Reeves says Labour would use revenue from reinstating 45% tax rate to hire more NHS staff
Reeves confirms that Labour would reinstate the 45% top rate of tax. And, for the first time, she says how Labour would use the money.
Labour would use the money to double the number of district nurses qualifying every year; to hire more than 5,000 new health visitors; to create an extra 10,000 nursing and midwifery places; and to implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in history.
Reeves ends her speech by saying a Labour government is on its way.
UPDATE: Reeves said:
I can tell you: with a Labour government, those at the top will pay their fair share.
The 45p top rate of income tax is coming back.
Here’s what we will do with that money.
The next Labour government will double the number of district nurses qualifying every year train. We will train more than 5,000 new health visitors. We will create an additional 10,000 nursing and midwife placements every year.
More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.
It will fall to us to fix the damage the Tories have done.
We have done it before and, conference we will do it again.
Key events
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‘No, nay, never’ – Ian Murray restates Labour refusal to do deals with SNP
Labour will never do any deals with the SNP, Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish secretary, Ian Murray, said in his speech. He told delegates:a
[The SNP] don’t want to make devolution work.
They don’t want a Labour government.
Conference, let me be very clear – the SNP are not our friends – they exist for one reason only – to rip Scotland out of the UK.
And don’t forget, at the last election Nicola Sturgeon encouraged people in England to vote Green, not Labour.
So let me reiterate Keir’s message – No deals with the SNP.
None.
No, nay, never.
The only deal we want to make is directly with the Scottish people.
Nandy says Labour wants to see more people in social housing than in private rented sector
Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary, told delegates in her speech that Labour wanted to make social housing the second most common form of housing again. She said:
The Tories have turned housing into a racket.
Incentivising speculation and profiteering while millions languish on waiting lists in cold damp homes.
So we will mend the deliberate vandalism of our social housing stock.
Because the idea of a home for life handed on in common ownership to future generations.
Is an idea worth fighting for.
Council housing is not a dirty word.
So today, I can announce we will be the first government in a generation to restore social housing to the second largest from of tenure.
This will be our mantra.
Council housing, council housing, council housing.
We’re going to rebuild our social housing stock and bring homes back into the ownership of local councils and communities.
According to the latest English Housing Survey, 65% of households in England in 2020-21 were owner-occupiers, 19% were in the private rented sector and 17% were in the social rented sector.
There are almost twice as many people saying they have confidence in Keir Starmer and Labour to tackle the cost of living crisis as there are people saying they trust Liz Truss and the Tories to deal with it, new polling from YouGov suggests.
Lucy Powell confirms Labour will set up independent statutory regulator for football
At the Labour conference event where Keir Starmer and Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary will appear with Gary Neville (see 2.56pm), which will start shortly, Starmer and Powell will confirm Labour’s commitment to an independent statutory regulator for football. Powell said:
Football brings our country together. Clubs are at the heart of communities, and great sources of identity and pride in our towns.
The meteoric rise of the Premier League has put English football at the top of the world, but the benefits are not being fairly shared in the football pyramid. Without financial oversight and regulation, many clubs have been left open to transient owners taking big gambles with their club’s future. Despite bigger revenues than ever coming in to football, the financial sustainability of the pyramid has never been more at risk.
The government is abandoning the football community, particularly across the north and Midlands, which are calling out for reform. Labour will legislate for an independent regulator to safeguard the long-term sustainability of football.
Kwarteng decides Westminster will have to wait another eight weeks for OBR’s verdict on mini-budget
Economists, currency traders, MPs and everyone else will have to wait another eight weeks until they can read the Office for Budget Responsibility’s verdict on the mini-budget, the Treasury has announced. The OBR will publish its next economic forecast on Wednesday 23 November. That will coincide with Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, announcing his medium-term fiscal plan on that day.
Kwarteng was strongly criticised for not allowing the OBR to produce a forecast alongside his mini-budget on Friday. If the OBR had been allowed to do one, it is likely that it would have said that Kwarteng was on course to break his fiscal rules, that the tax cuts announced were inflationary, and that any impact the tax cuts had on growth would not be enough to compensate for the significant increase in borrowing.
Kwarteng was able to avoid an OBR forecast because he decided not to treat the Friday statement as a formal budget. He had been expected to hold a formal budget later this year, but the Treasury has said that now it will be in the spring. As a proper budget, it will be accompanied by a further OBR forecast.
