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Sir Keir Starmer has launched a scathing attack on Suella Braverman over her recent controversial remarks on homelessness – warning Rishi Sunak that “without a serious home secretary… he cannot be a serious prime minister”.

Speaking during a debate on Tuesday’s King’s Speech, the Labour leader slammed her claims that living on the street was a “lifestyle choice”, instead calling it a “political choice” resulting from the scrapping of government housing targets and not enough new homes being built.

Politics live: Tories joke about Johnson and Truss as MPs debate King’s Speech

Sir Keir also appeared to reference other contentious comments by Ms Braverman, including her description of pro-Palestine protests at “hate marches”, saying using security issues as “a platform for her own ambitions” was making the job of the police even harder.

The prime minister failed to defend his home secretary during his response, even after being pressed further by Labour shadow minister Sir Chris Bryant, who asked whether he agreed with Ms Braverman on homelessness or whether she should be sacked.

Instead, Mr Sunak claimed the “actions” of the Conservative government had seen rough sleeping fall by a third and the Homelessness Reduction Act had helped “relieve or prevent” over 640,000 people from being homeless.

During the debate, Sir Keir criticised the King’s Speech as “a missed opportunity”, calling Mr Sunak’s pitch as the change candidate for the next election “ridiculous posturing”.

British Home Secretary Suella Braverman walks at the venue of Britain's Conservative Party's annual conference in Manchester, Britain, October 3, 2023. REUTERS/Toby Melville
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Suella Braverman has caused controversy with her remarks on both homelessness and Palestinian protests

The Labour leader dubbed the government plans revealed by the King today as “more of the same sticking plaster politics”, adding: “Today we reach something of a new low because they’re not even pretending to govern anymore.

“They’ve given up on any sense of service. They see our country’s problems as something to be exploited, not solved.”

But the Labour leader saved his real ire for Ms Braverman and issued a warning to the prime minister over her recent controversies.

“We needed a King’s Speech that would draw a line under 13 years of Tory decline, a King’s Speech for national renewal and a serious plan for growth,” he said.

“But instead, we have a party so devoid of leadership, it is happy to follow a home secretary who describes homelessness as a lifestyle choice and believes that the job of protecting us all from extremists – the most basic job of government – is legitimate terrain for her divisive brand of politics.”

Read more: What exactly did Braverman say about homeless people?

Sir Keir added: “As director of public prosecutions, I worked closely with the police and counter-terrorism forces. Their job is hard enough already without the home secretary using it as a platform for her own ambitions.

“And so I say to the prime minister, think very carefully about what she is committing your government to do and think very carefully about the consequences of putting greater demands on public servants at the coalface of keeping us safe.

“Because without a serious home secretary, there can be no serious government and he cannot be a serious prime minister.”

Is Starmer preparing for Braverman as Tory leader?


Jon Craig - Chief political correspondent

Jon Craig

Chief political correspondent

@joncraig

Did we just witness a taste of the fierce Commons battles to come after the next general election?

The most blistering attack of Sir Keir Starmer’s speech in the debate on the King’s Speech was not directed at Rishi Sunak, but at Suella Braverman.

Plenty of MPs believe the home secretary’s controversial attacks on “hate marches” and rough sleepers making a “lifestyle choice” are all about playing to the Tory gallery ahead of a leadership campaign.

Some MPs even claim Ms Braverman is goading Mr Sunak into sacking her so she can launch a leadership bid before the general election.

So it’s highly significant the Labour leader launched such a harsh attack on the home secretary. Does he anticipate facing her across the despatch box if he wins the election?

Throughout Sir Keir’s attacks, Mr Sunak’s body language is highly revealing. He makes no eye contact with her and makes no attempt to shake his head during the onslaught.

And then, when the Labour MP Sir Chris Bryant joins the attack on Ms Braverman and challenges the PM to sack her if he disagrees with her “lifestyle choice” slur, he doesn’t even mention her and praises the veterans’ minister Johnnie Mercer instead.

So is she on borrowed time in the Cabinet ahead of launching a leadership bid? As soon as Mr Sunak finished his speech, she hurried out of the chamber.

Will she have relished Sir Keir’s attack on her? Almost certainly. And what about the lack of support for her from the PM? Good or bad news for her?

