9.30am: It's one of those days with lots on, but no big story dominating the news. The BBC is leading with British troops pulling out of Sangin – which is also the splash in the Guardian – but that's unlikely to be still at the top of the bulletins by the end of the day. What will be leading the new by then? Who knows, but here's the schedule for the day:
9am: Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, is delivering a speech to a conference organised by the think tank Reform.
10am: Two former ambassadors to Iran give evidence to the Iraq inquiry.
12pm: Prime minister's questions.
12.30pm: Liam Fox, the defence secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the withdrawal from Sangin.
1.20pm: Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, is delivering a speech on welfare reform.
3.45pm: Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, speaks to the Local Government Assocation conference.
Nick Gibb, the schools minister, is also making a written statement to MPs today about behaviour in schools. My colleague Jeevan Vasagar has already previewed what he's going to say.
As usual, I'll be blogging all the breaking news, flagging up what's important, and bringing you the best politics from the papers and the web.
9.47am: Public sector pensions are in the news today. A body called the Public Sector Pension Commission has published a report saying they are "twice as valuable as previously thought". Here's the report, here's the press release, and here's an extract from the Press Association story about it.
Public sector pensions cost twice as much to provide as previously thought and must be reformed if they are to be sustainable, a report indicated today.
Workers in the public sector would need to save more than 40% of their salary each year, including their employer's contribution, to fund the final salary pension benefits they are building up.
But the actual amount they contribute is half this level at just 6% for workers and 14% for their employer, according to the independent Public Sector Pensions Commission.
A lack of transparency about the schemes is also masking their true cost due to the accounting methods used by the government, it claimed.
The commission estimates that the schemes will cost the government around £18 billion during the coming financial year, using the government's own accounting methods, but it warned that this figure nearly doubled to £35 billion if the liabilities were "properly measured".
The title "Public Sector Pension Commission" makes this body sound official, and neutral. But actually it's been set up by the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Institute for Directors and Nigel Stanley has written a post at the TUC's Touchstone blog saying that the idea that it is independent is "laughable". He says that most of the commission's members have an "extensive track record of opposing public sector pensions".
10.02am: Tony Blair came in for a bit of stick in a debate in the House of Lords last night from a couple of his former colleagues. Peers were debating a report from the Lords constitutional committee on the Cabinet Office and the centre of government and Lord Butler of Brockwell, cabinet secretary until 1998, said Blair had created a bit of a mess.
It is clear from the report of the committee and from the evidence taken that the centre of our government had become something of a mess. The committee puts it more diplomatically, referring to "a complicated and at times confusing web of offices, structures, jobs and personalities".
In particular, Butler queried the way the role of the Cabinet Office had changed while Blair was prime minister.
Professor Peter Hennessy told the constitution committee that the Cabinet Office had become a prime minister's department in all but name. The present cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O'Donnell, in his evidence to the committee, said that: "There is one Cabinet Office of which Number 10 is a subset". I found myself asking what Winston Churchill would have said about his office being a subset of the Cabinet Office. The logic would suggest that, in this respect, the prime minister is junior to the minister for the Cabinet Office.
Butler also criticised the way Blair tried to abolish the office of Lord Chancellor in 2003.
It is clear from the evidence that one government hand did not know what the other hand was doing and that the prime minister acted in ignorance of factual advice that was available to him.
Lord Goldsmith also commented on this affair. He was appointed by Blair, and generally has been very loyal to him, but he could not defend him over this.
I am, as it happens, a great admirer of the former prime minister, Tony Blair, but this was a bad business ... It is plain from the report that inadequate consultation and advice were taken on the effect of a proposed change in the machinery of government, as it may have seemed to some, although it was in fact a major constitutional change.
10.30am: After keeping us in suspense for a while, Lord Ashcroft has confirmed today that he is giving up his non-dom status so that he can stay in the House of Lords. Sky's Niall Paterson got there first (I think) on Twitter.
10.33am: Not much in the papers today. But here are three stories worth noting.
• The Times says in its splash that the security agencies are monitoring around the clock two active terrorist cells known to be planning attacks on Britain.
The cells stand out from dozens of police and security services operations because they have discussed methods of attack, including "soft targets" that could result in large-scale civilian casualties, according to security sources.
• Sue Cameron in the Financial Times says that, although the Department for International Development's budget is ring-fenced, it may have to spend its money helping the Foreign Office or defence.
"Nothing will be taken out of the Difid budget," one diplomat assured me. "It'll just be spent on things over which Difid has no control." And it is hard to see what Difid can do about it.
