Hunt dismisses Kwarteng’s claim that mini-budget not to blame for state of UK finances – UK politics live

NHS trusts are paying as much as £2,500 for a single agency nursing shift, research by the Labour party has revealed.

The party produced the figures by submitting freedom of information requests, and it says the results show the need for a big investment in NHS recruitment – which is what Labour is promising.

In a news release summarising its findings, Labour says:

In total, the NHS paid more than £3bn to agencies who provide doctors and nurses on short notice. The figure represents a 20% rise on last year, when the health service spent £2.4bn. Trusts spent a further £6bn on bank staff, when NHS staff are paid to do temporary shifts, taking the total spent on additional staff to around £9.2bn.

One in three NHS trusts paid an agency more than £1,000 for a single shift last year, while one in every six trusts paid more than £2,000, results from freedom of information requests reveal.

The most expensive shift was £2,549, paid by Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Swindon. Medway NHS Trust in Kent spent more than any other trust on agency staff, paying out £77m last year alone.

A BBC investigation on the same topic found that, even though pay rates for agency staff are supposedly capped, these limits are regularly ignored, on the grounds that patient safety would otherwise be at risk.

Commenting on the problem, Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said:

Taxpayers are picking up the bill for the Conservatives’ failure to train enough doctors and nurses over the past 12 years. This is infuriating amounts of money paid to agencies, when patients are waiting longer than ever for treatment.

Labour will tackle this problem at its root. We will train the doctors and nurses the NHS needs, paid for by abolishing the non-dom tax status.

Kwasi Kwarteng’s interview with TalkTV last night was the first time he had spoken in public about the events leading up to his sacking, and one of the main lines was his suggestion that Liz Truss was primarily to blame for the mini-budget imploding.

Kwarteng accepted a lot of responsibility himself. He told the programme:

I’m responsible. I’m not going to wash my hands with it. I was chancellor of the exchequer. I was also part of the top team.

But he also said that they went too fast, that Truss was driving this, and that he warned her to slow down. He said:

The prime minister was very much of the view that we needed to move things fast. But I think it was too quick. If you look at it, it was on the 23rd of September. We only got into the office on the sixth of September. And looking back, hindsight is a wonderful thing, I think a measured pace would have been much better …

I said, actually, after the budget that because we were going very fast – even after the mini-budget we were going at breakneck speed – and I said: ‘You know, we should slow down, slow down’.

Kwarteng said that, in response, Truss said she had to move quickly because she would only have two years in office.

But Kwarteng’s attempt to offload some of the responsibility for what went wrong on to Truss has been criticised by journalists, commentators and opposition MPs – not least because Kwarteng gave an interview on the Sunday after the mini-budget implying he wanted to go further.

Here is some of the reaction.

From my colleague Pippa Crerar

From ITV’s Anushka Asthana

From Sky’s Rob Powell

From my colleague Jessica Elgot

From Marc Stears, a former aide to Ed Miliband

From Tim Bale, an academic who has written extensively about the modern Conservative party

From the Labour MP Diane Abbott

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, has criticised Kwasi Kwarteng, the former chancellor, for refusing to apologise for the impact of his mini-budget in his interview with TalkTV last night.

When Kwarteng was asked by the presenter, Tom Newton Dunn, if he would apologise to people who had to pay more for their mortgages after the mini-budget, as lenders put their interest rates up in response to the assumption that Kwarteng’s policies would lead to the Bank of England raising interest rates by more than expected, Kwarteng replied:

I’m not going to, I’m not going to comment on that. I think it was regrettable. And I think people were very, very concerned. Interest rates were going up. The Bank of England has put interest rates up and all of that was happening. But there was turbulence and I regret that.

Newton Dunn asked Kwarteng twice more if he would apologise, but Kwarteng continued to refuse. “I don’t want to relive the past,” he said. “I just want to focus on where we are next week.”

But he did say he felt sorry for what people who were having to remortgage were going through. “I really feel sympathy for that,” he said. But he still felt the “strategic goals” of the mini-budget were right, he said, even though the implementation was flawed.

I will post more from the Kwarteng interview shortly. Here is our overnight story on it, by my colleague Nadeem Badshah.

As my colleague Lisa O’Carroll reports, Rishi Sunak seemed to make a reasonably good impression when he held his first face-to-face meeting with the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, last night, at the opening of the British-Irish Council summit.

The Irish government’s account of the meeting is here.

Sunak’s meetings with Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister (in person), and Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister (virtual – he has Covid), were also described as constructive. His predecessor, Liz Truss, did not even bother making a courtesy call to them in her 45 days as PM, and Boris Johnson’s relations with them both were fractious.

This is from Sky News.

And this is from Adrian Masters, ITV Cymru’s political editor.

Good morning. We’ve got less than a week to go now until the autumn statement – in effect, the second budget of the autumn – and already a blame game has broken out in the Conservative party about who is responsible for the massive spending cuts and tax rises the nation is about to face.

In an interview with TalkTV last night, his first since he was sacked as chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng rejected claims that his mini-budget was primarily to blame. When it was put to him that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the new chancellor, were going to blame him for all the problems, Kwarteng replied:

You know, the only thing that they could possibly blame us for is the interest rates, and interest rates have come down and the gilt rates have come down. The black hole and structural problems are already there. I mean, it wasn’t that the national debt was created by Liz Truss’s 44 days in government.

When he was challenged again, Kwarteng even questioned whether it was right to talk about a black hole in the first place. He said:

The national debt wasn’t radically changed by Liz Truss … There isn’t a black hole and the interest rates and the gilt rate funding the debt is exactly the same as it was before the mini-budget. So the black hole hasn’t been caused by the mini budget. It’s something that Jeremy and Rishi and their officials are going to have to tackle on their own regardless of what happened in the budget.

But Hunt does not accept this. He was asked about Kwarteng’s claim in an interview with Sky News this morning, and he replied:

All I would say is that when we produced a fiscal statement that didn’t show how we were going to bring our debts down over the medium term, the markets reacted very badly and so we have learned that you can’t fund either spending or borrowing without showing how you are going to pay for it and that is what I will do.

Hunt did not engage with Kwarteng’s specific argument, but he was clearly implying that his predecessor was at fault.

Hunt was giving an interview to respond to this morning’s growth figures showing the economy shrank by 0.2% in the third quarter of the year. Larry Elliott and Richard Partington have the full story here.

And Graeme Wearden has more on the business live blog.

Parliament is not sitting today, and there is not much in the diary. But Keir Starmer is visiting veterans in north London, and Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, is due to hold a press conference at around 12.45pm at the end of the British-Irish Council summit.

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