Probably bad news in the short-term, but probably not in the long-term, namely after the next election – when she no doubt hopes to be doing battle with Sir Keir across the despatch box.

While Mr Sunak did not have a response on the home secretary, who sat next to him throughout Sir Keir’s speech, he had lots to say about Labour’s plans for if they get into government.

He said the policies would lead to “higher inflation, more strikes, more immigration and higher borrowing”, and he said they would “give into inflation busting demands from their union paymasters”, calling such a move “dangerous”.

The prime minister also claimed Sir Keir “stands for the same old ideas”, while the government was “focused on the long-term decisions that will provide a better and brighter future for everyone”.

Read more: Will the pro-Palestinian march on Armistice Day go ahead?

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WATCH: The King’s Speech in 58 seconds

Mr Sunak also trumpeted a number of his government policies announced in today’s speech, including:

• New licenses for gas and oil fields

• A new bill to phase out smoking

• Introducing whole-life orders for the most horrific murders

• A new legal framework to enable self-driving cars to be used on Britain’s roads.

“This King’s Speech builds on the strong foundation of economy well on its way to recovery,” added the prime minister. “It rejects big government and instead backs people and businesses to thrive.

“It strengthens society with historic measures to support the nation, health and education. It secures our streets and borders with tougher sentences for criminals and powers for police.

“And above all this, King’s Speech delivers change. Change in our economy. Change in our society. Change in our communities. It takes long-term decisions for a brighter future.”

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Labour say there’s been a ‘massive increase’ in NHS appointments – this begs to differ

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Labour say there's been a 'massive increase' in NHS appointments - this begs to differ

“The target was never particularly ambitious,” says the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) about Labour’s plan to add two million extra NHS appointments during their first year in power.

In February, Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced they had achieved the feat early. He recently described the now 3.6m additional appointments achieved in their first eight months as a “massive increase”.

PM signs Chagos deal – politics latest

But new data, obtained by independent fact checking charity Full Fact and shared exclusively with Sky News, reveals this figure actually signalled a slowing down in new NHS activity.

There was an even larger rise of 4.2m extra appointments over the same period the year before, under Rishi Sunak’s government.

The data also reveals how unambitious the target was in the first place.

We now know two million extra appointments over the course of a year represents a rise of less than 3% of the almost 70 million carried out in the year to June 2024.

In the last year under Mr Sunak, the rise was 10% – and the year before that it was 8%.

Responding to the findings, Sarah Scobie, deputy director of independent health and social care think tank the Nuffield Trust, told Sky News the two million target was “very modest”.

She said delivering that number of appointments “won’t come close to bringing the treatment waiting list back to pre-pandemic levels, or to meeting longer-term NHS targets”.

The IFS said it was smaller than the annual growth in demand pressures forecast by the government.

What exactly did Labour promise?

The Labour election manifesto said: “As a first step, in England we will deliver an extra two million NHS operations, scans, and appointments every year; that is 40,000 more appointments every week.”

We asked the government many times exactly how it would measure the pledge, as did policy experts from places like the IFS and Full Fact. But it repeatedly failed to explain how it was defined.

Leo Benedictus, a journalist and fact-checker at Full Fact, told Sky News: “We didn’t know how they were defining these appointments.

“When they said that there would be more of them, we didn’t know what there would be more of.”

Leo Benedictus, journalist and fact checker at Full Fact, obtained the key data from the NHS after a Freedom of Information request
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Leo Benedictus

Even once in government, initially Labour did not specify their definition of “operations, scans, and appointments”, or what the baseline “extra” was being measured against.

This prevented us and others from measuring progress every month when NHS stats were published. Did it include, for instance, mental health and A&E appointments? And when is the two million extra comparison dating from?

Target met, promise kept?

Suddenly, in February, the government announced the target had already been met – and ever since, progress on appointments has been a key boast of ministers and Labour MPs.

At this point, they did release some information: the definition of procedures that allowed them to claim what had been achieved. They said the target involved is elective – non-emergency – operations excluding maternity and mental health services; outpatient appointments and diagnostic tests.

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Why has Starmer axed NHS England?

However, we still did not have a comprehensive baseline to measure the two million increase against.

The government data instead relied on a snapshot: comparing the number of appointments carried out from July to November 2024 with the number from July to November 2023, and adjusted them for the number of working days in each period.

