Prisoners to be held in police cells as jails close to full, justice minister says – UK politics live | Politics

Forty MPs, including seven Tories, have privately written to Rishi Sunak imploring him to attend the Cop15 biodiversity conference, which starts next week.

In the private letter, seen by the Guardian, the parliamentarians warn that a million species are facing extinction globally and a lack of high-level political buy-in could spell disaster for nature.

Sunak currently is understood to have no plans to attend, sending the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, in his stead.

But Tory backbenchers are among those who have asked him to stand up for nature by taking to the world stage in Montreal. The MPs wrote:

Today, we encourage you to stand up for nature by attending Cop15, holding bilateral meetings with other heads of government, and raising ambition to halt and reverse nature’s decline by 2030.

We hope that the same leadership the UK has demonstrated on climate will be extended to fight for an ambitious global deal to protect nature at Cop15.

With a million species facing extinction around the world there is no time to waste.

The letter follows a meeting between British parliamentarians and Canadian representatives, in which it was made clear there could be a replication of the failed 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, where talks fell apart.

Former prime minister Liz Truss had committed to attend during the summer leadership race and it was in her diary to go.

It is understood that plans are under way for the former prime minister Boris Johnson to attend Cop15 in what could cause further frustration for Sunak, who many believe was forced to U-turn on his decision not to attend Cop27 in Egypt.

The government’s chief nature adviser, Tony Juniper, recently said that the summit is “the best and last chance” to halt and reverse the decline of nature.

Lord Randall, a former Conservative MP and Theresa May’s former environment adviser, told the Guardian:

Cop15 is the most important moment for nature in a decade. Although world leaders have not been formally invited to attend the Montreal summit, the prime minister should think about ways in which he can engage with other heads of government whilst the talks are ongoing and ensure that Cop15 is a Paris moment for nature.

It would be helpful for the UK government to publish ambitious targets to restore nature, as promised in the Environment Act, before the UN summit takes place.

Cop stands for conference of the parties, but Cop26 was the 26th of its kind addressing the climate crisis, while Cop15 is the 15th of its kind on biodiversity.

Boris Johnson is still having his housing provided by the Bamford family, the latest entry in the Commons register of members’ interests shows.

The former PM has declared receiving accommodation worth £10,000 for himself and his family, covering the month of November, from Lady Carole Bamford.

This is the third month in a row he has declared housing from the Bamfords worth £10,000 a month.

He has also declared two further donations, both for accommodation worth £3,500, from the Bamfords over the autumn.

Lord Bamford, a pro-Brexit Conservative peer who is chair of JCB, has been a generous Tory donor for decades. He and his wife also paid for Johnson’s wedding party at their mansion in the Cotswolds in the summer, with Johnson declaring the gift as being worth £23,853.

Johnson, his wife and their two children, lived in Downing Street and at Chequers during his time as prime minister. Since then he has been living in Bamford accommodation despite owning or part-owning three homes, in London, Oxfordshire and Somerset.

Prisoners could be held in police cells in an attempt to reduce “acute and sudden” overcrowding in jails, MPs have been told.

In a statement to the Commons, Damian Hinds, the justice minister, said:

In recent months we have experienced an acute and sudden increase in the prison population, in part due to the aftermath of the Criminal Bar Association strike action over the summer, which led to a significantly higher number of offenders on remand.

With court hearings resuming, we are seeing a surge in offenders coming through the criminal justice system, placing capacity pressure on adult male prisons in particular.

I’m announcing today that we’ve written to the National Police Chiefs’ Council to request the temporary use of up to 400 police cells through an established protocol known as Operation Safeguard.

This will provide the immediate additional capacity we need in the coming weeks to ensure the smooth running of the prison estate and to continue taking dangerous criminals off the streets.

Hinds said that using police cells to house prisoners was not unprecedented, and last happened in 2006, 2007 and 2008.

Responding for Labour, Ellie Reeves, a shadow justice minister, said:

This is yet another crisis created by this shambolic Tory government. It is hard to think of a more damning indictment of this government’s failure on law and order than the fact they have now run out of cells to lock up criminals. But it is hardly surprising when under the Tories 10,000 prison places have been lost.

UPDATE: I have amended the headine to say prisons are “getting full”, because they original wording said they were full now. The Ministry of Justice says they’re not. It says about 1,000 places are still available, but that these could soon run out.

Angela Rayner is seeking to put the government on the ropes over its failure to appoint a successor to Lord Geidt as Rishi Sunak’s ethics adviser.