• The FT reports on an Institute for Fiscal Studies report saying that marriage does not make relationships more stable.
"Marriage per se does not contribute much to making relationships more stable when children are young," the IFS said. "This casts doubt on the government's aim of promoting marriage in order to decrease the rate of parental separation."
10.42am: Prime minister's questions might be slightly more interesting than usual today - because John Bercow delivered a speech last night saying how appalling it usually is. I can't find the full text on the web, but there's a news report on it here and here's an extract.
We reached the point [by the end of the last parliament] where almost nothing was deemed beyond the personal responsibility of the prime minister of the day, where the party leaders were responsible for a third of all the questions asked (and often more like 50 to 60% of the total time consumed) all set against a background of noise which makes the vuvuzela trumpets of the South African World Cup appear but distant whispers by comparison. If it is scrutiny at all, then it is scrutiny by screech which is a very strange concept to my mind.
Bercow said that in the 1960s opposition leaders asked just 10% of questions at PMQs and 25% in the 1980s. The proportion has grown because Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock did not always use up their full quota of questions when they were leading the opposition. According to Bercow's research, it was John Smith who established the precedent that the opposition leader would always ask three questions. (Now it's six, but in those days there were two PMQs per week.)
Bercow also said that the televised leaders' debate in the election helped to persuade him that PMQs needed to change.
The rules for those encounters included, you may recall, a prohibition on cheering or chanting from the audience. Does anyone plausibly contend that the cut and thrust of debate between messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg suffered as a consequence?
11.09am: The Public Sector Pension Commission report which I mentioned earlier (see 9.47am) is not an easy read, but Stephanie Flanders has got a clear summary and analysis on her BBC blog. At the risk of annoying realityethical (who has a go at her reporting in the comments), here's an extract from what she has to say.
The basic argument of the report is hard to quibble with: public sector pensions may be "affordable" in their current form, but it is difficult to believe they are sustainable, at a time when private-sector pension provision has fallen so far.
Only 11% of private sector workers are in final salary schemes today, but 94% of public sectors workers are. Well over 50% of private sector workers don't have any employer-sponsored pension scheme at all.
This report's greatest contribution to the debate lies less in the scary numbers but in the range of options it offers for reform, and in the words of good sense it offers to those who must come up with proposals on this for the government - for example, they make the point that the prime minister's promise to cap public sector pensions at £50,000 a year will do very little to cut costs because it would affect relatively few retirees. The real savings come from capping the salary on which pension benefits can be accrued. The report reckons that a £50,000 cap on pensionable salaries in the civil service would cut costs by 2.3% - not a huge amount, perhaps, but far more than a similar cap on the pension that can be paid out.
11.20am: Ministers have been regularly promising to "cut red tape" ever since I started covering Westminster in the 1990s - and probably since long before. Today Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, is the latest person to have a go. He has issued a press release promising a "radical plan to banish nonsense red tape". The government has got an interesting proposal in this area. It wants to operate a "one-in, one-out" rule, forcing minister to scrap a regulation for every new one they introduce. But today's "radical plan" seems to consist of just inviting council staff to think of regulations that should be abolished and send them in to cutredtape@communities.gsi.gov.uk.
Pickles has also published his own list of "unnecessary regulations, ridiculous micromanagement or outdated laws that he intends to revoke or simplify". But there are only 11 items on it. The highlight seems to be a 1919 law forcing councils to get government permission if they want to buy allotment land.
11.39am: Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has been cleared of contempt of parliament. Earlier this year an investigation was launched following complaints that he tried to exert improper influence over the conclusions of a parliamentary inquiry into the EHRC. This morning the Lords privileges committee has issued a report saying that he was "not guilty" of contempt but that his behaviour - he called three members of the committee investigating the EHRC shortly before its report was finalised - may have been "inappropriate and ill-advised".
12.01pm: PMQs is starting. David Cameron begins with a reminder that today is the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 terror attacks in London.
12.04pm: Harriet Harman starts by supporting what Cameron said about 7/7.
She says hundreds of thousands of women are the victims of domestic violence. The justice department is reviewing short prison sentences. Will Cameron confirm that the review will not stop magistrates giving short sentences for domestic violence.
Cameron says that for "too many years" this was an issue that the police did not deal with properly. He pays tribute to Labour for taking the issue seriously. Ken Clarke, the justice secretary, made it clear in his speech last week that he did not want to abolish short sentences outright, Cameron says.