This did not tell us if the NHS had already been adding appointments under the Conservatives, and at what pace, and therefore whether this target was a big impressive ramping up of activity or, as it turns out, actually a slowing down.

Since then, a number of organisations, like Full Fact, have been fighting with the government to release the data.

Mr Benedictus said: “We asked them for that information. They didn’t publish it. We didn’t have it.

“The only way we could get hold of it was by submitting an FOI request, which they had to answer. And when that came back about a month later, it was fascinating.”

This finally gives us the comparative data allowing us to see what the baseline is against which the government’s “success” is being measured.

Full Fact passed the data to Sky News because it had seen our reporting about how the information published by the NHS in February was not sufficient to be able to assess whether things were getting better or worse.

What the government says now

We put our findings to the government.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “On entering office last July, the secretary of state [Wes Streeting] was advised that the fiscal black hole meant elective appointments would have to be cut by 20,000 every week.

“Instead, this government provided the extra investment and has already delivered 3.6 million additional appointments – more than the manifesto commitment the British public voted for – while also getting more patients seen within 18 weeks.

“In the nine months since this government took office, the waiting list has dropped by over 200,000 – more than five times as much as it had over the same period the previous year – and also fell for six consecutive months in a row.”

Health Secretary Wes Streeting leaves 10 Downing Street, London, following a Cabinet meeting. Picture date: Tuesday May 6, 2025. PA Photo. Photo credit should read: Aaron Chown/PA Wire
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Health Secretary Wes Streeting. Pic: PA

We put this to Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak’s chancellor during his last two years as prime minister, and health secretary for six years under David Cameron and Theresa May.

He said: “What these numbers seem to show is that the rate of appointments was going up by more in the last government than it is by this government. That’s really disappointing when you look at the crisis in the NHS.

“All the evidence is that if you want to increase the number of people being treated, you need more capacity in the system, and you need the doctors and nurses that are there to be working more productively.

“Instead what we’ve had from this government is the vast majority of the extra funding for the NHS has gone into pay rises, without asking for productivity in return.”

Jeremy Hunt told Sky News that "the vast majority of the extra funding for the NHS has gone into pay-rises, without asking for productivity in return"
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Jeremy Hunt speaks to Sky’s Sam Coates

Edward Argar, shadow health secretary, accused the government of a “weak attempt […] to claim credit for something that was already happening”.

“We need to see real and meaningful reform that will genuinely move the dial for patients,” he added.

Is the NHS getting better or worse?

New polling carried out by YouGov on behalf of Sky News this week also reveals 39% of people think the NHS has got worse over the past year, compared with 12% who think it’s got better.

Six in 10 people say they do not trust Keir Starmer personally on the issue of the NHS, compared with three in 10 who say they do.

That is a better rating than some of his rivals, however. Just 21% of people say they trust Nigel Farage with the NHS, and only 16% trust Kemi Badenoch – compared with 64% and 60% who do not.

Ed Davey performs better, with 30% saying they trust him and 38% saying they do not.

Ms Scobie of the Nuffield Trust told Sky News “the government is right to make reducing long hospital treatment waits a key priority […] but much faster growth in activity is needed for the NHS to see a substantial improvement in waiting times for patients.”

The government is correct, however, to point out the waiting list having dropped by more than 200,000 since it’s been in office. This is the biggest decline between one July and the following February since current waiting list statistics were first published under Gordon Brown.

The percentage of people waiting less than 18 weeks for treatment is also falling for the first time, other than a brief period during the pandemic, for the first time in more than a decade.

There is still a long way to go, though. Figures released last week showed the total number of people waiting for NHS treatment in England had risen again in March, following six months of positive progress.

The latest figures show 6.25m people waiting for 7.42m treatments (some people are on the list for more than one issue). That means more than one in 10 people in England are currently waiting for NHS treatment.

There continues to be a fall in the number who have been waiting longer than a year. It’s now 180,242, down from almost 400,000 in August 2023 and over 300,000 in June 2024, the Conservatives’ last month in power.

But that number is still incredibly high by historical standards. It remains over 100 times higher than it was before the pandemic.

The government has a separate pledge that no more than 8% of patients will wait longer than 18 weeks for treatment, by the time of the next election. Despite improvements in recent months, currently more than 40% wait longer than this.


