Newslinks for Sunday 23rd March 2025 | Conservative Home

Reeves takes axe to the Civil Service

“Rachel Reeves will this week order the Civil Service to save £2 billion a year in a move that unions said could result in tens of thousands of government jobs being axed. The Chancellor and Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, will tell all government departments they must cut administrative costs by 15 per cent over the next five years. Mr McFadden will set out in a letter that the cuts must target roles in HR, office management and government communications to spare front-line services. Union bosses said the size of the cuts represented about 10 per cent of the entire Civil Service salary bill, raising the prospect of tens of thousands of redundancies.” – Sunday Telegraph

• Chancellor to make £10bn in cuts – FT
• Civil service to be told to slash more than £2bn a year from budget by 2030 – Observer
• Reeves to strip Civil Service of £2bn – Sunday Express
• Chancellor promises she will not raise taxes – Sun on Sunday
• Reeves to raise spectre of Truss to persuade Labour MPs to accept cuts – Observer
• ‘Let her raise taxes, then sack her’: why Reeves’s number may be up – Sunday Telegraph
• Can Reeves make the numbers add up? – Sunday Times
• Reeves has six months to save her job: Rattled Labour MPs issue stark warning – Mail on Sunday

Comment

>Today:

Hunt: What I’d be doing if I were still chancellor

“Reeves may have had a bruising start, but she has time to put things right — if she confronts some basic truths about the economy and public finances. Instead of fixating on a fictitious “black hole”, she should concentrate on the real issue, which is long-term pressure on public finances caused by an ageing population, a bloated welfare state, the need to upgrade our defences and spiralling debt interest. Those growing pressures have meant that she and her predecessors (including me) have produced budgets with very little headroom for changing market conditions.” – Sunday Times

MPs braced for assisted dying bill to collapse

“The assisted dying Bill is at risk of collapse at the next vote in protest over how it has been handled. Some MPs who voted in favour of the legislation in November are now considering switching sides. It comes amid concerns over a lack of safeguards such as scrapping a requirement for a High Court judge to approve applications. Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who is promoting the bill, has instead suggested a three-person panel with a senior legal figure, psychiatrist and social worker. One insider said: “Easily 50 MPs voted for it because they wanted to give it a fair hearing not because they backed it. Many do not like what they’ve seen so I think defeat is perfectly likely.” – Sun on Sunday

Starmer told by Labour MPs to curb ECHR powers in UK courts

“Labour MPs have urged Sir Keir Starmer to overhaul human rights laws blocking the deportation of failed asylum seekers and foreign criminals. Red Wall backbenchers said the Prime Minister should back changes to how the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is applied in British courts to take back control of the UK’s borders. Their plea comes with Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, reviewing the rules following a string of controversial immigration tribunal rulings. Many of the most contentious verdicts have been based on Article 8 of the convention, which guarantees people “the right to respect for your family life”. – Sunday Telegraph

• Primary school scraps Easter service to ‘respect’ other religions – Sunday Telegraph

Miliband orders energy investigation after Heathrow meltdown

“Ed Miliband on Saturday night ordered an official investigation into Britain’s “energy resilience” in the wake of the Heathrow meltdown. The Energy Secretary instructed the energy watchdog to draw up a report on the creaking grid after a fire at a single substation shut down Europe’s largest airport. In a statement, he said the review would include recommendations on “any wider lessons to be learned on energy resilience for critical national infrastructure”. It came after The Telegraph revealed how Heathrow and the Government were warned a decade ago that the airport was overly reliant on very few sources of power.” – Sunday Telegraph

• Ministers order inquiry after Heathrow chaos – FT

Comment

Tory MPs accuse Badenoch of breaking pledge over net zero by 2050

“Kemi Badenoch has been accused of breaking a promise made to Tory MPs during her leadership campaign after abandoning the party’s commitment to reaching net zero by 2050. Speaking to the Observer, Chris Skidmore, who served as a government minister between 2016 and 2020, said that Badenoch had made clear to a group of Tory MPs and other Conservatives at a leadership hustings in 2022, when she was seeking their votes in the race to replace Boris Johnson, that she backed the policy. Skidmore said he recalled “how she told a Conservative Environment Network hustings of 60 MPs that I organised with [former business and energy secretary] Alok Sharma for the leadership in 2022 that she believed in net zero – and made that promise in private to us all.” – Observer

Comment

Labour civil war erupts over ‘deeply-damaging’ employment rights plan

“Angela Rayner is reportedly facing calls from her colleagues to water down her plans to change workers’ rights so they would be more palatable for industry leaders. The Deputy Prime Minister is expected to have to face down a coordinated ambush as business chiefs are said to be drafting a joint letter addressed to peers in the House of Lords before they debate the Employment Rights Bill next week. A draft of the message from the B5 – a group of business groups, including the British Chambers of Commerce, CBI, Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), Institute of Directors (IoD) and Make UK – to the Lords warned of “grave unintended consequences” of giving workers further “day-one” rights, GB News reports.” – Sunday Express

Become a brickie to build a career, Labour tells schoolchildren

“School leavers should get a job on a building site rather than turn to a life on benefits, Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, has said. She said that too many young people were unemployed and that construction offered “a good wage and decent prospects for the future”. Writing for The Telegraph, she insisted that she was “not prepared to allow a generation of young people to slide into worklessness”. She made the remarks as ministers launched a new training scheme to encourage 60,000 school leavers to take up jobs in the building sector.” – Sunday Telegraph

‘I just saw red’: the MP who went to jail for punching a constituent

“Mike Amesbury could have shrugged it off. The Labour MP for Runcorn & Helsby might have ignored the bearded, redheaded bloke, a parent who was unknown to him from his son’s primary school, who was giving him bother on a night out, complaining about the temporary closure of Sutton Weaver swing bridge. But Amesbury didn’t shrug it off. By 2am, Amesbury says he’d had “six or seven” pints of bitter over the evening, more than his usual share. He was alone at a taxi rank outside the pub, having decided that he’d prefer to take a cab than walk home. And that’s when Paul Fellows, who had also been drinking, began complaining about politics.” – Sunday Times

Other political news and comment

• A new MP for Runcorn? Bring on Reform, say disillusioned voters – Observer
• UK should ‘ideally’ not have any troops in Ukraine, says Badenoch – FT
• And UK should step in to fund scheme tracing Ukrainian children, say Lib Dems – Observer
• A trade deal with Trump will be the biggest Brexit benefit of all – Greg Hands, Sunday Telegraph

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