Harman says it is "reassuring" to hear that the Lib Dem promise to get rid of short sentences will not be implemented. Harman urges Cameron to "listen to his mother". Cameron's mother (a former magistrate) supports the need for short sentences, as Cameron said in the election.
Harman says that in the election Cameron said any minister who produced plans for cuts that would affect frontline services would be told to "think again". Does this apply to the home secretary?
Cameron says his mother had to hand out short sentences "to badly behaved CND protesters outside Greenham Common". This seems to be aimed at Harman, although Cameron himself admits that he doesn't know whether she was a Greenham Common protester. (Was she? I don't think she was.)
On public spending, Cameron says Labour would have cut spending too by 20%. So the cuts are Labour cuts.
12.09pm: Harman says Cameron was asked last week if he could confirm that police numbers won't fall over the course of the parliament. Can Cameron answer that question today?
Cameron quotes from what Alan Johnson said when he was asked if he could give an assurance during the election that police numbers would not fall. Johnson said: "No."
Harman tries again. Cameron says Labour is to blame for the state of the economy. Britain is now being lectured by Argentina about debt, he says.
12.12pm: Harman asks if the government cuts are more likely to make crime go down or go up.
Cameron says gun crime and violent crime almost doubled under the last government. Cameron tries to make a point about Labour spin doctors, and he is about to quote from the new book by Deborah Mattinson. But John Bercow cuts him off: "We won't bother with that."
Harman asks Cameron if he can promise that crime will go down.
Cameron says he was "only trying to boost sales" of the Mattinson book. On crime, he says he won't be wandering around his constituency in a stab-proof vest.
12.17pm: PMQs verdict: Cameron won quite easily. He had effective, substantial responses when he was challenged by Harman over short sentences and police numbers. She might have done much better if she had focused on the frontline spending promise that Cameron made before the election. "What I can tell you is any cabinet minister, if I win the election, who comes to me and says 'here are my plans' and they involved frontline reductions, they will be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again," Cameron told the Andrew Marr show. I can't see how he can defend that remark now. But Harman only pressed him on it once.
12.32pm: There was not anything remarkable in the rest of PMQs. But here are some of the other topics Cameron covered.
• Asked about the killing of Zac Olumegbon, Cameron said sentences needed to send out the message that carrying a knife was unacceptable.
• He ruled out presenting the UK budget to an EU body before presenting it to parliament.
• Asked if there would be fewer children in poverty at the end of the parliament, he said: "We are absolutely committed to meeting the child poverty target."
• He said academies would have to admit children with special needs on the same basis that other schools do.
• Asked about the search for the fugitive gunman Raoul Moat, Cameron said it would be wrong to comment on the ongoing operation.
The whole house and the whole country will be wishing the police well in their search for this individual so that we can put a stop to this horrendous spree that has been taking place.
12.39pm: Liam Fox is making his statement about the withdrawal of British troops from Sangin. He stresses that the decision has been agreed by members of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf).
12.48pm: Here is what Fox has said about Sangin.
ISAF intends to restructure its forces in Farah and Nimroz provinces so that it can consolidate a US marine brigade in northern Helmand, which will assume responsibility for security in Sangin later this year. This will simplify current command arrangements and enable UK troops to be redeployed to reinforce progress in the key districts of central Helmand ...
The result will be a coherent and equitable division of the main populated areas of a Helmand between three brigade-sized forces, with the US in the north and south, and the UK-led Task Force Helmand, alongside our outstanding Danish and Estonian allies, in the central population belt.
12.52pm: And here are some of the other points Fox made.
• Some solidiers from the theatre reserve battalion, the 2nd battalion the Duke of Lancaster's regiment, will be deployed to Afghanistan from Cyprus. This will be a temporary deployment until the Americans take over Sangin.
• Fox insisted that he and David Cameron had been arguing for some time that "British troops in Helmand were too thinly spread" and that there were "insufficient force densities for effective counter-insurgency".
• And he claimed that British forces in Sangin had made "huge progress in the face of great adversity".
12.59pm: Fox has just urged MPs to understand the "complexities" of Aghanistan. There is no single, unified Taliban, he said.
We should perhaps reflect on the terms that we use, not just on "the Taliban" but also "the insurgency", and ask whether there are a number of similar, but discrete, insurgencies going on, just as there are number of similar, but discrete, groups that we tend to call the Taliban. If we accept in this House that we are dealing with greater complexity than is sometimes described, I think we might find it easier to understand the complexity of some of the solutions that ourselves and the Afghan government will have to come to.
