UK Covid inquiry live: David Cameron denies Tory austerity policies affected NHS response | Politics

Here is the text of Keir Starmer’s speech in Edinburgh on Labour’s clean energy policy. And here is the 18-page clean energy superpower mission document.

The Scottish Conservatives claim the Labour proposal to stop issuing further oil and gas licences would be “catastrophic” for the north-east of Scotland. Liam Kerr MSP, the party’s spokesperson for net zero, energy and transport, said:

There was a reason Keir Starmer delivered this speech in Edinburgh, rather than Aberdeen – because this is an economically and environmentally illiterate policy that betrays north-east Scotland.

Despite his desperate attempts at re-spinning it in recent days, the Labour leader is sticking stubbornly to his disastrously received and catastrophic position of banning all new oil and gas projects.

That would cost tens of thousands of skilled jobs and destroy communities across the north-east. That’s madness when we know that renewable sources don’t yet cover our energy needs – because it would lead to costly foreign imports of fossil fuels, increasing our carbon footprint.

Kerr also claimed the policy would “give Russia even more influence over UK and European energy markets”.

The TUC has said that David Cameron’s evidence to the Covid inquiry (see 2.29pm) shows he is “in denial about the huge damage caused by his austerity policies”. In a statement, Paul Nowak, the TUC general secretary, said:

David Cameron is in denial about the huge damage caused by his austerity policies – both to public services and the UK economy.

The evidence is clear that the cuts he imposed massively damaged the readiness and resilience of our public services. And they shredded our social security safety net – leaving millions vulnerable.

We must learn the lesson that cuts have costs. And we must strengthen our public services and safety net so that we are never left exposed in the same way again.

Here is a summary of the main points from David Cameron’s evidence to the Covid inquiry this morning.

Our whole economic strategy was about safeguarding and strengthening the economy and the nation’s finances so we could cope with whatever crisis hit us next.

And I think that’s incredibly important because there’s no resilience without economic resilience, without financial resilience, without fiscal resilience.

[Marmot and Bambra’s] conclusion is to look a lot at austerity, and what have you. I’m not sure the figures back that out.

We had some very difficult winters with very bad flu pandemics; I think that had an effect. We had the effect that the improvements in cardiovascular disease, the big benefits that already come through before that period, and that was tailing off.

And then you’ve got the evidence from other countries. I mean, Greece and Spain had far more austerity, brutal cuts, and yet their life expectancy went up. So I don’t think it follows …

They have got lots of important evidence and I have looked at it very carefully and will think about it very carefully, but I did find that they had leaped to a certain set of conclusions quite quickly, not all of which was backed up by the evidence.

• Cameron said that, when he was PM, the government did not plan enough for the risk of a non-flu pandemic. (See 11.43am.)

• He said more time should have been spent assessing the risk of a pandemic with asymptomatic transmission. “When you think what would be different if more time had been spent on a highly infectious, asymptomatic pandemic, different recommendations would have been made about what was necessary to prepare for that,” he said.

• Oliver Letwin, who as Cabinet Office minister in Cameron’s government was responsible for resilience, now thinks he should have spent more time on pandemic planning, the inquiry heard. During his evidence, Cameron was asked about the witness statement from Letwin, who said that he had been told by officials that he did not need to look at pandemic influenza planning because the UK was already well prepared for it. In the statement Lewtwin went on:

I now believe, however, that it might have been helpful if I had delved into the pandemic influenza risks myself … This is not because I believe such a review would have been likely to lead to any significant improvements in our preparedness for a pandemic flu itself, but rather because it might have led me to question whether we were adequately prepared to deal with the risks of forms of respiratory disease other than pandemic influenza.

• Cameron said there was a failure to learn from Exercise Alice, a “tabletop exercise” was conducted in 2016 to identify any potential threats from Mers [Middle East respiratory syndrome] coronavirus. He said:

Having read through Alice – because ministers weren’t involved – there’s a sentence in Alice which is ‘access to sufficient levels of PPE was also considered and pandemic stockpiles were suggested’.

That’s a sentence in Alice, but it doesn’t make it into the recommendations.

