Who crashed the economy? – Owl

Fourteen people remain on her resignation honours list, which is being vetted by the House of Lords appointments commission. The list could have been even longer, however, as at least two people turned down a nomination by the former prime minister, The Times has been told.

Matt Dathan www.thetimes.co.uk

One source said they felt it would be “humiliating” to receive an honour from Truss, who served as prime minister for 49 days, the shortest spell in British history. Another said they did not deserve it.

Truss nominated four people for life peerages and 12 for honours such as knighthoods, damehoods, OBEs, CBEs and MBEs. According to previous reports the nominated life peers include Sir Jon Moynihan, a big pro-Brexit donor to the Conservative Party, and Matthew Elliott, who ran the Brexit campaign in 2016.

The others are said to be Ruth Porter, Truss’s deputy chief of staff in No 10, and Mark Littlewood, the outgoing head of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a think tank that backed her mini-budget.

Truss also wishes to recognise a “handful” of “local community heroes” in Norfolk, where her constituency is, according to a source close to her.

It is understood that Kwasi Kwarteng, who served as chancellor under Truss and oversaw the disastrous mini-budget, has not been included on the list. It is not known if he asked not to be included.

Mark Fullbrook, who also worked for Truss in No 10, had pushed for advisers to get honours in the days leading up to her departure last October. However, one aide rejected the honour as they did not feel they had earned it.

A source insisted the list was “very modest” and said it was customary for those departing No 10 to be given the chance to draw up a resignation list.

However, it is likely to renew criticism of the honours system, which was under fire over Boris Johnson’s list of more than 40 awards, which is said to have been whittled down from an original list of almost 100. It included seven peerages, including to an aide aged 30.

Opposition parties have called for Truss’s honours to be blocked. It is understood that she submitted the list to the commission several months ago and the names are still being vetted. Those on the list have not been given any indication of how long it will take. Truss’s office declined to comment.

Moynihan, 75, gave £20,000 to Truss’s leadership campaign last summer. He has attributed her demise to the Bank of England being “asleep at the wheel”, saying the end of her government would “reverberate to the detriment of many people’s view of democracy in this country”.

Elliott, 45, was chief executive of Vote Leave and founded the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Porter worked for Truss at the Ministry of Justice before her stint at No 10. Littlewood, 51, a former Liberal Democrat adviser, has known Truss since they were Oxford University undergraduates.

Since leaving office, Truss has spoken out predominantly about the need to stand up to China. She has been given tens of thousands of pounds by the investment banker behind the right-wing Reclaim Party, as well as a friend of the Duke of York as she seeks to portray herself as a victim of the “anti-growth coalition”.

• Therese Coffey has been lampooned for not attending countryside festival
• Game Fair enthusiasts were left disappointed after she didn’t attend the event
• The environment secretary was travelling back from a G20 summit in India 

www.dailymail.co.uk 

London pulls away from rest of Britain in competitiveness index

The London economy and parts of the south-east have become more attractive to investors than the rest of Britain over the past year, according to a study.

Phillip Inman www.theguardian.com

A report by academics at the University of Cardiff and Nottingham Business School found that out of 362 areas across England, Wales and Scotland, nine of the top 10 in a competitiveness index were London boroughs.

Runnymede, a borough to the west of London, was ninth, below new entrant Hackney and above Southwark.

The study’s authors said London and the home counties, including the top-ranked City of London, Westminster and Camden, stretched their lead over the rest of the regions and nations of Britain as the most economically attractive areas.

Only East Anglia and Cambridgeshire managed to keep pace with the capital, which the report’s authors said was due to their integration with London.

“The east of England regions are becoming increasingly decoupled from the rest of the nation. It is clear that a location’s proximity to London is becoming an important determinant of its competitiveness and future economic growth. The nation will become further reliant on the relative growth hotspots in the capital and surrounding areas,” they said.

Camden was considered to have a cultural life that would be attractive to entrepreneurs, along with the transport, skilled workers and homes needed to support high-wage employees.

“In some regards, Camden, with its cultural amenities and bohemian flavour, might be regarded as the archetypical locality that would attract the high-skilled creative classes who not only innovate themselves, but also create an environment that is attractive to other high skilled groups,” the authors said.

