UK politics: Owen Paterson rejects report saying he broke lobbying rules – as it happened

• The Tory MP Owen Paterson faces a 30-day suspension from the House of Commons for an “egregious” breach of lobbying rules, raising the possibility he could lose his seat if enough constituents trigger a byelection. Paterson has strongly reject the Commons standards committee’s findings, and claimed the inquiry into the accusations against him contributed to his wife taking her life last year. (See 2.24pm.)

• Plans to take tougher action against water companies for pumping sewage into rivers and the sea will once again be opposed by the government, Downing Street has announced. Peers are debating the environment bill, and later today they are expected to debate a new amendment from the crossbencher, the Duke of Wellington, who tabled the original proposal to protect rivers from raw sewage that was controversially voted down by MPs. Wellington’s latest amendment says water companies should “take all reasonable steps to ensure untreated sewage is not discharged from storm overflows into inland & coastal waters”.

• Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has told MPs that he does not think Nato was militarily defeated in Afghanistan. Instead there was a failure of political resolve, he told the Commons defence committee. He said:

I don’t think that we were defeated. Our resolve was found wanting, I would say, rather than defeated

Nato were there to enable a political campaign and I think that is what failed. The military were there to put in place the security environment in order to try and deliver that.

When that is withdrawn, that is when you find out whether your political campaign has worked. What was we discovered is it didn’t work.

It was the western resolve and the western narrative or political foundations they had laid failed. There are a lot of searching questions there for all of us.

That’s all from me for today. But our coronavirus coverage continues on our global live blog.

These are from Nick Triggle, the BBC’s health correspondent, on the DHSC saying the asymptomatic testing of pupils will continue at least until January. (See 4.02pm.)

The Climate Change Committee, an independent government advisory body, has published its assessment (pdf) of the government’s net zero strategy published last week. It describes it as “an ambitious and comprehensive strategy that marks a significant step forward for UK climate policy, setting a globally leading benchmark to take to Cop26”.

But it says for the strategy to succeed some “key issues will need to be resolved quickly”, including delivery mechanisms in agriculture.

In evidence to the Commons science committee this morning, Prof Lucy Chappell, chief scientific adviser to the Department of Health and Social Care, said the government wanted the testing of asymptomatic pupils in schools, as well as pupils with symptoms, to continue at least until January.

Beyond that, people were considering how long asymptomatic testing should continue, she said. She told the committee:

I would like to think that in five years’ time we won’t all be lateral flow testing. There’s a stretchable point between those five years clearly.

Between now and January, it’s clear that we’ve committed to testing. We are then reconsidering where we go beyond January, beyond spring.

Chappell was speaking after Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, told the same committee that he thought there should be a move away from the testing of asymptomatic pupils.

Giving evidence to the Commons environment committee, Graeme Dear, chair of the British Poultry Council, said there was likely to be a shortage of UK-produced turkeys at Christmas because of labour shortages. He said:

We have been given access through the seasonal workers scheme for up to 5,500 but that finishes on December 31.

We would have loved to have known about that in June, and therefore could have placed enough turkeys for a full Christmas.

We will do our utmost to make sure that Christmas is as normal as it can be, but there is a likelihood that there will be a shortage – had we known back in June or July that would have been fixed.

Around 90% of our shortages are in the processing plants, and the irony is that we may find ourselves having to import turkey from France and Poland for a British Christmas, probably with some of the very workers we trained and left to go back to their homelands.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, has announced details of government plans to change the way nuclear power stations are financed. Following a recommendation from the National Audit Office, the government will replace the existing Contracts for Difference funding mechanism with the Regulated Asset Base model. The RAB model, also used to fund projects like the Thames Tideway tunnel and Heathrow Terminal 5, means investors start receiving returns more quickly. But Kwarteng also claims it could save consumers £30bn for every new large-scale power station.

The amount of farm produce being wasted because there are not enough workers available to harvest it is “completely inexcusable”, MPs have been told.

Tom Bradshaw, vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union, told the Commons environment committee that almost a quarter of this year’s daffodil crop was wasted as it could not be picked. He went on:

The food waste we are seeing at a farm level, whether courgettes, apples going unpicked, autumn raspberries not being picked at the moment and tragic culls going on in the pig sector, is completely inexcusable.

It is within the gift of this government to put solutions in place which will mean that this doesn’t happen next year, but that needs to happen urgently because the lack of confidence we’ve got across multiple sectors means investment plans are put on hold and many are mothballing facilities.

We have glasshouses that should be growing tomatoes which are currently being mothballed because they don’t know if they will have the labour to pick them while energy costs are also spiralling and having an impact.

Farmers were heavily reliant on seasonal workers from the EU before Brexit, and the UK’s departure from the EU has created a labour shortage, which has also been exacerbated by Covid.

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Sturgeon ended her statement by explaining the Covid arrangements for Cop26, which starts in Glasgow at the weekend.

She said, as far as possible, steps have been taken to ensure delegates are vaccinated.