So if you’re asking: ‘Does it look like there were failures to follow through from this?’ I think the answer to that is yes.

I’ve thought a lot about this because, having been back through all the paperwork and everything, I haven’t found any moment when I was asked or the Treasury was asked to approve sort of surge capacity for PPE supplies or anything like that.

• He said that, if asked, his government would have bought three months’ worth of PPE supplies for hospitals. He said:

In Jeremy Hunt’s evidence hospitals in Hong Kong had to have three months of PPE supplies.

I was never asked: ‘Can we have funding for three months of PPE supplies for every hospital?’ But had I been asked we would’ve granted it, that’s not expensive, that’s not a huge commitment.

The Metropolitan police have confirmed that they are looking at three new sets of complaints about alleged lockdown rule-breaking by politicians – but it has stressed that full investigations will only be launched if that is deemed “proportionate”.

In a statement, it says it is “in the process of assessing” material about three sets of events: gatherings at No 10 and Chequers uncovered by the Cabinet Office when it was looking at Boris Johnson’s diaries as part of its Covid inquiry work; the alleged birthday drinks party attended by Sir Bernard Jenkin in Dame Eleanor Laing’s office; and the party staged by Shaun Bailey’s Tory London mayoral campaign team.

The statement says:

It would not be appropriate to prejudge the outcome of these assessments or to provide a running commentary on their progress.

We will provide further updates at the appropriate time.

But it also says, when considering retrospective breaches of Covid rules, the Met will only launch a full investigation “when there is evidence of a serious and flagrant breach” and where an investigation would be proportionate, where not investigating would “significantly undermine the legitimacy of the law” and where there is “little ambiguity around the absence of a reasonable defence”.

No 10 has also said that Rishi Sunak currently is not planning to attend the Commons debate on Boris Johnson – but that attendance has not been ruled out.

Speaking at the lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson said Sunak had other engagements this afternoon and evening. He said:

I don’t think we know yet whether there will be a vote on this issue.

The prime minister is hosting the prime minister of Sweden. He has a series of meetings [and] an evening commitment.

Asked whether Sunak planned to attend the Commons if there was a vote, the spokesperson said:

It depends on the timings of the day.

He has commitments that he can’t move, but obviously it will depend on how the timings in parliament play out.

Asked if it was possible Sunak might attend, the spokesperson replied:

Currently you’ve got his schedule for today which doesn’t include attending parliament, but obviously we will see how the timings play out.

Scottish Conservative MPs who fail to vote in favour of the privileges committee report condemning Boris Johnson will be betraying their voters, Humza Yousaf, the Scottish first minister, said. Speaking at his news conference this morning (see 10.32am), Yousaf said:

I think those that choose to turn up to the vote and abstain, or indeed vote against the sanctions, any Scottish Tory MP who does that is betraying the people they represent.

Boris Johnson, and indeed the Conservative party more generally, have shown flagrant disregard for rules that many of us, most of us, adhered.

At the extreme end of that we saw people literally missing the funerals of loved ones, not being able to say goodbye, while they partied in Conservative headquarters. That is a betrayal of people’s trust.

Any Scottish Tory MP that is going to abstain or not vote to sanction Boris Johnson, they rightly will face the wrath of the Scottish people at the ballot box, I don’t doubt that for a minute.

Liz Truss was often accused of deliberately dressing like Margaret Thatcher as her career in government progressed on the way to becoming prime minister.

But it was never intentional, she told a media conference in Dublin this morning.

Truss, who was PM for just a few weeks last year, said that female politicians were often compared with one another because “there aren’t that many of us”.

Speaking about the Thatcher comparison, she said:

I just think, frankly, it’s lazy thinking on people’s part. It’s not something I have ever consciously sought to do at all.

Truss also complained about some media outlets treating politics as “a branch of the entertainment industry” and she described the Daily Star’s decision last year to set up a livestream to see if her premiership would last longer than a lettuce (it didn’t) was “puerile”.

A cross-party group of British MPs and peers has written to Rishi Sunak him to reconsider a decision to allow a visit this week by a senior Chinese government official accused of overseeing the forcible repatriation of hundreds of dissidents back to China, including some from the UK. Patrick Wintour has the story here.