The Guardian revealed earlier this week that several candidates had turned down the role because Sunak is refusing to grant the new adviser the power to launch their own investigations. Sunak had promised that appointing a new ethics adviser would be one of his top priorities in office.

During an urgent question, Labour’s deputy leader accused ministers of promising “jam tomorrow” and “mañana, mañana”.

But she failed to pin down Alex Burghart, the junior minister at the Cabinet Office, on any of the specifics of the appointment. He told her:

We’re going to have an independent adviser, they’re going to have the powers that they need, and they are going to be appointed very soon.

But he refused to answer any of the detailed questions he was asked about how many candidates had been approached and when the process might be complete.

Here is my colleague Peter Walker’s story about PMQs.

And this is how the story starts.

Keir Starmer has used prime minister’s questions to make a pointed and personal attack on Rishi Sunak over tax benefits for private schools, saying the policy of continued VAT exemption for school fees amounted to “trickle-down education”.

Specifically using Winchester, the private school Sunak attended, as an example, Starmer highlighted a 2017 article by Michael Gove that argued for VAT to be imposed on school fees.

“Winchester College has a rowing club, a rifle club and extensive art collection – they charge over £45,000 a year in fees,” the Labour leader said. “Why did he hand them nearly £6m of taxpayers’ money this year in what his levelling up secretary calls ‘egregious state support’?”

Citing the contrasting example of Southampton, where Sunak grew up, Starmer said four in every ten state school pupils in the city failed either their English or maths GCSEs.

Keir Starmer won that quite comfortably, but it was a notable victory – one to remember, and possibly a turning point – for two reasons. The main one is that Starmer is now establishing a winning track record in this arena, and he is bedding down two criticisms of Rishi Sunak that are starting to stick: privileged, and “weak”. Another month of this and it will be received wisdom. But, second, this may have been the most successful example of a Labour leader using private education against a Tory PM in recent times.

David Cameron and Boris Johnson were both educated at the most elite private school in the country, and Conservative MPs generally are less likely to be state-educated than Labour MPs, but in the past Labour leaders have been cautious about using this as a line of attack. In part that was because people are not responsible for where their parents send them to school, in part it was because it smacked of class warfare, and in part it was out of fear of being on the wrong side of the aspiration argument. Only a minority of people are rich enough to afford private education, but there are many more who would like to be that wealthy one day, and Tony Blair taught his party that it was best not to alarm this group.

Yet Starmer today (with a little help from Michael Gove, whom he quoted) successfully monstered Sunak over going to Winchester. It is worth looking in detail at why it worked for Starmer so well.

First, Sunak’s response was poor. There is not a particularly good argument in favour of the tax advantages enjoyed by private eduction (as Gove pointed out in his Times article five years ago), but there are arguments (principally the cost to the state if private schools close), which is partly why Labour largely accepted the status quo when it was in office. Sunak could have opted a techno-bore answer, laced with references to Labour figures being privately educated. (Starmer himself went to a school that turned private while he was there, although he was able to finish his education there without his parents paying fees.) But instead, in his first response to Starmer, Sunak went for a total non-sequitur, banging on about Covid and the unions. And, in his second response, Sunak went way over the top, claiming Stamer’s question showed that he was “attacking the hard-working aspiration of millions of people in this country”, which meant that “he’s not fit to lead”.

Second, the Labour policy is popular, and has become more so in recent years. As living standards stagnate, there may be more public appetite for bashing private education than in the past. My colleague Pippa Crerar has the polling figures.

Third, by presenting private education as an “aspiration” issue, Sunak made it easier for Starmer to attack him over homeownership. Telling Sunak he should “get out more”, he said:

He talks about aspiration, they are killing off aspiration in this country and it is not just education. Why is the dream of homeownership far more remote now than it was when his party came into power 12 years ago?

Sunak is the richest person ever to be prime minster. In the past Britons have tended not to mind very much about their political leaders being wealthy. (We are still ruled by a King, after all; egalitarian, we’re not.) But they do expect their prime ministers to be in touch, and to know what people are experiencing. In this exchange Starmer turned Sunak being privileged into a riff about him being clueless, and it worked.

Starmer ended with a spiel about Sunak being weak. (“Every week he gets pushed around and every week he gets weaker”). Sunak has his own weak jibe in response. (“Too weak to confirm no one on the picket line.”) This sounds like an argument about character. In reality, a leader’s “strength” or “weakness” is probably 80% a consequence of political context (how much space they have available to act), and at most only 20% a matter of personal authority and leadership virility. But the public at large won’t take much convincing that Sunak is weak, given everything that is happening in his party and in the country at large (see 9.21am), and so this is an easy hit for Labour.