People arriving from outside Britain and Ireland will have to show a negative test result, she said, and people arriving from red list countries will have to quarantine.

She said people entering core Cop26 venues would have to do a lateral flow test every day, wear masks, and follow one-metre social distancing.

And delegates would have to follow Scotland’s Covid rules in public spaces and on public transport, she said.

Sturgeon says from 4am on Sunday people arriving in Scotland from abroad will have to take a lateral flow test, rather than a more expensive PCR test, on day two after their arrival. This will bring the Scottish rules into line with England’s.

But if the lateral flow test is positive, people will need to have it confirmed with a PCR test.

Sturgeon says the NHS is deliving the biggest ever winter vaccination programme.

Covid boosters and flu vaccinations are being co-administered wherever possible, she says.

She says that means some people might be getting their flu vaccine a bit later than usual.

Sturgeon says today marks the latest point for a three-week review of regulations.

But the cabinet decided this morning that no changes were needed, she says.

She says the decline in cases has levelled off. In recent days there has been a slight increase.

But Scotland currently has the lowest Covid rate of the four UK nations, she says.

She says the NHS remains under significant pressure.

There has been a slight change in the age distribution of people going to hospital, she says. More of them are older patients.

She says a further £482m is being allocated to the NHS. This includes £120m for the test and protect programme, and £130m for the vaccination programme.

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, is giving a statement to Scottish parliament about Covid. She says there will be no immediate changes to the rules in force.

She starts with the latest figures. There have been 2,262 new cases, she says, with 11.5% of tests being positive.

She says there are 917 Covid patients in hospital – 15 more than yesterday.

And there have been 20 further deaths.

David Davis, the Conservative former Brexit secretary, has said he does not believe Owen Paterson received a fair hearing from the parliamentary investigation into the lobby accusations against him.

In an interview with the BBC’s World at One Owen Paterson strongly rejected the findings of the Commons standards committee report saying he had broken parliamentary lobbying rules. (See 9.35am). He also claimed the manner in which the investigation against him was conducted contributed to his wife, Rose, taking her life last year. He told the programme:

[There is] absolutely no doubt whatever in my mind that the manner in which this inquiry was conducted led to the extreme anguish which caused Rose to hang herself. I wasn’t spoken to for 17 months and during that time a number of letters were sent ...

Paterson said he thought he had answered the initial allegations, but then subsquently, twice more, he received further letters, extending the accusations “way beyond” the original ones. He went on:

And I remember very clearly the last weekend before Rose hanged herself, [her] really going to me in the kitchen, saying: ‘Don’t you realise,this inquiry is going to go on and on and on, until [the parliamentary commissioner for standards] finds some spurious reasons for finding you guilty. She is determined to catch you out. And then you’ll have to resign and I’ll have to resign and we’ll end our days in humiliation and disgrace.’ There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the manner in which this inquiry has been conducted, in complete breach of the rules of natural justice, was a major factor in my wife’s decision to hang herself in June last year.

Paterson said that, although the Commons rules ban lobbying on behalf of a paying client, there is an exception if an MP needs to raise a “serious wrong” with the authorities. He said this was the case for him because Randox, one of the companies he was working for, found 15% of random milk samples from supermarkets contained a carcinogenic antibiotic.

Paterson has set out his objections to the report in full in a statement on his website.

(The committee said that, although this exception covered one of the lobbying interventions by Paterson, it did not cover the others.)

Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccine Group that developed the AstraZeneca vaccine, told MPs this morning that some of the charts showing Covid cases in the UK to be far higher than in other European countries were misleading. In evidence to the Commons science committee, he said the figures partly reflected the fact that the UK is doing a lot more testing. He explained:

If you look across western Europe, we have about 10 times more tests done each day than some other countries, this is per head of population.

So we really have to always adjust by looking at the data ... we do have a lot of transmission at the moment, but it’s not right to say that those rates are really telling us something that we can compare internationally ...

If you make the adjustment of cases in relation to the rates of testing, and look at test positivity, currently Germany has the highest test positivity rate in Europe. So I think when we look at these data it’s really important not to sort of bash the UK with a very high case rate, because actually it’s partly related to very high testing.

I’m not trying to deny that there’s not plenty of transmission, because there is, but it’s the comparisons that are problematic.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesperson also played down claims that its plan B for Covid could cost the economy up to £18bn. The figure comes from a leaked government assessment. (See 10.09am.) But the analysis was based on the premise of plan B being in force for five months, and the spokesperson said this was not government policy and “not something we’re planning to”. He went on:

If it were to become the case, the plan B measures would allow venues to remain open and remain trading.

We are confident the plan B measures taken as a package will help curb Covid cases while also striking that important balance of allowing parts of the economy to remain open that will otherwise face severe restrictions or even closure.

In the Commons a few minutes ago, during the UQ on pre-budget announcements, Sir Desmond Swayne, a lockdown-sceptic Tory, asked why this plan B assessment had not been made public. Simon Clarke, the chief secretary to the Treasury, prompted loud laughter when he replied saying he could not talk about leaks.