UK Politics Live: Grant Shapps calls on P&O Ferries boss to resign over mass layoffs | Politics

Leaked emails suggest the Tory peer michelle mone lobbied a health minister on behalf of a company seeking Covid contracts – five months after her lawyers said she had stopped doing anything for the company.

The documents add to questions surrounding Lady Mone’s account of her involvement in Medpro PPE, who secured government contracts worth more than £200million to supply personal protective equipment at the start of the pandemic.

Several months later, according to the leaked emails, Mone was trying to help PPE Medpro secure a lucrative contract to supply the government with Covid-19 antigen tests.

Mone has repeatedly sought to distance herself from PPE Medpro, whose activity she first recommended to the government in early May 2020. When Mone’s May 2020 referral became public, she said her involvement in the company went no further than a single recommendation at the time. Cabinet Minister Theodore Agnew.

However, emails seen by the Guardian from October 2020 suggest Mone was still at that time promoting the company, which sold Covid tests.

My colleague David Conn to the story.

About Ukrainethe last Department of Defense The intelligence update indicates that Ukrainian forces have reoccupied towns and defensive positions up to 35 kilometers east of the capital, Kyiv.

The intelligence update, released this morning, continues:

Ukrainian forces will likely continue to attempt to push Russian forces back along the northwest axis from Kyiv towards Hostomel airfield.

In southern Ukraine, Russian forces are still trying to bypass Mykolaiv as they seek to move west towards Odessa, their progress being slowed by logistical problems and Ukrainian resistance.

Ministry of Defense 🇬🇧
(@DefenceHQ)

Latest Defense Intelligence Update on the situation in Ukraine – March 25, 2022

Read more about the UK government’s response: https://t.co/shZZIe6cBq

🇺🇦 #StandWithUkraine 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/gdCRYuQvvp

March 25, 2022

The Interior Ministry reports that 20,100 visas have been issued under the Ukrainian family regime from 5 p.m. on Thursday.

So far, 35,500 applications have been submitted, according to provisional data published on the department’s website, the PA news agency reports.

The UK’s resettlement scheme for those fleeing Ukraine has been called a “shame” by a Briton working in Lviv to help applicants through the process.

Andre Murraya technician from north-east Scotland, said ministers’ claims about the success of the visa scheme to allow charities, businesses or corporations to sponsor a refugee ‘does not match the reality on the ground”.

Murray said:

The rhetoric stops at the border of Ukraine and does not penetrate where it is needed.

Speaking from Lviv, Murray said the Ukrainians were “very grateful” for all the military equipment provided by Britain to help repel Russian forces.

But he added:

They are under no illusions that the UK has made it artificially difficult to find refuge there.

My colleague Aubrey Allegretti to the story.

Here’s more from the former Labor Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, speak to BBC Breakfast about Wednesday’s Spring Statement.

Brown accused Rishi Sunak of missing millions of people who “face real hardship” in his budget statement.

He said:

Any sympathetic and comparable chancellor would want to do something about this level of fuel poverty.

There was a blank slate in his budget statement this week and he omitted millions of people who are facing real hardship.

The former prime minister said parents in Fife were battling to keep their children warm at night.

I saw poverty when we had unemployment and I saw poverty when I grew up in a mining town, and I haven’t seen anything as bad as that, and so there’s an urgency to what the Chancellor does.

It’s something he can’t turn away from.

The former Labor Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, warned that families will face a cost of living crisis that “no chancellor, no government should be prepared to accept”.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Brown said:

It’s an emergency. It’s a cost of living crisis. You can’t ignore the needs of people who have to choose between putting on the heat and running the meter and feeding the kids.

This is simply not an acceptable situation.

He added:

We cannot allow this. We have food banks, we now have baby banks, we have clothing banks, and now what we have here in Fife is actually a bedding bank.

BBC breakfast
(@BBCBreakfast)

“We have food banks, baby banks and bedding banks.”

⁰Former Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown recounts #BBCBreakfast the situation faced by some of the poorest families due to the rising cost of living is “an emergency”.https://t.co/oIkBtDxZCW pic.twitter.com/CC19Pkjuuq

March 25, 2022

The government has failed to rein in the excessive salaries paid to academy leaders, according to parliament’s spending watchdog.

According to a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, the number of academic trusts paying at least one senior member of staff over £100,000 rose from 1,875 in 2019-20 to 2,245 the following year.

The committee criticized the use of tens of millions of pounds of public money to ‘prop up’ mismanaged trusts in its sector report, which was published on Friday just days before the DfE unveiled its plans to expand its academies program to eventually include all schools in England.

MPs on the committee said the sector’s lack of financial transparency undermined parents’ ability to hold headteachers and the DfE to account, both for their use of public funds and the education they provide.

They also accused the DfE of not yet sufficiently controlling excessive pay in the sector, meaning the department could not assess whether public funds were being well spent. The committee said the use of public funds to support struggling academic trusts has failed to address financial mismanagement within the trusts.

The report said:

We are concerned that there is a risk that a trust will become too big to fail and that large sums of public funds will be injected into it to keep it afloat.

At the other end of the scale, there were fears that small schools in rural areas – which might be less attractive to trusts – could become “orphaned”.

My colleague Sally Weale to the story.

Hello. transport secretary, Grant Shaps, called on the chief executive of P&O Ferries to resign over the sacking of 800 workers and pledged to force the ferry company to reverse its decision and pay its crew minimum wage.

Peter Hebblethwaite admitted to MPs on Thursday that his company had broken the law by sacking the 800 workers without consultation, a performance Shapps described as “brazen, breathtaking and displaying incredible arrogance”.

Speaking to Sky News, Shapps said:

I can’t believe he can stay in that role after admitting to deliberately going out and using a loophole – well, breaking the law – but also using a loophole.

They signaled their ships through Cyprus [which meant they] avoided telling anyone about it, or they felt like they had. And even though they know they broke the law, what they did was pay people in a way to try to buy their silence. This is unacceptable.

My colleague Matthew Tisserand has the story here.

Shapps also accused P&O Ferries of trying to ‘buy silence’ from its staff over the mass layoffs, telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

What they did was pay – or attempt to pay – their staff with higher severance packages… and thus buy their silence.

We cannot find ourselves in a situation where laws are being used creatively, or abused in this case, to circumvent what Parliament very clearly intends to do. We have a (national) minimum wage law.

Shapps promised new legislation next week that will force the company to pay workers the minimum wage, adding that he had spoken to shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh and thought there was “a very, very parliamentary agreement wide” that new legislation was needed.