Economy

If the new government’s ‘pensions review’ takes forward last year’s ‘Mansion House reforms’ – credited to chancellor Jeremy Hunt but largely the work of the then Lord Mayor of London, Nick Lyons, and designed to push the UK’s largest private-sector pension providers to commit funds to unlisted equities and vital infrastructure – all to the good. If it succeeds in ‘unleashing the full investment might’ of the £360 billion Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS), as the new Chancellor Rachel Reeves says she intends, even better. We’d have a public investment fund to rival those of the Netherlands and Singapore, though still way behind the likes of Norway and South Korea.

Figures out today show a country with levels of surveyed crime still at historic lows (just a quarter of the 1995 peak) but with two big exceptions. Personal theft rose by 40 per cent compared with the year before, and shoplifting is at its highest level since records began in 2003. What’s going on? ‘These figures show the disgraceful dereliction of the last Tory government on law and order,’ said Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary. Is this fair? Today’s figures show total crime at roughly half the level the Conservatives inherited from Labour in 2010. Incidents of theft from the person peaked at 708,000 in 2009 – and hit a

Seven Labour MPs had the whip suspended after voting against the two-child benefit cap, but this is a small taste of what awaits Labour. In her first major, Liz Kendall has set herself a target of hitting an 80 per cent employment rate – bolder than anything the Tories ever shot for. It is higher not only than today’s 72 per cent but (far) higher than the all-time, pre-lockdown record of 74 per cent. It is precisely the right target, for economic and social reasons. But it is one that can only be achieved via serious, game-changing welfare reform. The new Work and Pensions Secretary has inherited a full-blown welfare

In dodging calls from his party to remove the two-child cap, Sir Keir Starmer is making one of his first noteworthy mistakes as Prime Minister. Both John McDonnell, the far-left former shadow chancellor, and Anas Sarwar, the soft-left Scottish Labour leader, have called for the Coalition-era policy to go. The cap limits the payment of Universal Credit to a family’s first two children, with subsequent offspring meriting no additional payment. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, keeping the cap will mean an extra 670,000 children worse off by the end of this Parliament while scrapping it would reduce relative child poverty by half a million. The annual cost of

As the dust around the election settles, a question Tory MPs and supporters still grapple with is why Rishi Sunak called the election when he did – not least because economic indicators point to improvements over the summer and autumn, as inflation returns to target and growth starts to pick up. But Rachel Reeves, the new Chancellor, is having none of this narrative. ‘I really don’t buy this idea that somehow we’ve been handed a golden inheritance,’ she told Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC this morning, in her first sit-down interview since she entered No. 11. ‘If the former prime minister and chancellor had thought things were so good, they

‘We cannot let the challenges of the recent past define our relationships of the future,’ declared the Prime Minister ahead of today’s meeting of the European Political Union at Blenheim Palace. The meeting, he added, ‘will fire the starting gun on this government’s new approach to Europe’. The subtext to this is: the grown-ups are back in charge, and from now on we are going to have a far more constructive relationship with the EU. Keir Starmer has even promised a renegotiation of Britain’s trading relationship with the EU, which is supposedly going to make life easier for our exporters. Keir Starmer has even promised a renegotiation of Britain’s trading relationship

When Rishi Sunak called a summer election, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill didn’t make the pile of ‘wash up’ legislation to be rushed through Parliament. His plans for a generational smoking ban, and a crackdown on vapes, were paused. But this was never going to be more than a brief delay. Labour has used the King’s Speech today to confirm that it will see Sunak’s smoking ban through. Or rather, the party might argue that it’s reclaiming the idea. It was Labour, after all, that floated the policy before the Tories adopted it at their party conference last year.  One day, a 63-year-old will be able to purchase a tobacco