Labour delegates urged to back PR to end ‘trickle-down democracy’, where power just rests with marginal seats
In the debate this afternoon the motion on proportional representation was moved by David Ward, a delegate from Ashford CLP who was head of policy for John Smith when he was Labour leader. Ward said said the current electoral system allowed the Tories to get away with measures like last week’s “obscene budget prioritising protecting bankers’ bonuses and and cutting taxes for the rich”. He went on:
The Tories can get away with this because our current electoral system lets them. Their trickle-down economics are underpinned by a trickle-down democracy, a system which hands all the power to a small number of voters in marginal swing seats, leaving millions of us unrepresented at Westminster.
The result is a government which bears no resemblance to the one that most of us voted for.
All of us in the Labour party on social justice and a more equal society. That must be based on the fundamental principle that all votes should count, no matter where they are cast.
We know there is overwhelming support for proportional representation across our party and within the wider labour movement. And that’s why today we are asking conference to make a historic commitment in favour of fair votes.
Supporters of PR sometimes argue that it forces parties to cooperate. Johanna Baxter, who is chairing the conference this afternoon, may have been making a subtle dig against it when she pointed out that there were three motions being debated on electoral reform “because at the composite meeting they could not find consensus for a single motion”. The three motions cover standards for MPs and the abolition of the House of Lords.
Peter Walker
Andy Burnham might be the darling of recent Labour conferences, but no one has told Boris Johnson’s former transport adviser, who has condemned the Greater Manchester mayor for what he called “cowardice and feebleness” in traffic policy.
Speaking at a fringe event in Liverpool, Andrew Gilligan, who oversaw policies including active travel and buses for Johnson as London mayor and then in No 10, used Burnham as an example of how, he said, local leaders could slow down a shift away from motor transport.
Burnham, who Gilligan mockingly described as “the great radical, the new Labour hero”, has pushed back against a scheme to charge high-emission vehicles entering the city, which has now been delayed.
The city, Gilligan said, has the highest levels of asthma and lung disease in the country. He went on:
Despite winning every single one of the 215 wards of Greater Manchester last year, despite winning 67% of the vote to 19%, [Burnham] still hasn’t had the political strength to charge a few vans and taxis a few quid for driving into central Manchester.
That is the kind of level of cowardice and feebleness that we’re dealing with. He can talk the talk, but actually walking the walk, even in a tiny way – he’s not up for it.
Gilligan has argued that factors including Covid and supply chain issues made it harder for people to upgrade older vehicles.
PR works for Wales, first minister Mark Drakeford tells Labour conference
In the conference hall delegates have just started debating a clutch of motions including composite eight, the one saying Labour would include a commitment to proportional representation in the next manifesto.
Earlier, in the Wales report section, Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister, used his speech to back PR. He said:
First of all, the Senedd, with its unbroken Labour governments, has always been elected by proportional representation, a system put on the statute book – twice! – by a Labour government at Westminster.
And, in a special conference, earlier this summer, over three quarters of the entire Welsh party voted to strengthen the proportionality of our voting system, to make sure that every Labour vote will count towards creating that next Welsh Labour government.
And secondly, conference, while Labour has always formed the government in Wales, we’ve never governed alone.
The fault line in Welsh politics runs right down the middle of the Senedd. On the one side, a reactionary, out-of-touch, deeply unloved Conservative party.
On the other side, those parties committed to social and economic progress.
Do the parties of the centre left agree on everything? Of course not.
But we focus on those areas where progressive parties can agree; a politics which recognises the dominant position of Labour, but which also recognises that no party has a monopoly on progressive ideas.
And, in the face of the dreadful decisions of last week, the obligation to do everything we can to take and exercise power on behalf of that great mass of decent people, the length and breadth of the UK is more powerful than ever.
Later this afternoon Gary Neville, the former England footballer and TV pundit, will be taking part in an “in conversation” event with Keir Starmer and Lucy Powell, the shadow culture secretary, on the conference platform. It is not clear who is interviewing whom.
Earlier Neville told reporters he was shocked by the mini-budget. He said:
I didn’t support the tax cut that was given at the end of last week. I also didn’t support the removal of the cap for bankers’ bonuses. It was a shock, to be honest with you – I shouldn’t be shocked any more.
It didn’t feel like it was reading the room in this country, when people are desperately worrying over the winter about how they are going to heat their homes, how they are going to feed their families, that bankers are potentially going to increase their bonuses or that the highest earners in this country are going to be better off.
