Key events
Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, asks if Starmer will back the young carers chair. Will he support this, and giving young people more access to music generally.
Starmer praises the project, and jokes about Davey singing his Christmas single outside No 10. There are meant to be laws about anti-social behaviour, he says.
Badenoch says Starmer is about to give away our hard-won Brexit freedoms. She says Labour is punching the British people in the face, in one case literally. Will the PM tell the truth?
Starmer says he will do that now. The Tories left a £22bn black hole in the accounts, he says. He says Labour is getting on with the job, with record funding for the NHS, money for trains and buses, and potholes, and a higher minimum wage.
Badenoch says the Tories voted yesterday to exempt hospices from the “jobs tax”, the national insurance increase. Will the government exempt them?
Starmer says the government will announce funding plans for hospices in the new year.
He says Badenoch wants all the advantages of the budget, but none of the disadvantages.
Badenoch claims that Starmer needs to misrepresent her to make his point. She does not need to do that to talk about him.
Did the chancellor tell him about the impact of the national insurance cut on charities?
Starmer says Badenoch is defending the winter fuel payment. But he says she used to say some people did not need it.
Badenoch says the Tories kept the triple lock. She says some pensioners may die as a result of the winter fuel payment cut. Did the chancellor know what she was doing?
Starmer says the shadow chancellor said the triple lock was unsustainable, but Badenoch is now committed to it. Over a sandwich or a steak, they should meet to sort it out.
Badenoch says there are 850,000 pensioners eligible for pension credit. If they all sign up, the savings from the winter fuel payment will be wiped out, she says.
Starmer says Badenoch should not claim it as a good thing that pensioners did not sign up for pension credit. He repeats the point about the triple lock.
Kemi Badenoch says for years cabinet minsters played politics with Waspi women. Now they are admitted “that we were right all along”.
And, turning to another group of pensioners, she asks how many have applied for pension credit.
Starmer says the government has been driving up eligibility for pension credit.
And, because it stablised the economy, the government has been able to keep the triple lock. The shadow cabinet called it unsustainable.
Chris Hinchliff (Lab) asks if the government will support ensuring parents get financial support if they cannot work because they have a terminally ill child. He says constituents who are campaigning on this issue, because they lost a child in these circumstances, are watching.
Starmer praises the family for their camaigning and says the government will announce plans on this soon.
Keir Starmer starts by saying he met the “brave men and women” serving on HMS Iron Duke in Estonia yesterday. He thanks all members of the armed forces keeping the country safe. And he thanks Commons staff for all their work, and wishes everyone a happy Christmas.
It is women and equalities questions in the Commons, and Claire Coutinho, the shadow minister for women and equalities, has just asked by the government is refusing to back Richard Holden’s 10-minute rule bill banning cousin marriage.
Bridget Phillipson, the minister for women and equalities, said she would write to Coutinho about this issue. On Monday No 10 declined to back this plan.
Starmer faces Badenoch at PMQs
The last PMQs of 2024 is about to start.
Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.
Streeting says moving from analogue to digital most important of his three main NHS reform goals
Wes Streeting has just finished giving evidence to the health committee. Here are some of the main points he made.
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Streeting, the health secretary, said the the move from analogue to digital is the most important of the “three shifts” in the NHS he wants to see. The three priorities are: hospital to community; analogue to digital; and sickness to prevention. Asked to choose the most important, he reluctantly chose analogue to digital. He explained:
If there is one thing that would make a demonstrable improvement in the patient experience, the level of personalised care and the extent to which we can run and bleed this system more effectively and efficiently, that is around the shift from analogue to digital.
When I talk about how we can use AI, machine learning, genomics, big data, to not only intervene early with earlier diagnosis and earlier treatment, but to actually predict and prevent illness, which is a game changing paradigm shift in healthcare in this century, what I get from a lot of NHS staff is, ‘Look, that sounds brilliant, that sounds really visionary, but I just like it if, when I turn the machine on in the morning, it turned on reliably’.
After PMQs there will be an urgent question, on Mauritius and the Chagos Islands, tabled by Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary.
And after that there will be four government statements:
Ombudsman says she did not expect ministers to accept Waspi women badly treated, but refuse to put it right
Rebecca Hilsenrath is the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman and it was her report, published in March, that said Waspi women should receive compensation worth up to £10bn. In an interview with Times Radio this morning, she said she did not expect the government to ignore her recommendations in the way it did yesterday. She said:
It’s great that the government are saying that our intervention will lead to service improvements and it’s fair to say also that people who come to us, overwhelmingly, are motivated by wanting things to improve for other people.
But what we don’t expect is for an acknowledgement to be made by a public body that it’s got it wrong but then refuse to make it right for those affected.
In her statement to MPs yesterday, Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, said the fact that the government delayed giving women information about the fact their state pension age was rising did not lead to them suffering “direct financial loss”. Kendall said this was one of the conclusions in the ombudsman’s report.
This refers to the fact that that Waspi women did not lose money to which they were legally entitled.
But, in her interview this morning, Hilsenrath said that some women may have lost out as a result of what happened. She explained:
That delay left thousands of women … not knowing whether had they received information earlier, it might have given them the chance to make better decisions.
And that’s the key injustice that we found, that sort of lack of financial autonomy, the fact they weren’t given the information to make the best decision for themselves at the time. And they’ll never know whether it would have made a difference.
