Rishi Sunak indicates he’s no longer committed to manifesto pledge to bring net immigration below 2019 levels – UK politics live

Rishi Sunak has stood by his leadership pledge to protect the green belt in England after the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, this week said it should be built on “where appropriate” to make housing more affordable, Rowena Mason reports from Hiroshima, where she is travelling with the PM.

Water companies in England have apologised for repeated sewage spills and pledged to invest £10bn this decade in an attempt to quell public anger over pollution in seas and rivers, Alex Lawson reports.

Downing Street has welcomed the announcement, while stressing that it will need to be approved by regulators. A No 10 spokesperson said:

We welcome this apology from the water industry, but acknowledge there continues to be more that needs to be done.

You’ll know that we put the strictest targets ever on water companies to reduce sewage pollution and demanded that water companies deliver their largest ever infrastructure investments of £56bn.

But the plans that have been set out today will of course need to go through the correct regulatory approval first to both ensure they deliver on the targets that we’ve set whilst not disproportionately affecting consumer bills.

Asked if the PM thought it was fair that customers of the water companies would have to pay for this investment, the spokesperson said:

We’ve been clear that we think water companies must put consumers above profits and we’ve said that previously, and we’ve taken steps to help drive progress and ensure they put consumers first.

And we’ve been clear throughout that we don’t want to see things disproportionately impacting customer bills, especially given we know that there are people up and down the country who are struggling with the cost of living, which is why we provided the help we have in that area.

Kemi Badenoch, the business and trade secretary, has said that the problem raised by car manufacturers worried about exports to the EU facing tariffs from next year “isn’t to do with Brexit”.

She made the comment during business questions in the Commons, where Jonathan Reynolds, her Labour shadow, criticised her record since she has been in post. He told MPs:

It’s now been 100 days since we first welcomed [her] to her new post. In that time we’ve seen steel production fall to record lows, the automotive sector has issued warning cry after warning cry that government policy risks shipping jobs overseas.

Badenoch defended her record, saying she had negotiated for the UK to join the CPTPP, “the biggest free trade agreement that the UK has seen since we left the European Union”.

And on the car industry, she said:

The issue that the automotive industries are talking about is around rules of origin. This is something that the EU are also worried about because the costs of the components have risen.

This isn’t to do with Brexit, this is to do with supply chain issues following the pandemic and the war in Russia and Ukraine.

I actually have had meetings with my EU trade counterpart, we are discussing these things and looking at how we can review them, especially as the TCA [trade and cooperation agreement – the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU] will be coming into review soon.

The “rules of origin” requirements raised by car manufacturers are part of the TCA, and are therefore definitely related to Brexit. But Badenoch is right in the sense that all European car manufacturers are having problems because there is not enough battery supply in Europe, making them reliant on imports from Asia.

As a result, as the Financial Times reports, German carmakers who export to the UK are also calling for a delay in the introduction of TCA rules that, from next year, would impose tariffs on UK/EU vehicle imports with foreign batteries.

As the FT reports in its story:

The intervention is the belated fulfilment of Brexit advocates’ hope that German carmakers would step in to EU-UK negotiations to protect their own sales.

Paul Scully has said he will temporarily stand aside from his role as minister for London while he stands to be the Conservative candidate to be mayor of London, the BBC is reporting.

Rishi Sunak has travelled to the G7 meeting in Hiroshima, due to start tomorrow, and one of the issues the leaders of the group of wealthiest nations will be discussing is how to address the Ukraine war while preventing one with China. My colleague Patrick Wintour has this analysis.

Boris Johnson told aides that he wanted to indulge in “an orgy of frog bashing” at some point last year, after Emmanuel Macron, the French president, criticised the British response to the refugee crisis, Guto Harri has revealed.

Harri was working as Johnson’s communication chief at the time, and he made the revelation in the latest edition of Unprecedented, his podcast about his time at No 10. Harri says:

There were tensions early on when people like Emmanuel Macron of France went to Moscow to talk to Putin. I think Boris described it privately as ‘nauseating’. And meanwhile, I think Macron was feeling the tension from Boris seemingly doing the running with helping Ukraine militarily. So, when the British press was giving the British government a hard time over our response to the refugee crisis, Macron turbocharged it by criticising Boris pretty directly and his words were all over the front page of the Guardian on a Friday, I think.

