Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer clash over homelessness and the UK economy at PMQs – UK politics live | Politics

Michael Gove will next week announce a relaxation of housing targets for local authorities in England, which developers worry will mean far fewer homes being built amid a housing crisis, Kiran Stacey reports.

Diana Johnson says the Home Office has revealed that it is spending £22m on the Bibby Stockholm barge.

Q: How long is that for?

Pursglove says he does not have that figure.

Johnson says the Home Office could not give a value-for-money assessment, saying what that per person cost was.

Pursglove says the value for money assessment is being updated.

He says this is a more cost effective way of providing accommodation.

Q: How do you know?

Pursglove says they are still looking at the figures.

At the home affairs committee Diana Johnson, the committee chair, is now having a row with Michael Tomlinson, the minister for illegal migration.

She says Tomlinson and his colleagues are being “incredibly disrespectful” in coming to the committee without answers.

Lee Anderson, the Tory deputy chair and a member of the committee, is now asking questions. He also accuses the Home Office team of being “disrespectful”.

He asks if Sir Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary, and Simon Ridley, the interim second permanent secretary, have got into trouble over how badly prepared they were when they attended the committee last month.

Tomlinson says a follow-up letter has been sent. But if Anderson has not had a satisfactory answer yet, he should get one.

Q: Do you keep a weekly or monthly total of how many people have been returned? Is that a good idea?

Tomlinson says he thinks that would be a good idea.

Q: What good does it do clearing the asylum application backlog? Does that just lead to people claiming support from councils?

Pursglove says it is helpful to clear the backlog. That means asylum seekers can be removed from hotels.

Q: You have sent us figures saying only 420 non-Albanians have been returned since 2020. Is that acceptable?

Tomlinson says he wants that figure to be much higher.

Q: Do you support having ID cards?

Tomlinson says he is cautious about that proposals.

Michael Tomlinson, the minister for illegal migration, and Tom Pursglove, the minister for legal migration, have just started giving evidence to the Commons home affairs committee.

There is a live feed here.

James Cleverly, the home secretary, is often described at Westminster as a friendly guy, and he has paid a warm tribute to Mark Drakeford, who has announced today that he will stand down as Labour leader in Wales and Welsh first minister before Easter next year. Cleverly posted this on X:

I never really worked closely with Mark Drakeford, but on the times we did meet and talk I always found him to be a real gent.

Thank you for your public service, and all the best for the future.

But Cleverly’s colleagues at CCHQ were not feeling so charitable this morning. They sent out a press release with a quote from Richard Holden, the Tory chair, saying:

We thank Mark Drakeford for his service, but Labour’s 25 years of failure running Wales cannot be ignored … With falling schools standards, blanket 20mph speed limits, and blocking meal deals in supermarkets, the Labour government in Wales have been focused on short-term soundbites.

Many Labour figures have been paying tribute. Steven Morris quotes some of them in his story about Drakeford standing down, and here are some more.

From Keir Starmer:

From Gordon Brown, the former Labour PM:

Mark Drakeford has been a brilliant, compassionate and principled leader of Welsh Labour putting social justice right at the top of his mission. He deserves all our gratitude for his years of public service.

From Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader and shadow secretary for climate change and net zero:

From Kevin Brennan, the Cardiff West MP and shadow minister for victims:

SNP leaders have paid tribute too.

From Nicola Sturgeon, the former Scottish first minister:

Sending my very best wishes to @MarkDrakeford. He was without doubt one of the most decent, dedicated, principled, and impressive politicians I had the privilege of working with in my time as FM. He will be the hardest of acts to follow.

From Humza Yousaf, the Scottish first minister:

My thanks to @MarkDrakeford, a dedicated and principled public servant. A Labour politician willing to call out the damage of Brexit and stand up to Westminster austerity. An ally in defending devolution from repeated Westminster attacks. I wish him all the best for the future

Many families were shocked last week when the government announced a huge increase in the income threshold for anyone sponsoring a family visa. The new rules should mean that any Briton earning less than £38,700 will probably not be allowed to bring a foreign spouse to the UK.

During PMQs Stephen Timms, the Labour MP who chairs the work and pensions committee, said the marriage plans of thousands of couples were scuppered by these rules. He asked if families already in the UK would be exempt when their visas were renewed, or whether any transitional exemptions might be in place.

In his reply, Rishi Sunak implied the rules would be introduced gradually. He said:

We have a longstanding principle that anyone bringing dependants to the UK must be able to support them financially – we should not expect this to be at the taxpayer’s expense and the threshold hasn’t been raised in over a decade, it is right that we have now brought it in line with the median salary.

The family immigration route as he knows does contain provision for exceptional circumstances, but more generally it’s also right, and I can tell him, to look at transitional arrangements to ensure that they are fair and the Home Office are actively looking at this and will set out further information shortly.

In his memoir Politics on the Edge, the former cabinet minister turned podcaster Rory Stewart says: “Nine years in politics had been a shocking education in lack of seriousness.” PMQs often shows why this is such a compelling critique of Westminster, but rarely more than today.

It’s the last PMQs before Christmas and so an element of end-of-term cheer was understandable, and expected. But the opening of the sesssion today was just bizarre. First, Rishi Sunak was cheered to the rafters by his MPs as if he were Churchill at the end of WW2, rather than a PM who had just managed to win a vote by postponing the big policy argument until the start of the next year.

Then, after a question about contaminated blood, he took a question from a Tory who seemed to think that the reason the tax burden is so high is all because of the economic modelling methodology used by the OBR. Sunak leaned into this enthusiastically, and started boasting about introducing the biggest tax cuts for a generation. Regular readers – and, indeed, any half-intelligent person who follows current affairs reasonably diligently – will of course know that the tax burden is approaching a postwar high.

Keir Starmer did not indulge Sunak’s denialism, but he did start off in festive, jokey mode and made some reasonably good gags about Tory disunity. This created a problem when, in his third question, he moved on to problems with the economy and public services. Sunak was able to hit back effectively with the line: “He talks about governing and he spent the first two questions talking about political tittle-tattle, what a joke.”

But Starmer then steered the conversation to homelessness, and he had a good jibe about the pomposity of the European Research Group.

Nearly 140,000 children are going to be homeless this Christmas, that is more than ever before, that is a shocking state of affairs and it should shame this government. Instead of more social housing, housebuilding is set to collapse. Instead of banning no-fault evictions, thousands of families are at risk of homelessness. Rather than indulge in his backbenchers swanning around in their factions and their star chambers pretending to be members of the mafia, when is he going to get a grip and focus on the country?

Sunak’s response was managerial (“tone-deaf”, Starmer called it), but it was in the next exchange where he came unstuck. A good rule in the Commons is that a reply should always match the tone of the question put, which means that sombre/emotive/non-partisan needs a response in kind. Starmer started talking about named families and individuals affected by homelessness and asked Sunak about an 11-year-old boy whose letter to Santa requested a forever home, and no new toys, “just my old toys out of storage”. It was heartbreaking. There was no easy reply available to Sunak, but he should at least have engaged emotionally. Instead, he just started hammering away about a vote in the Lords. This time he really was tone-deaf.

Here is the clip.

It was hard to tell whether the trap was deliberate or fortuitous – but Sunak fell into it all the same.