UK politics: government likely to have to ‘pay some Waspi compensation in election year’ – as it happened

• Thousands of women, potentially hundreds of thousands, are owed compensation because of government failings related to the way changes to the state pension age were made, a long-awaited official report has said.

• The UK’s poorest families have borne the brunt of the cost of living crisis, according to latest official figures that show 300,000 more children were plunged into poverty amid falling incomes and soaring levels of hunger and food bank use.

• The Conservative candidate for the Greater Manchester mayoral election has defected to Richard Tice’s rightwing Reform UK party. Explaining why he defected in an interview with the PM programme, Dan Barker said:

I switched to Reform UK because I thought the Conservatives were not serious about the election against Andy Burnham, they’ve given up on Greater Manchester and, I would argue, the north of England as well, and the policies in Westminster are no longer what I would call conservatism either.

So when I look at Reform UK, and look at their policies, and the people and the things they say, I see that as true conservatism.

Barker also said “it is clear that the Conservative party have lost the confidence of ordinary working people across the UK and there is a reckoning waiting for them at the general election.”

• Esther McVey, a Cabinet Office minister who has criticised Whitehall waste, has claimed tens of thousands of pounds in expenses to rent a London flat despite her husband owning a property a mile away.

• Humza Yousaf has hit back at “disinformation and inaccuracy” surrounding Scotland’s controversial hate crime act, after the Scottish Conservative leader, Douglas Ross, suggested the new legislation would result in “innocent people being prosecuted”.

• Record numbers of pupils in England were absent for long periods last year, with one in 50 missing at least half of their lessons, according to official data showing absences remain far higher than pre-Covid levels.

Vaughan Gething, the new Welsh first minister, has appointed his cabinet. The full details are here. Gething says his new team “will answer the call of the generation in waiting, to create a stronger, fairer, greener Wales”.

Food insecurity – a measure of how often families have difficulty having enough food to eat, or enough healthy food – has been rising, today’s family resources report from the DWP says.

Here is the chart.

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And the report says:

The proportion of food-secure households decreased from 92% in 2019 to 2020, to 90% in 2022 to 2023, a decrease of two percentage points. This is the lowest proportion of food-secure households since the introduction of household food security to the FRS in 2019 to 2020. In previous survey years, the proportion of food-secure households has been broadly stable.

Despite a decrease in household food security this survey year, the majority of households are still food secure with high household food security (83%) or marginal household food security (7%). Food-insecure households are still in the minority, with low household food security (5%) or very low household food security (5%).

Geographically, there were differences in household food security. Northern Ireland was the most food secure (86% high, 5% marginal), Scotland was least food secure (82% high, 6% marginal).

The Liberal Democrats have also urged the government to pay compensation to the Waspi women. This is from Wendy Chamberlain, the Lib Dem chief whip.

After years of waiting, the ombudsman has finally recommended compensation for Waspi women.

These courageous women, who have tirelessly campaigned for justice after being left out of pocket, deserve our admiration for their persistence.

Liberal Democrats have long supported Waspi in their campaign and it is now up to this Conservative government to come forward with a plan to get these women the compensation they are owed.

Like the SNP (see 5.03pm), the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to be in government at Westminster after the election. The potential cost of Waspi compensation would be a huge headache for any chancellor, and Labour, like the government, has not so far made a commitment to paying compensation.

The SNP has been prominent in calling for Waspi women to receive compensation. This is what Kirsten Oswald, the party’s women and equalities spokesperson, said about the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s report.

Women born in the 1950s have been betrayed by the Tory government and deprived of pensions they were entitled to.

This saga has run on for far too long – it’s time for the UK government to step up and put an end to this serious injustice by issuing an immediate apology and fair and fast compensation to all women who were affected.

The state pension is a reserved matter. The Westminster government is responsible for women not be properly informed about their pension age rising, and the cost of any compensation scheme would also have to be paid by the Westminster government.

The government poverty figures out today included two measures used by statisticians to measure inequality. Both show it going up slightly over the past year (from 2021-22 to 2022-23).

The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality, between 0% and 100% where 0% would mean everything being shared equally and 100% would mean one person having everything. Here are the figures for income inequality, where there has been a small rise, on both the before housing costs measure and the after housing costs one.

The DWP says since 2011 the Gini coefficient has been “broadly stable”.

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Another measure is the 90:10 ratio. This measures the gap between the average income in the top 20% and the average in the bottom 20% (what the higher one is as a proportion of the lower one). The higher the number, the bigger the gap. It has been going up, with or without housing costs included, although, on both measures, the figures are lower than in 2019-20.

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Steve Webb, a Liberal Democrat who served as a pensions minister in the coalition government, has told the BBC that he thinks the government will have to offer some sort of compenstion to the Waspi women. He said:

The ombudsman says he thinks the DWP will refuse this.

My view is that they will never hold that line.

In an election year, parliament I just don’t think will vote for nothing to be done. So I think we will end up with some form of rough justice, I would guess in that £1,000 to £3,000 range that the ombudsman has recommended. (See 11.19am.)

Because if parliament has an ombudsman who spends years meticulously going through all of this, the government should accept that. They shouldn’t refuse.