And much as Boris is not prone to getting really cross, nor using particularly strong language, this was one where he really flipped and at our morning meeting, I think with a small gang of us he just launched into a violent attack on Emmanuel Macron. Basically, saying ‘He’s a four-letter word that begins with C, he’s a weirdo, he’s Putin’s lickspittle. We need to go studs up on this one’ – a rugby term that basically means, gloves off – ‘We need an orgy of frog bashing. I’m going to have to punch his lights out.’ Pretty strong stuff. And I’m pleased to say weeks later, of course, they had patched it up. They got on really well. They actually went for a whisky together at the G7 summit.

Although Harri claims Johnson is not particularly prone to using strong language, other revelations from the series have been that Johnson privately described Sue Gray as “psycho”, and that, after Rishi Sunak resigned, Johnson considered sending him a message calling him a cunt.

A defiant Jeremy Corbyn has told Labour members in his Islington North branch he wants to carry on as their MP, after a motion by the local party supporting him was passed almost unanimously. Aubrey Allegretti has the story.

This morning the Daily Mail has splashed on a story saying Keir Starmer “sparked outrage” yesterday by saying he would renegotiate the UK’s Brexit deal with the EU. The report quotes Tories saying the Starmer comments show that he would somehow reverse Brexit – a criticism of the party regularly made by CCHQ and leading party figures.

The story is based on what Starmer said yesterday about wanting a “better Brexit deal” as he said Labour would respond to calls from British car manufacturers for the government to negotiate changes to the “rules of origin” provisions in the Brexit deal that could lead to British exports facing prohibitive tariffs next year. Starmer has not raised this particular issue before, but what he said was in line with his long-standing commitment to negotiate changes that would make the Brexit agreement function more smoothly. (To the dismay of pro-Europeans, he has ruled out a substantial renegotiation, such as taking the UK back into the single market or the customs union.)

This morning Jim McMahon , the shadow environment secretary, insisted that Starmer was not proposing a wholesale renegotiation.

Asked on Sky News whether Starmer’s comment meant he would “start again” with talks and abandon the current deal, McMahon replied:

He certainly hasn’t said that. He’s been clear that the agreement is a framework and a starting point but it’s not the end because there are naturally gaps that we need to fill.

McMahon said Labour would seek to “reduce red tape and allow us to trade on a competitive basis”, for example, but a return to free movement “isn’t on the table”.

More than one in three Conservative voters believe the government is doing a bad job at improving housing in Britain – more than those who believe it is being effective, exclusive polling for the Guardian has revealed. Robert Booth has the story.

Good morning. Rishi Sunak is in Japan, where he will be attending the G7 summit starting tomorrow. Today he has announced the “Hiroshima Accord”, a pact with Japan covering economic security and technology. The No 10 summary is here, and here is our story from Rowena Mason, who is with the press pack accompanying the PM.

Paradoxically, overseas trips by the prime minister normally coincide with an intensification of focus by the lobby on domestic news. That is because journalists get more access to the PM on these trips than they do in London, and they tend to ask more questions about UK issues than about the place being visited. That has happened again and, as Rowena and Pippa Crerar report, Sunak is being criticised for his surprisingly upbeat comments about living standards.

Sunak has also risked inflaming the perpetual Tory row about immigration. In 2019 the Conservative party manifesto said: “There will be fewer lower-skilled migrants and overall numbers will come down.” At the time annual net immigration was running at 226,000, which meant the pledge implied the Tories could get net migration below this figure.

Figures out a week today are expected to show net immigration in 2022 running at a record high of around 700,000, or possibly more. Speaking to reporters on his flight to Japan, Sunak insisted that he still wanted to bring the level of net migration down, but he indicated that he no longer felt bound by the implicit below 226,000 target.

Asked if he was sticking to the 2019 pledge, he replied:

I’ve inherited some numbers, I want to bring the numbers down.

Asked again if he stood by the figure from 2019, he replied:

I’ve said I do want to bring legal migration down. I think illegal migration is undoubtedly the country’s priority, and you can see all the work I’m putting into that.

The Conservatives have been promising lower net migration since the 2010 general election campaign, when David Cameron said his party would limit immigration to “tens of thousands” (ie, he would keep it below 100,000). The party has never achieved this, and the pledge hung around his neck like a millstone.

(The alternative approach, defending highish net immigration and going out in public to make the case for it, hasn’t been tried by any recent Tory PM, and would be unacceptable to party opinion. Even Labour is wary on this front too; recently Keir Starmer suggested legal migration was out of control.)

We may hear more on this as the day goes on. The Commons is sitting, but business is quite routine. But we’ve got a lobby briefing, Humza Yousaf is taking first minister’s questions at 12pm, and in Northern Ireland people are voting in the local elections.

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