1.05pm: Liam Fox said that he has invited newspaper editors to the Ministry of Defence for a "very detailed briefing" about Afghanistan. He was responding to a question from a Tory MP complaining about the way the conflict has been reported.
1.13pm: Fox has insisted that the British are not "retreating" from Sangin.
Any attempt by anyone to describe this as a retreat would be completely contemptible.
1.16pm: Some MPs have been critical of the notion that the military operation in Afghanistan is all about protecting Britain from terrorist attack. This is from Patrick Mercer, the Tory MP and a former soldier.
Five years to the day we were attacked not by Afghans, but by Yorkshiremen, not trained in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan and the Lake District. Yet the last government insisted on telling us that conventional military operations would somehow impede this sort of attack in the future. Clearly that is nonsense. Would the secretary of state come to the despatch box and explain that we are involved in a regional war that stretches right the way from Iran to Russia, and this is as much about fighting for Pakistan's stability as Afghanistan's stability, and that the lives and blood of our servicemen are being shed in a crucial cause.
Fox accepted that the war was "not just about Afghanistan".
1.26pm: The Fox statement is now over. What was interesting was how little enthusiasm for the Afghan mission there is in the Commons, particularly on the Conservative benches. John Baron suggested that the British were in danger of achieving a "pyrrhic victory". His fellow Tory backbencher Edward Leigh was even more blunt. He said Britain went to war on the "wrong premise".
We were told that we were going there to protect Londoners going to work. We now know that that al-Qaida has moved most of its operations to Pakistan, we know that most of the Taliban we kill die within 20 miles of where they are born. So why are we there? Is it to hold territory, which nobody has ever succeeded in doing in Afghanistan, not even the Soviets, with 240,000 people. If it is to fight a dirty war and keep their heads down, why don't we place more reliance on special forces, rather than let the British army go on bleeding to death.
2.03pm: Here's a lunchtime summary.
• An extra 300 extra troops will be sent to Afghanistan, Liam Fox announced. Fox said the soldiers would be deployed until October as he confirmed that British forces will withdraw from Sangin. But any attempt to describe that as a retreat would be "completely contemptible", he said. The defence secretary also announced that the government was spending £189m on equipment for the forces in Afghanistan. He insisted that he and David Cameron had been arguing for some time that British forces in Helmand were "too thinly spread" and he said that the redeployment would lead to better distribution of Isaf forces in Helmand. Several MPs questioned whether Britain should be fighting in Afghanistan at all.
• Chris Huhne, the energy secretary, announced that he will scrap the ban on councils selling green electricity into the national grid. In a speech to the Local Government Association conference this afternoon, he will say: "It's ridiculous that the 1976 Local Government Act prevents councils from selling electricity from local wind turbines, or from anaerobic digestion. I want to see this repealed and by the end of the year I hope local authorities will be able to sell electricity from renewables – generating revenue to help local services and keep council tax down. Local communities can truly benefit from the low-carbon transition." Huhne also said that he was publishing information about the carbon footprint of every council in Britain.
• Michael Gove, the education secretary, has let it be known that he is going to apologise "unreservedly" for mistakes his department made when releasing information about the cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future programme. The Press Association says: "There were 25 mistakes in a department for education (DfE) list that set out which building projects would be scrapped, reviewed and protected following the axing of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme. It means several schools that thought their building projects were safe have now been told they will not go ahead."
• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has raised concerns about the government's decision to cut two employment programmes. "While the large fiscal deficit makes it essential to focus on cost-effective programmes and target the most disadvantaged groups, labour market programmes should remain adequately funded. In this context, it may also be of concern that the new budget ends funding for two crisis measures – the Future Jobs Fund and the Six Month Offer," the OECD said. Larry Elliott has got the full story at Guardian Business.
• Trevor Phillips, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has been cleared of allegations that he committed a contempt of parliament. But a Lords committee has accused him of behaviour that may have been "inappropriate and ill-advised". (See 11.39am.)
• Lord Ashcroft has revealed that he has given up his non-dom status. (See 10.30am.)
2.47pm: I wasn't following the Iraq inquiry hearing this morning. But the Press Association has filed a story and it says that Sir Richard Dalton, Britain's ambassador to Iran at the time of the war, said that Tony Blair had "very much exaggerated" Iran's role in supporting the insurgency. Here's an extract from the PA copy.
Tony Blair "very much exaggerated" Iran's role in supporting al-Qaida insurgents in their attacks on British and American forces in Iraq, a former ambassador to Tehran said today.