The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

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Starmer’s winter fuel cut U-turn claim ‘not credible’

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Starmer's winter fuel cut U-turn claim 'not credible'

Sir Keir Starmer’s claim he is U-turning on cutting winter fuel payments for pensioners because he now has the money is not “credible”, Harriet Harman has said.

👉 Listen to Electoral Dysfunction on your podcast app 👈

The Labour peer, speaking to Sky News political editor Beth Rigby on the Electoral Dysfunction podcast, said the prime minister made the move as it was so unpopular with voters.

PM signs Chagos deal – politics latest

She also said Labour’s poor results at the local elections and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were the “straw that broke the camel’s back”.

Sir Keir said on Wednesday he would ease the cut to the winter fuel payment, which has been removed from more than 10 million pensioners this winter after it became means-tested.

He and his ministers had insisted they would stick to their guns on the policy, even just hours before Sir Keir revealed his change of heart at PMQs

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Winter fuel payment cuts to be reversed

Baroness Harman said: “It’s always been contested and always been unpopular.

“But the final straw that broke the camel’s back was the elections. The council elections and the Runcorn by-election, where the voters were saying, ‘this is not the change we voted for’.

“At the end of the day, you cannot just keep flying in the face of what voters – particularly if they’re people who previously voted for you – wanted.”

Baroness Harman is unconvinced by Sir Keir’s claim he can U-turn because there is more money due to good economic management by the government.

“I don’t think that’s credible as an argument,” she said.

“It really is the fact that voters just said ‘this is not the change we voted for, we’re not going to have this’.”

The challenge for the government now, she said, is deciding who will get the allowance moving forward, when they’ll get it, and when it will all be announced.

Read more:
Ex-PM suggests who should miss out on winter fuel payments

What are the options for winter fuel payments?

  • The Institute for Fiscal Studies has looked into the government’s options after Sir Keir Starmer said he is considering changes to the cut to winter fuel payment (WFP).
  • The government could make a complete U-turn on removing the payment from pensioners not claiming pension credit so they all receive it again.
  • There could be a higher eligibility threshold. Households not claiming pension credit could apply directly for the winter fuel payment, reporting their income and other circumstances.
  • Or, all pensioner households could claim it but those above a certain income level could do a self-assessment tax return to pay some of it back as a higher income tax charge. This could be like child benefit, where the repayment is based on the higher income member of the household.
  • Instead of reducing pension credit by £1 for every £1 of income, it could be withdrawn more slowly to entitle more households to it, and therefore WFP.
  • At the moment, WFP is paid to households but if it was paid to individuals the government could means-test each pensioner, rather than their household. This could be based on an individual’s income, which the government already records for tax purposes. Individuals who have a low income could get the payment, even if their spouse is high income. This would mean low income couples getting twice as much, whereas each eligible house currently gets the same.
  • Instead of just those receiving pension credit getting WFP, the government could extend it to pensioners who claim means-tested welfare for housing or council tax support. A total of 430,000 renting households would be eligible at a cost of about £100m a year.
  • Pensioners not on pension credit but receiving disability credits could get WFP, extending eligibility to 1.8m households in England and Scotland at a cost of about £500m a year.
  • Pensioners living in a band A-C property could be automatically entitled to WFP, affected just over half (6.3m).

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has committed to just one major fiscal event a year, meaning just one annual budget in the autumn.

Autumn budgets normally take place in October, with the last one at the end of the month.

If this year’s budget is around the same date, it will leave little time for the extra winter fuel payments to be made, as they are paid between November and December.

Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the Electoral Dysfunction podcast the economy will have to be “strong enough” for the government to U-turn on winter fuel payment cuts.

He also said the public would have to wait for the budget for any announcement.

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Reeves vs Starmer: Inside the ‘rift’ in Downing Street

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Reeves vs Starmer: Inside the 'rift' in Downing Street

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Are Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves falling out over winter fuel payments? Beth tells us what she’s been hearing in Westminster about a rift between the pair and although it’s denied by Number 11, she’s heard there’s “palpable tension” between the principal players over the change in policy.

Also, with a vote on welfare reforms coming up next month, Beth, Harriet Harman and Ruth Davidson discuss how it will play out with Labour MPs and whether the government is losing its grip despite having such a big majority.

Plus, Beth speaks to Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds about the winter fuel U-turn and whether the government can get a better deal with Donald Trump.

Remember you can also watch us on YouTube!

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