A surge in start-up businesses in Hackney in the past year and similar cultural attributes to Camden meant that it jumped 10 places between 2019 and 2023.

The local areas ranked in the bottom 10 were scattered across much of England and Wales.

East Lindsey, which includes the east coast resort of Skegness, had the worst ranking.

The authors said: “It is a largely rural locality with a significant proportion of its economy associated with agriculture and food production.

“As this is one of the sectors which have been hit hardest by the loss of access to cheap labour from the European Union, this is likely to explain some of its loss in competitiveness.”

The report said Skegness held little attraction for businesses, like many resorts on the east coast affected by economic developments over the past 20 years.

Blaenau Gwent and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, and Torbay and Gosport on the south coast of England, were also among the least competitive localities.

The authors said they defined competitiveness as “the capability of a local economy to attract and maintain firms with stable or rising market shares in an activity, without sacrificing the standards of living of those who participate in it”.

They added: “It is true that an area with low wages and property prices may be attractive for some businesses, but such activities tend to be low value-added and footloose, and are not necessarily going to improve standards of living and achieve levelling up. In other words, being cheap doesn’t equate to competitiveness.”

Rishi Sunak has said he wants the UK to be a high-wage economy, attractive to domestic and foreign businesses prepared to invest in high-skilled workers.

Mark Gregory, a visiting professor at the University of Staffordshire and a former chief economist at the consultancy EY, said the study was unable to capture some important aspects of a local economy that attract businesses.

He said that while London scored highly as a cultural centre, it was increasingly unattractive as a place for young, skilled graduates to work, mainly due to soaring housing costs.

Some areas that fell into the bottom half of the competitiveness rankings were attractive places to live and work even though wages were low, Gregory said.

“How an area is perceived by businesses is another important element driving decisions about where to locate. Tech firms will go where young people want to be and where infrastructure is best, while pharmaceutical businesses will want to be near universities,” he said.

“Manufacturing, which attracts most foreign direct investment, is highly sensitive to wage levels and will want to locate where they are relatively low, not in cities.”

The report found that between 2019 and 2023, the biggest improvements in the competitiveness rankings were in Folkestone and Hythe, Bury, Wolverhampton and Worcester.

Wolverhampton’s improvement was probably due to the potential benefit from the HS2 railway line, the authors said, while Worcester had become more attractive to skilled workers after the pandemic because of its proximity to rural areas.

MPs have been paid £10m from second jobs and freelance work over the past year, largely driven by the size of Boris Johnson’s earnings as well as former Tory ministers taking up a slew of highly paid roles, a Guardian analysis has found.

Rowena Mason www.theguardian.com 

Almost 18 months after the furore around second jobs led to promises of a crackdown, MPs’ earnings from work outside parliament have continued to rise.

The analysis looked at all MPs who made more than £1,000 in the past year, excluding income from completing surveys. Even stripping out Johnson’s £4.8m, about 90 other Conservative MPs brought in approximately £4.75m – an increase from nearer to £4m in 2021.

A much smaller number of Labour, SNP and Lib Dem MPs also brought in outside income of just over £400,000.

The government last year ditched plans to cap MPs’ income from second jobs, just months after the issue provoked a sleaze scandal that plunged Johnson’s government into crisis. The promised clampdown followed the Owen Paterson lobbying scandal and a furore over Geoffrey Cox being paid nearly £6m as a lawyer since joining parliament, voting by proxy on days he was undertaking paid work.

The rise in incomes over the past year appears to have been partly driven by a minority of Conservative MPs taking on very highly paid work, from lucrative consultancies to well paid media gigs for the rightwing GB News channel, as well as Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV.

Some of the highest-paid include the former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is paid about £29,000 a month to host a programme for GB News – which would make him about £350,000 in a year.

Brandon Lewis, a former party chair and ex-cabinet minister, now has three business strategy jobs, including one working for a property developer, making him in total £150,000 a year, while Chris Skidmore, a former minister who carried out a net zero review for No 10, has three jobs in clean energy and policy making him about £200,000 a year.

