UK politics live: new Reform UK treasurer Nick Candy claims party membership will overtake Tories next year | Politics

Back at the culture committee, Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, is being asked about the BBC, and the future of the licence fee.

She says that “no option is off the table” for the BBC’s charter review, both in terms of the structure of the BBC and its funding model.

She says the government is “not in the business of reform for reform’s sake”.

But she says it is clear that there are limits to what the BBC can raise through commercial sources.

So the government is going to have to look “in the broadest sense” at the options, she says.

Nandy says she knows that 75% of people proscecuted for non-payment of the licence fee are women. She says the government is extending the simple payment plan to make it easier for people to pay in instalments.

And she says she wants to hear what the committee recommends on the future of the BBC.

During the election Keir Starmer said the licence fee would stay in place at least until the BBC’s current charter runs out at the end of 2027.

Nick Candy has given an interview to GB News about his new role as treasurer for Reform UK. (See 10.16am and 12.15pm.) Here are the main points.

I think for past general elections, £25m to £40m has been raised for previous parties, and I think I will do significantly better than that, more than £40m.

Already this morning, I’ve had millions of pounds worth of donations from people that have never donated to a political party in this country. But it’s not just about getting rich donors and billionaire people or whatever, or millionaire people.

Today, we need the guys that have got £1, £5, £10, £25, to be a member of Reform.

Reform has 100,000 members now. The Tories have 130,000 members. I’m sure in the next six months Reform will go past the Tory membership and that will be a game changer in this country …

Once they start winning some of these local elections and these by-elections, it’s going to be a complete game changer. My only job is raising the funds to do it properly.

• He said that, despite saying before the election that it was time for a change and that Keir Starmer was “a decent man”, he did not vote Labour this summer.

Birmingham city council has reached an agreement to settle historical equal pay claims that left the authority with liabilities estimated at £760m and pushed it into effective bankruptcy, Jessica Murray reports.

Councils in England could be driven to bankrupty because the costs of dealing with children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) are rising at an unsustainable rate, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said in a report.

Summarising the problem, the report says:

The special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) system in England has faced unprecedented pressure over the past decade, and without substantial reform it will likely become unmanageable for local authorities over the coming years. Fundamentally, this is due to the rocketing number of children and young people with education, health and care plans (EHCPs). Children with EHCPs are those with the highest needs and local authorities are statutorily obligated to cover the costs of provision set out in EHCPs. The reasons behind this rise in EHCPs are complex, but potential explanations include increased severity of needs, expanded recognition and diagnosis of needs, and stronger incentives to seek statutory provision.

Meaningful reform is likely to be “complex and costly”, it says.

It is likely to require a significant expansion of the core SEND provision available in mainstream schools, an expansion of state-funded special school places, a geographic redistribution of funding, and maybe reducing the statutory obligations currently attached to EHCPs. At the moment, there are huge delays in getting assessments, forcing many parents to get private assessments or go to legal tribunals. Building parental confidence in a new system will therefore be challenging. Any transition to a new system would also be costly as it would likely entail some double funding to cover current obligations. Although difficult, substantial reform is necessary to create a financially sustainable and equitable SEND system. The default is spending an extra £2–3bn per year on an unreformed system by 2027–28.

But, without reform, councils could go bankrupt, the report says.

It is important to restate that the default is for continued rises in numbers of pupils with EHCPs, extra spending of £2–3bn per year and local authority deficits of £8 billion in three years’ time, pushing many to the point of bankruptcy.

Back at the culture committee, Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, says she has seen too many examples of people in the creative industries who are victims of mistreatment at work feeling that they cannot complain because of the power wielded by stars who misbehave. Referring to the Gregg Wallace allegations, she says there have been too many cases of complaints being “swept under the rug”.

She says she is meeting the Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority (CIISA) tomorrow. She goes on:

I instinctively think that it is better if the industry grips this, but if they don’t, I will be prepared to take further action.

She says she has looked at various examples of misconduct cases and she is worried that nothing seems to change.