And Sir Richard Dalton said that the UK and US misread the intentions of the Iranian regime, believing it would inevitably be hostile to their mission in Iraq when in fact Tehran wanted them to succeed in installing a stable government in Baghdad.
Giving evidence to the Iraq Inquiry today, Sir Richard - Britain's ambassador in Tehran from 2003/06 - said Blair made "a series of very bad decisions" about the legality of the 2003 invasion.
And he condemned US President George Bush's 2002 characterisation of Iran as part of an "axis of evil" as a "monstrous error".
As international pressure continues to ratchet up over Tehran's alleged efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, Sir Richard warned that military action against Iran would be illegal unless there was evidence it posed an "imminent and real" threat to another country.
In his appearance before the inquiry in January, Blair stressed the role of both Iran and al-Qaida in destabilising Iraq and making the task of rebuilding the country following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein more difficult.
But Sir Richard today told the inquiry: "From what I saw of his evidence, I thought he very much exaggerated this factor."
Iranian help to al-Qaida was in fact limited to permitting fighters to pass across its territory from Pakistan and Afghanistan, said Sir Richard. His assessment was that Tehran had no interest in promoting "anarchy" in Iraq, but wanted an inclusive Iraqi-run government capable of acting as a source of stability in the region.
He added: "I felt at the time that the legitimate and justified criticism of Iran was sometimes used with too broad a brush. Much more of the coalition difficulties were attributed to Iran than was the case."
Iran wanted to foment enough disorder in Iraq to "make sure the coalition felt some pain and therefore didn't dig in for a long stay", but its interference was not as damaging to the US-led mission as the insurgency led by former Ba'athists.
3.16pm: It's thought that around 200 MPs have given up claiming parliamentary expenses because the new system is so complicated, my colleague Nick Watt writes on his blog. He also says that last night's debate on the finance bill, which did not finish until after 2am, illustrated why MPs dislike the new system.
MPs with outer London constituencies, who are not allowed to claim accommodation or travel expenses until Parliament sits past 11.00pm, were frantically working out in the early evening yesterday what to do. They knew parliament would be sitting late but they did not exactly when the commons would rise. If they booked a hotel and parliament rose early they would not be able to make a claim and would be out of pocket.
3.31pm: Professor Michael Clarke, director of the Royal United Services Institute, has put out this statement about the withdrawal from Sangin. It's quite long, but I think it's worth quoting in full because it explains what this is all about, politically and militarily. Clarke's conclusion: the British should probably have never been in Sangin in the first place.
It never made much military sense to put troops into the northern areas of Sangin, Musa Qala and Kajacki in the first place; but in 2006 they were sent there at the insistence of President Karzai, and once established, any pullback would have represented a victory for the Taliban. If the 99 British troops killed in Sangin have died for a minor military objective, they nevertheless died to uphold the military credibility of the whole British operation in Helmand. And now that the Americans are arriving in force, the British find themselves occupying almost 70% of Coalition territory in Helmand with less than 30% of the troops that will be in place by the end of August. It would be crazy not to reorganise the force and take the opportunity to reinforce the British units in the central belt of Helmand, making them more effective – and safer - with larger numbers.
Musa Qala was handed over to US forces in March, and was by then in pretty good order after some tough times; Kajacki was handed over in June, not as stable as commanders would have hoped, but certainly better than it had been. Sangin will probably be handed over in October sometime; and it will still be the badlands. The British will have achieved two out of three (or perhaps one and a half out of three) in coping with these barely tenable outposts. For the lads on the ground that rates as a score draw away from home. They'll settle for that and get on with the next bit of the campaign.
But the political fall-out is unpredictable. The end of British operations in Basra last year represented a similar gritty score draw away from home, but the mechanics of it came to look like a furtive retreat, with precious little gratitude from the Iraqi government. The image at home that Britain was giving up a job it could no longer handle, was impossible to shake off. And the same may attach to Sangin. This war is as much about image and perception as it is about who controls the ground in Afghanistan. Getting out of a forward base the troops should probably never have been in at all, and for which they have sacrificed so much of their blood and sanity, is never going to be easy. But it is militarily right that it should be done.
On that note, I'm finishing for the day. I posted a summary at 2.03pm. There hasn't been much new since then, except Tony Blair being criticised by Britain's former ambassador to Iran (see 2.47pm). It's been an uninspiring day. But it might improve tomorrow. Cameron is due to make a major speech about public sector reform.
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