What you need to know
Public safety is at risk over small boats, says Philp
Philp said some non-UK citizens and asylum seekers are suspected of being guilty of grooming.
“Does the deputy prime minister now accept that the small boats crisis is a crisis of public safety as well as a border crisis?” he asks.
Rayner replies: “This is a very serious issue and more needs to be done. Let me update the house. Working with our allies, we have carried out a series of major arrests to tackle smuggling gangs behind this vile trade.
“In the past month a ring leader that smuggled almost 4,000 migrants has been jailed for 25 years.”
Standing up for victims ‘not far-right’, says Philp
The shadow home secretary Chris Philp criticised previous comments by the PM in which he said people were “jumping on a far-right bandwagon” on the issue of grooming gangs.
“Standing up for rape victims is not far-right. So will the deputy prime minister apologise for what the prime minister said?” Philp asks Rayner.
Angela Rayner replies: “The prime minister did not just raise issues but acted on them. He brought the first prosecutions agaisnt grooming gangs, called for action to address ethnicity issues in 2012 and he [Mr Philp] will know that the data the previous government collected was inaccurate and not complete.”
She adds: “The prime minister made those comments specifically about Tory ministers who sat for years in the government and did absolutely nothing about this scandal.”
Philp said that victims of the scandal believed it had been “covered up” by authorities.
He says: “The survivors told us they will only have confidence in an inquiry if it is independently led, has full statutory powers, covers all 50 towns affected including Bradford, if those who covered this up are prosecuted, if foreign perpetrators are all deported, if survivors are closely involved and if it is set up before the summer recess.”
Deputy PMQs about to start
Angela Rayner is to face questions from the shadow home secretary Chris Philp as the prime minister is travelling back from the G7 summit in Canada.
Britain an international ‘laughing stock’
The UK has been turned into an international “laughing stock” over the failure to control the HS2 rail project, a minister acknowledged.
The housing and planning minister Matthew Pennycook said there were “serious problems” with HS2 “in terms of accountability, project overruns, costs”.
He told LBC the way HS2 and other infrastructure projects had been handled “reflect very poorly on us” as a country.
Pennycook said the Planning and Infrastructure Bill includes a number of changes that will “speed up the consenting process for nationally significant infrastructure” and this week’s infrastructure strategy “seeks to reverse the frankly erratic decisions and underinvestment we’ve seen over the past 14 years”.
HS2 chief executive ‘astounded’ by findings
Mark Wild, chief executive of HS2 Ltd, is understood to have been astounded by his findings after he took control of the government-owned company in December last year.
The source said: “Alexander wants to turn the tide on the whole thing. Wild has been tasked with looking at the entire project and the speech today is designed to tackle these fresh revelations and look at how we move forward.
“There has been a total lack of ministerial oversight in the past and we need to change that so the same mistakes are not made on Northern Powerhouse Rail or the Lower Thames Crossing.”
The ballooning cost of HS2
In December HS2 Ltd estimated the cost of building the railway would be between £54 and £66 billion in 2019 prices and between £67 and £83 billion in current prices.
Revelations last year that HS2 had spent £100 million of taxpayers’ money to build a bat tunnel shocked Westminster. Wild said that he could not apologise for complying with the law but conceded that an “extraordinary amount of money” had been spent on the barrier, in ancient woodland in Buckinghamshire, to comply with the law on protected species.
‘Line in the sand’ over HS2, minister to say
The transport secretary Heidi Alexander will tell the Commons that she is “drawing a line in the sand” over the embattled rail project as the government tries to wrestle it back into order. The remaining section of the high-speed line between London and Birmingham will no longer be completed by 2033 and a delay of at least two years is now expected, according to reports.
Alexander will present the findings of an interim report by Mark Wild, chief executive of HS2 Ltd, the company responsible for the delivery of the project at 12.30pm.