Today’s poverty figures aren’t good news for the government (see 10.39am, 12.56pm and 1.27pm), but the Department for Work and Pensions has been able to extract some positive findings.

It says “there are 1.1m fewer people in absolute poverty after housing costs than there were in 2010, including 100,000 children, 200,000 pensioners, and 700,000 working aged adults.”

(That is a less impressive statistic than it sounds, because the absolute poverty measure is what counted as relative poverty in 2010, and so over time in a growing economy it should be falling. That is why it is the government’s preferred measure, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says. See 1.27pm.)

The DWP also says that in the past year the number of families where someone is disabled that are in absolute poverty, after housing costs, has fallen by 100,000.

Commenting on today’s figure, Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, said:

I know the last few years have been tough, with the aftershocks of Covid and the war of Ukraine driving up inflation and cost of living pressures. That’s exactly why we stepped in with the biggest cost of living package in Europe, worth an average of £3,800 per household, and this unprecedented support prevented 1.3 million people from falling into poverty in 2022/23.

Our decisive action to more than halve inflation has allowed us to deliver tax cuts worth an average £900 a year – putting more money directly in the pockets of hardworking families. On top of this, we’re bringing in the biggest ever rise to the national living wage, so more people can achieve long-term financial security through work.

George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, has said that Rishi Sunak should announce the date of an autumn election now. Speaking on his Political Currency podcast, which he co-hosts with Ed Balls, the former shadow chancellor, Osborne said:

I would say today: ‘I’ll tell you when the general election is going to be, it’s going to be on this date.’ That ends all the speculation about early elections. It means you don’t go through the whole summer [with people asking] is it going to be October or November?

The marginal advantage [Rishi Sunak] is going to get by having a bit of a surprise that it’s late October or mid November or early December is more than outweighed by the endless speculation.

When Balls asked if he thought such a move would kill leadership speculation, Osborne replied:

Yes, it probably does. It’s a return to something I was involved in which was the Fixed-term Parliament Act, which the Tories were thrilled to get rid of, but I can tell you, it would be wonderful for the Tory party if the Fixed-term Parliament Act had been kept on the statute book and they hadn’t got rid of it. Because then Rishi Sunak would be able to say, ‘Look, I’ll tell you when the general election is going to be, it’s going to be in January 2025.’ [He should] fix the date now, end the speculation, forestall any leadership contest – and you’re back in charge of events.

Reform UK has dropped a second parliamentary candidate for having extremist views. After Hope Not Hate, which campaigns against racism and fascism, published a report about Benjamin “Beau” Dade, who has called for mass deportations and the removal of “the foreign plague”, Reform UK said he was no longer a candidate for the party in South Swindon. “When this was brought to our attention we acted,” a party spokesperson said.

Yesterday Reform UK axed its candidate in Rutland and Stamford over racist views posed on X.

In relation to the story at 12.13pm, a reader asks:

Will the Tories be able to replace their mayoral candidate in Manchester before the vote?

Yes. Nominations have not even opened yet.

Peers have angrily rejected claims that they are to blame for the government not being able to pass its Rwanda bill before Easter, PA Media reports. PA says:

The House of Lords inflicted seven defeats on the government over its safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill last night, including a bid to restore the power of the courts to intervene in removals to Rwanda.

Peers have said the government initially scheduled for MPs to respond to Lords amendments early next week, which would have allowed time for the “ping pong” process – when the bill shuttles between the Commons and the Lords until agreement is reached – to conclude before the Easter recess.

However, the government has confirmed the government will not debate the bill again until the Commons returns on Monday 15 April, after the Easter recess.

In the Lords today Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, a former Conservative cabinet minister, asked: “Has the minister seen the reports in The Times and Telegraph, and other newspapers, suggesting that this House has delayed the passage of the Rwanda bill unnecessarily, resulting in people being exposed to the dangers of the Channel?

“Will he take this opportunity to point out that this house was well prepared to pass the legislation back for consideration in the House of Commons before Easter and it is no fault of this house that the legislation has been delayed? And that this house has just been doing its job, which is asking the Commons to think again, and is not responsible for delaying the legislation?”

Vocal support was heard from across the house as peers shouted “hear hear”.

Home Office minister Lord Sharpe of Epsom said: “I’m happy to reassure him that I have seen those reports and I can also reassure him that I passed that very message back before those newspapers published those reports.”

When Rishi Sunak announced plans for the Rwanda bill last year, as a response to a supreme court ruling saying Rwanda was not a safe country, he described it as “emergency legislation”.

But at the No 10 lobby briefing this morning the PM’s spokesperson was reluctant to use the same phrase. Instead he described it as legislation “dealing with a migration emergency”.

The term emergency legislation is usually applied to bills rushed through parliament at speed. Ministers know that, after a few rounds of “ping pong”, the Lords will back down and the government could easily have scheduled these debates so as to conclude this process before Easter.

Ministers have refused to explain why they are delaying. But the new timetable means the bill will get royal assent about two weeks before the local elections, and the first flight to Rwanda may leave in the weeks after the local elections, when likely Tory losses mean Rishi Sunak will be in need of as much “good news” as he can get.