One of the things that has really concerned me is that when we’ve looked across the board at repeated instances of where people have spoken up, made complaints that have been swept under the rug, and it’s only ended up in resulting in action when they’ve gone to the media – you can look at the inquiries into all of those occasions, and every time the recommendations are the same. And yet here we still are, with these things happening on a regular occurrence.

The Green party has said that the 5% efficiency savings that Rachel Reeves is demanding in her spending review will lead to cuts to services. In a statement, Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader, said:

Labour call their 5% cuts across government departments “efficiency savings.

We call it what it is: cuts to services.

This amounts to the continuation of the same damaging, unpopular and unnecessary policy that has, under successive governments, so devastated our country over many years.

Instead of stripping more money from essential front-line services that are already on their knees, Labour could and should look to tax the very richest more to raise crucial funds.

This could act as a lifeline for key services such as our NHS.

We remain clear, cutting services always was and still is, a political choice.

The billionaire property developer Nick Candy has said he will give at last £1m to Reform UK.

At a photocall with Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, to mark his defection to the party and his appointment at party treasurer (see 10.16am), Candy was asked whether he would be donating any of his own money to the party.

“Of course,” he replied.

Asked how much, he said he would be giving a “seven-figure sum”.

When reporters asked Farage if Candy’s appointment meant Reform UK was now the party of party of millionaires and billionaires, Farage replied:

No, we haven’t sold a single peerage.

We need ammunition. We can’t fight big national campaigns without the money.

Asked about claims that Elon Musk might donate $100m to the party, a claim that Musk has denied, Farage said that he did not know anything about that, but that if he were offered a legal donation from Musk, the world’s richest man, he would take it.

Labour won 34% of the vote at the general election, but 63% of the seats being contested, and many commentators have pointed out that the first past the post electoral system delivered the most disproportional result in British political history.

But the Electoral Reform Society, which campaigns for electoral reform, has today published a report saying the result was “one of the most disproportional seen anywhere in the world”.

In a summary, it says:

A new report on this year’s general election from the ERS shows that the parties’ votes have shifted more than at any time since 1931, with voters more willing than ever to ‘shop around’ and vote for smaller parties than in any other election in modern times.
As a result, this election saw a number of firsts such as being the first UK election where four parties received over 10% of the vote, five parties received over 5% of the vote and Labour and the Conservatives received their lowest combined vote share (57.4%) in the era of universal suffrage. The historically disproportional result also highlighted how the current first past the post electoral system, which is designed to work largely as a two-party system, is struggling with the shift towards multiparty voting and is producing erratic results where parties receive seats far out of proportion to the share of the votes that they won. Notably, Labour received a whopping 63.2% of seats on just 33.7% of the vote, meaning a 1.6% increase in the party’s 2019 vote-share saw it more than double its seats in parliament to 411. At the other end of the spectrum, Reform UK and the Green party received just over 1% (1.4%) of the seats between them, after winning more than 20% of the vote combined.

This graphic contains some other striking figures from the report.

Commenting on the report, Darren Hughes, chief executive of the ERS, said:

Our current two-party voting system is struggling to cope with this new multi-party reality and has produced a parliament that least resembles how the country actually voted in British history.
This will not help trust in politics, which is at an historic low [3], and is why we need to move to a fairer, proportional voting system that would accurately reflect how the country voted before the next election.

Keir Starmer said the UK-Cyprus relationship could be taken to “an even stronger level” as he met the country’s president in Nicosia for talks on the Middle East amid fresh upheaval in Syria, PA Media reports. PA says:

Starmer’s meeting with Cypriot leader Nikos Christodoulides was the first of its kind in 53 years.

The two men described the meeting as “historic”, with the prime minister saying it had been “far too long” since a British premier had made a bilateral visit to Cyprus.

“Please take it as a statement of my intent that our already strong relationship, the partnership between our countries – strong historically, strong because of the ties that we’ve had people-to-people for many, many years and common interests – can be taken to an even stronger level between us,” he said.

Christodoulides said the meeting was “testament to our strong political will to work together to enhance our bilateral relationship” on matters including defence, security and trade.

Starmer is the first British prime minister to visit Cyprus since Edward Heath in 1971.