UK politics live: minister defends Labour’s justice record after warnings of threat to public safety

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Planning reforms seek to boost smaller developers to build homes faster

The government is seeking to give a boost to smaller developers with faster planning decisions and financial backing to speed up building new homes.

It will set out the detail of proposals to cut red tape and for planning decisions to be shifted away from councillors and towards expert officers as part of efforts to meet Labour’s pledge to build 1.5m homes by 2029-30.

Speaking on Sky News, housing minister Matthew Pennycook said:

We’ve inherited, as you know, a housing system that’s not building enough homes … part of the reason it is broken is that we’re overly reliant on a small number of large volume housebuilders. So we’ve got to diversify the housing market and get smaller housebuilders back in the game.

In the 1980s they used to produce about 40% of all homes. Today it’s less than 10%, and so the package we’re announcing today allocating land specifically to SME housebuilders, providing them with more financial support, and, yes, easing the burden of regulation in a number of areas, so that we can level the playing field between smaller housebuilders and their larger counterparts. Get them back in the game.

Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner is expected to visit a construction site in Oxfordshire today to promote the initiative.

Metropolitan police commissioner: police 'carrying scar tissue of years of austerity'

Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has said police are “carrying the scar tissue of years of austerity cuts” and added there are “big challenges” and “new threats around”.

Discussing a call for more funding that appeared in a letter in the Times this morning, PA Media report he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

This government has made three big pledges that policing will have to contribute massively to – one, about strengthening neighbourhood policing so that we can be better at fighting crime in communities and protecting people from antisocial behaviour; secondly, they want to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, it’s a crime that’s at epidemic levels and growing every year; and thirdly, they want to halve knife crime.

We think that’s a balanced and sensible ambition, but it is very, very ambitious. We’re carrying the scar tissue of years of austerity cuts, and the effects of that. Forces are much smaller when you compare the population they’re policing than they were a decade or 15 years ago.

So we’ve got big challenges, we’ve got new threats around. There’s global threats from states, we’ve got the growing online threats that’s changing demand … we’re not just asking for more money, we want radical reform in policing as well.

We think there should be fewer police organisations across the country that can be more efficient, more capable. We need a proper national police agency that helps coordinate things. So we’re up for change, we’re up for doing things differently, we’re up for radically reforming. But it also needs more money, because policing is a people game.

The Liberal Democrats, who have been campaigning on water quality for some time, have responded to the news that Ofwat has imposed a total fine of £123m on Thames Water.

Tim Farron, their spokesperson for environment, food, and rural affairs, said:

This is shocking but hardly surprising. Thames Water has been failing for years; failing to invest, failing to maintain, and failing to deliver, and all the while it has been dumping sewage in our rivers and waterways. It has saddled customers with its debts and provided them with shoddy service in the meantime.

This should be the final nail in the coffin for Thames Water. It needs to be turned into a public benefit company and Ofwat needs to be scrapped and replaced with a real regulator with teeth.

Thames Water hit with record Ofwat fine over sewage breaches

Thames Water has been hit with a record £104m fine over environmental breaches involving sewage spills, after failing to operate and manage its treatment works and wastewater networks effectively.

The water regulator for England and Wales, Ofwat, confirmed on Wednesday that – on top of penalties for breaches related to dividend payouts – it was issuing the beleaguered water company with £123m worth of fines that would be “paid by the company and its investors, and not by customers”.

Read more from Kalyeena Makortoff here: Thames Water hit with record fine over sewage breaches

Sadiq Khan calls for partial decriminalisation of cannabis possession

Kevin Rawlinson

Sadiq Khan has backed calls for the partial decriminalisation of cannabis possession, as a wide-ranging study suggests the way the drug is policed causes greater harm to society than its usage.

“I’ve long been clear that we need fresh thinking on how to reduce the substantial harms associated with drug-related crime in our communities,” the London mayor said on Wednesday.

Read more from Kevin Rawlinson here: Sadiq Khan calls for partial decriminalisation of cannabis possession

Shadow minister: government doing 'terrible job on keeping the country safe' over prisons in England and Wales

Shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately has accused the government of doing “a terrible job on keeping the country safe.”

She told listeners of Times Radio “We’ve already seen that they accidentally released a load of prisoners that they shouldn’t have done, including violent domestic abuses, which are clearly terrifying for the victims of that abuse. And they just don’t have the prison situation under control. They need to take responsibility. They’re now in government.”

Put to her that the Conservatives had just added 455 spaces to the prison estate in England and Wales in 14 years, she said “Labour are in government, they have to take responsibility for the decisions that they are making.”

Pressed on what the Conservatives would do differently in the present circumstances, Whately said “we’re no longer in government.”

Minister defends government's record on prisons and sentencing after warning from security officials

Housing minister Matthew Pennycook has defended the government’s record on prisons and sentencing in England and Wales after criticism from senior security officials, but said “we can’t build our way out of” prison capacity pressures in the short term.

Earlier today the Times newspaper reported that the heads of the Metropolitan police, MI5 and the National Crime Agency have told the government that plans to release prisoners early could be of “net detriment to public safety.”

Speaking on Times Radio the minister said “The risk to public safety I’d highlight is the prospect of our prison system collapsing, which is what we face and why we’ve had to act.”

He continued by saying:

What we were handed by the previous government in terms of the state of our prison system was nothing short of criminal neglect. They added just 500 places to the prison estate in their time in office, while at the same time, sentence lengths rose, and as a result, we got the prison population rising by approximately 3,000 people each year.

And we’re heading back to zero capacity. If we run out of capacity, courts will be forced to suspend trials, the police will have to halt arrests, crimes will go unpunished.

We’ll essentially be in a breakdown of law and order, so while we’re trying to add prison places as fast as we can as a Government – and we’ve already created 2,400 since taking office, allocated an additional £4.7bn to prison building, putting us on track to hit 14,000 places by 2031, we can’t build our way out of this particular crisis we’ve inherited because demand for places will outstrip supply. So sentencing reform is necessary.

In a letter to the Times, six police chiefs have warned that without “serious investment” they will be unable to deliver on the prime minister’s flagship pledges. The warning comes ahead of the government spending review, and they cautioned that cuts will lead to the “retrenchment we saw under austerity”.

Welcome and opening summary

Welcome to our rolling coverage of UK politics for Wednesday. Here are the headlines …

• Housing minister Matthew Pennycook has defended the government’s record on prisons and sentencing in England and Wales after police chiefs warned that sentencing reforms could put pressure on frontline services

• The government has announced a package of measures it says is designed to streamline the planning system for small and medium sized housebuilders

• The Treasury is reported to be in a standoff with some ministers over proposed cuts to public services including policing and social housing

• Nigel Farage has been accused of leaving a multibillion-pound black hole at the heart of Reform UK’s spending plans after unveiling a series of expensive policy pledges to be paid for by cutting nonexistent items of government spending

• The national water regulator Ofwat has fined Thames Water nearly £123m after two investigations into the company

• London mayor Sadiq Khan has called for partial decriminalisation of cannabis possession

It is Martin Belam with you here. You can reach me at [email protected] if you spot typos, errors or omissions, or have a question.