I don’t think people in this country at the highest-earner bracket were actually expecting favour, they weren’t asking for favour.
In the last Neville has left open the prospect of going into Labour politics. But today he ruled it out. He said he was not tempted by the prospect of being a Labour candidate in the forthcoming byelection in West Lancashire and he said a career in politics was not for him. He explained:
I have got no intention of going into politics at all. The reality of it is, I love what I do so much, I love what I do in football, I love what I do in Greater Manchester with the businesses that I co-own.
Lord Mandelson, the former Blairite cabinet minister, has suggested that voters could shift to Labour decisively at the next election, as they did in 1997. In an interview on Radio 4’s World at One, he said the mood in the party had improved considerably. He said:
I do feel there is vibrancy in the conference and among people here. There is not the sort of rancour that you experienced here when you came to conference during the Corbyn years, which was so factional. It really sowed so much poison and division amongst people in the party. It was like a permanent state of war going on. That has completely evaporated …
Mandelson also said he thought voters might be turning against the Conservatives wholeheartedly.
I think we may well be seeing a time at the next election, a sea change in attitudes among the electorate of the sort that we saw in 1997.
Mandelson was referring to a famous quote by James Callaghan, Labour prime minister in the late 1970s, who told an aide before the 1979 general election that ushered in 18 years of Tory government: “You know there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”
Delegates vote for bringing rail and Royal Mail back into public ownership, and for £15 an hour minimum wage
The Labour conference has voted for five composite motions aimed at committing the next Labour government to bringing rail and Royal Mail back into public ownership.
They included a motion moved by Unite saying rail services should be “run in the public interest under public ownership”. It also backed the right of Labour MPs to join picket lines. (See 9.50am.) It said:
Conference notes that a good way of showing solidarity with workers taking strike action is to visit them on picket lines … Conferences supports a negotiated settlement in the rail dispute and supports all Labour MPs attending picket lines until such an outcome is reached.
Delegates also backed a motion moved by the CWU saying the next Labour government should “bring Royal Mail back into public ownership, reunite it with the Post Office and create a publicly-owned Post Bank”.
And a motion moved by Unison calling for £15 per hour minimum wage was also among those passed.
Teaching union leaders make case for better school funding
Sally Weale
Children will see larger class sizes, cuts to the curriculum and fewer extracurricular activities without additional funding for schools in England, education unions will warn at a fringe event at the Labour party conference on Monday.
They will also say the proposed below-inflation pay award of 5% for most school teachers and leaders will further reduce pay in real terms following a decade of pay erosion, fuelling a recruitment and retention crisis which has left schools struggling to fill vacancies and put teachers in front of classes.
Speaking ahead of the event, Geoff Barton, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said:
The issues of teacher pay, recruitment and retention, school funding, and pupil outcomes are all linked. Without adequate pay, we cannot recruit and keep the teachers we need, and without the money to pay them, schools will be unable to maintain current levels of provision and educational standards will be at risk.
Paul Whiteman, the general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, criticised the government’s failure to fund the pay award. He said:
The spiralling energy bills, inflationary costs, and lack of funding for teachers’ pay this year means school leaders will be forced to make cuts that ultimately cannot help but negatively impact on the education and wellbeing of children.
Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said:
Teaching is a great profession. However, after years of successive governments and numerous education secretaries, conditions, pay and school funding have so deteriorated that it is now one that many graduates are choosing not to enter or those currently teaching are choosing to leave.
Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson is due to address the Labour conference on Wednesday.
Reeves says Labour would use revenue from reinstating 45% tax rate to hire more NHS staff
Reeves confirms that Labour would reinstate the 45% top rate of tax. And, for the first time, she says how Labour would use the money.
Labour would use the money to double the number of district nurses qualifying every year; to hire more than 5,000 new health visitors; to create an extra 10,000 nursing and midwifery places; and to implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in history.
Reeves ends her speech by saying a Labour government is on its way.
UPDATE: Reeves said:
I can tell you: with a Labour government, those at the top will pay their fair share.
The 45p top rate of income tax is coming back.
Here’s what we will do with that money.
The next Labour government will double the number of district nurses qualifying every year train. We will train more than 5,000 new health visitors. We will create an additional 10,000 nursing and midwife placements every year.
More than that: We will implement the biggest expansion of medical school places in British history doubling the number of medical students so our NHS has doctors it needs.
It will fall to us to fix the damage the Tories have done.
We have done it before and, conference we will do it again.