps said the government had “taken note of that research and looked at how we can best introduce those measures”.

I will post more from his morning interview round shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

9.45am: Andrew Griffith, a Treasury minister, gives evidence to the Treasury committee on the cryptocurrency industry.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

11.30am: Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow work and pensions secretary, gives a speech on Labour plans intended to get more older people, and people with medical conditions, back into work.

11.30am: Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy PM, takes justice questions in the Commons.

12pm: Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, visits an energy research centre ahead of the publication of the Scottish government’s energy strategy.

At some point today the government is publishing its strikes (minimum service levels) bill. And Steve Barclay, the health secretary, is visiting a 111 call centre.

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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