Cameron says there are always pressures on the NHS.

But he says that by the time he left office public satisfaction with the NHS was extremely high. The King’s Fund described it as one of the most successful health systems in the world. He goes on:

We’d virtually abolished mixed-sex wards, we’d got hospital infections down, we were carrying out 40% more diagnostic tests every week. There were successes in the NHS as well as pressures.

Asked about expert reports criticising the state of the NHS, he said they tended to measure outputs (performance) by inputs (money spent on health). He says these experts did not recognise the role reform could play.

Q: Do you accept health inequalities increased during your time in office?

Cameron says after 2011, in many countries around the world life expectancy improved, but at a lower rate than before.

Countries such as Greece and Spain had far more austerity, “brutal cuts”. But life expectancy went up in those countries, he says.

He says he has read the report by Prof Clare Bambra and Prof Sir Michael Marmot on health inequalities that was submitted to the inquiry.

As an example, he says the report said child poverty increased during his term in office. He goes on:

Well, actually, the number of children living in absolute poverty went down. The number of people living in absolute poverty went down. The number of pensioners living in absolute poverty went down very considerably.

(Absolute poverty is a measure of poverty benchmarked to the relatively poverty figure in a particular year, normally when a government takes office. Over time it almost always goes down, because inflation means household incomes go up in cash terms for the poorest families, even if they do not go up in relative terms.)

He says he thinks Bambra and Marmot in their report came to “a certain set of conclusions quite quickly, not all of which was backed up by the evidence”.

In their report Bambra and Marmot say:

The UK entered the pandemic with increasing health inequalities and health among the poorest people in a state of decline. We knew from previous pandemics and research into lower respiratory tract infections that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, people living in areas or regions with higher rates of deprivation, and people from minority ethnic groups and people with disabilities, are much more likely to be severely impacted by a respiratory pandemic.

Kate Blackwell KC is now asking David Cameron about his government’s austerity policies. She says she does not want to examine whether they were right in principle; she just wants to ask about their impact on health, inequality and societal resilience.

Q: Do you accept that the health budgets passed by your government were inadequate, and let to a depletion in its ability to provide an adequate service?

Cameron says he does not accept that.

He says, if the government had lost control of the public finances, it would not have been able to protect the NHS.

He says health spending went up. The number of doctors increased.

But it was “essential” to get the public finances back to health.

Q: In a witness statement, Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, has talked about his concerns about capacity in the NHS.

Cameron says he knows of Hunt’s concerns. He was a very capable health secretary. He was always battling for the NHS. But financial decisions had to be taken collectively.

Q: Hunt sets out in his statement matters that should have been addressed.

Cameron says, without his government’s action, government debt might have been £1tn higher. There would have been a financial and fiscal crisis, as well as the pandemic.

He says government needs to have a strong economy, and also to prepare for pandemics. It did not end up spending enough time on the sort of pandemic the UK experienced.

David Cameron is giving evidence to the Covid inquiry since 11am. He was prime minister from 2010 until 2016, and he said that although pandemics were seen as a “tier 1 risk”, there was too much focus on the risk of a flu pandemic, and not enough on the risk of another type.

He said he had been asking himself why that happened, and it was “very hard” to give an answer. He said:

This is the thing I keep coming back to, which is that pandemic was a ‘tier 1 risk’ – pandemics were looked at, but … much more time was spent on pandemic flu and the dangers of pandemic flu rather than on potential pandemics of other more respiratory diseases like Covid turned out to be. And, you know, I think this is so important because so many consequences follow from that.

And I’ve been sort of wrestling with … I think the architecture [to deal with large-scale emergencies] was good – the national security council, the national security adviser, the risk register, and also this new security risk assessment, which was perhaps a bit more dynamic.

But that’s where I keep coming back to … is, so much time was spent on a pandemic influenza and that was seen as the greatest danger – and we had very bad years for flu so it is a big danger.

But why wasn’t more time and more questions asked about what turned out to be the pandemic that we faced? It’s very hard to answer why that’s the case. And I’m sure this public inquiry is going to spend a lot of time on that.

These are from ITV’s Anushka Asthana on Cameron’s evidence.