Sajid Javid, a former chancellor, is being paid £25,000 a month – or £300,000 a year – as adviser to Centricus Partners, a Jersey-based investment firm, related to “global economic outlook, geopolitics and financial markets”.

The figures, compiled from the Register of MPs’ interests, also highlight how some ministers have been part of a revolving door – leaving office during the Johnson era, taking on second jobs, and then returning to government during Rishi Sunak’s tenure.

Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, was paid £8,000 to advise the hedge fund Caxton Associates on policy and £5,000 by an art services business in the short period he was out office last autumn under Liz Truss.

Meanwhile, Gavin Williamson, a former education secretary, resigned his £60,000-a-year second job working for RTC Education, a firm run by a Tory donor, when he went to work for Sunak in October 2022 and then signed back up again in February 2023, a few months after he was ousted from cabinet again.

Some MPs shed their second jobs shortly after Johnson said he was looking at limiting outside income in terms of hours or pay – a policy that was later dropped by the government. But a string of others have taken on new roles in the past year, such as the former Home Office minister Sir Mike Penning, who took a third extra job last October being paid £5,000 a month as a non-executive of a firm called Tenacious Holdings, which markets cannabidiol (CBD) products.

The high earnings are also driven by former prime ministers and senior ex-cabinet ministers making money from speeches and television appearances. Theresa May and Liz Truss were both paid six figures to run their post-No 10 offices from giving speeches, while the former health secretary Matt Hancock registered about £450,000 from media appearances, speeches and his book.

There were at least 18 MPs whose outside incomes totalled more than their £86k MP salary in the year to the end of July, compared with 11 in the autumn of 2021, when Owen Paterson was found to have committed an “egregious” breach of lobbying rules by lobbying for two firms he was paid to advise.

The highest Labour earner over the last year was David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, who made more than £90,000 from presenting on LBC radio and giving speeches. Labour has signalled that if it wins power it will not allow MPs to take up paid directorships or consultancies. Those Labour MPs conducting outside work at the moment are largely making money from freelance work, from books or professional jobs such as working shifts as a doctor.

Transparency campaigners called for tighter rules as more MPs will be looking to supplement their income over the next year: many Conservatives fear losing their seats at an election, with Labour favoured in the polls.

Jonathan Evans, the former MI5 chief and chair of the committee on standards in public life, renewed his call last month for new curbs on MPs’ outside work, suggesting to Sky News there should be an “indicative ceiling” on how much time they should devote to them.

At the same time, Eric Pickles, the Conservative peer and chair of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), has asked for a new regime to fine ex-ministers who contravene lobbying restrictions on outside employment to be in place by the autumn reshuffle. A Sky News and Tortoise investigation found last month that MPs had worked about 89,000 hours in their second jobs since the beginning of the parliament.

Sue Hawley, of the campaign group Spotlight on Corruption, said parliament and regulators needed to tighten up the rules on second jobs as MPs within the next year, as some parliamentarians seek to maximise their earnings potential before leaving office.

“It’s increasingly clear that parliament, and its standards regulators, need to be looking closely at when MPs earning huge sums outside of their role in parliament damages the reputation of the House of Commons,” she said. “There is a real risk that MPs and ex-ministers earning such huge sums fuels cynicism about parliament and risks undermining faith in democracy.

“It’s also clear that as ministers eye the possibility of being ejected at the next election, the rules on the revolving door need toughening up urgently to prevent potential conflicts of interest. That’s why the government needs to heed Lord Pickles’ call to lay out a timetable for urgent implementation of these rules over the autumn.”

Tom Brake, the director of Unlock Democracy and a former deputy leader of the House of Commons, also made the case for reform, saying it was undermining faith in the democratic system.

“For too many, being an MP is a sideline or an afterthought. For them, earning big money elsewhere or brushing up their TV presenter skills is their priority, not fighting for constituents struggling with a cost of living crisis.

“Former PM Boris Johnson’s pledge to tackle MPs’ second jobs was always suspect. These latest figures show it was entirely bogus,” he said.

Richard Burgon, a Labour MP and former shadow justice secretary, said the figures showed why the government should adopt his bill that would ban MPs from having second jobs. “While millions face a cost of living crisis, it’s a disgrace that some MPs are still busy lining their own pockets through second jobs,” he said.