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Andrew Sparrow with all the latest as the Commons prepares to vote on tuition fees – a vote that will split the Lib Dems, and perhaps damage the coalition

1.22pm: Denham is now quoting David Rendel, the former Lib Dem MP. He has an email that Rendel sent to colleagues. Rendel said he did not think the government’s plans were progressive.

1.20pm: Denham says that when David Cameron said yesterday that everyone would be better off under the government’s plans, he was reminded of the person on those adverts on daytime TV encouraging people to roll up all their debts and include them in one loan. But people end up paying more, Denham says.

1.18pm: Asked about the graduate tax, Denham says it’s important to decide how much graduates should contribute, before deciding how that money should be raised. Today MPs are dealing with the first point; how much government should contribute, and how much students should contribute themselves.

Denham says the government has underestimated the amount of money it will have to write off through students being unable to repay their loans.

Stephen Williams, a Lib Dem, asks about Labour’s own plans to cut higher education funding. Denham says it’s a strange experience standing at the dispatch box. Half the time he is criticised on the grounds that Labour did not have a plan to cut the deficit, and half the time he is criticised on the grounds that Labour was planning cuts. What is different is that Labour would not have cut the university teaching budget by 80%, he says.

1.14pm: Denham says that if this fee increase goes through English students will face higher fees than students in any other public universities in the developed world.

(Channel 4′s FactCheck looked at this claim yesterday and concluded that it’s accurate .)

1.10pm: Denham criticises David Cameron for talking down universities in his speech yesterday . Cameron said universities were “uncompetitive”.

Denham also quotes from something Cameron said when he was in China recently . Here’s the full quote:

In the past we have been pushing up the fees on overseas students and using that as a way of keeping them down for domestic students. We have done the difficult thing. We have put up contributions for British students. Yes, foreign students will still pay a significant amount of money but we should now be able to keep that growth under control.

This means Cameron is raising fees for UK students so that he can keep fees down for the Chinese, says Denham. He calls that “extraordinary”.

1.06pm: Denham says that, although today’s vote is on a narrow measure, behind it is a policy that represents the most profound change in university funding since the 1920s. No sane person would rush this through without proper discussion. But today MPs are voting without even seeing the government’s white paper on this.

Julian Huppert, a Lib Dem, asks Denham to apologise for the fact that Labour introduced top-up fees in the first place.

Denham admits that Labour voted for top-up fees in the 2001-2005 parliament. But the policy only came into effect after the 2005 election, he says.

1.03pm: John Denham is speaking now. He says if the Lib Dems vote for the tuition fee increase, they will forfeit the right to call themselves progressives.

If all Lib Dem MPs vote against the measure, it will fall, Denham says.

1.00pm: The NUS have sent me an email to say that they definitely contacted Matthew Hancock (see 12.16) and were told by someone in his office that he was voting against the government. The NUS think Hancock has backtracked. I think it’s more likely that the Commons switchboard put them through to the wrong office.

1.00pm: Cable accuses Labour of shedding “crocodile tears” about social mobility. Social mobility has deteriorated. There are 80,000 pupils on free school meals. Only 40 make it into Oxbridge. That’s a “shameful inheritance” from people who claim to be concerned about social justice.

He says the government has had a “difficult choice” to make. But it has opted for policies that provide a strong basis for university funding. He is “proud” to put forward the measure to the house.

12.54pm: Vince Cable mentions some of the concessions he announced yesterday designed to make his plans more acceptable.

12.51pm: Cable says he has eliminated most of the other alternatives to raising money for universities. “The only practical alternative was to retrieve income for universities from high-income graduates once they have left,” he says. Today 50 university vice-chancellors have endorsed that approach, he says.

Cable says he has asked the CBI to get its members to provide more employer support for apprenticeships.

Simon Hughes asks what assurances Cable can give that fees of £9,000 will be exceptional and that most will charge £6,000.

Cable says that’s a good question. Under Labour, most universities charged the maximum. Cable says any university wanting to charge more than £6,000 will have to meet “very demanding tests” in relation to access.

12.46pm: Labour’s Ali Rushanara asks about the abolition of the educational maintenance allowance. That will have a particular impact on British Bangladeshi pupils, she said.

Cable says the existing EMA system is “enormously wasteful”. It goes to many pupils who do not need it. The pupil premium will give support to schools and pupils in areas of high deprivation.

12.44pm: Ann Treneman, the Times’s sketchwriter, has just tweeted this from the chamber.

12.41pm: Labour’s Jack Straw tells Cable that George Osborne told the Treasury committee yesterday that he would have billions to spend later this parliament when he sells government assets. Straw suggests that this money should be used to fund higher education.

Cable says he will address the funding issue.

A Labour spokesman (John Denham) sent a letter to colleagues saying that university teaching budgets were being cut by more than other departmental budgets, Cable says. But this is because the government is protecting some departments, Cable says.

Denham intervenes. He asks Cable to name any other spending programmes that have been cut by 80% (as the university teaching budget has.)

Cable says Labour would have cut his department’s spending by 25%. Cable could have cut further education, or apprenticeships, or basic training, but he chose not to cut these programmes. He had to cut university spending by 25%. He could have cut the number of students at university, but he rejected that. He could have made a decision to reduce student maintenance. But that would have affected low-income students at university now. He could have taken “the Scottish option” – cutting funding to universities without giving them the means to raise extra money. But, if he had done this, the great English universities would still have been great. But the Scottish universities would have been in decline.

12.34pm: On the subject of a graduate tax, Cable quotes from something Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman, wrote in the Guardian this week . Wilby wrote: “Labour has been seduced into sentimental, sloppy thinking that defends the interests of the affluent, not the poor.”

12.32pm: Vince Cable is opening the debate. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are beside him on the frontbench.

Cable says that when he came into government Lord Browne was already reviewing higher education. Cable asked him to make his plans more progressive. This has happened. Under these proposals, 25% of graduates would pay less than they do now.

He also asked Browne to consider a graduate tax. Browne came to the same conclusion as Ron Dearing did when he looked into this for Labour, and Alan Johnson when he was in charge of higher education. Browne concluded a graduate tax was “unworkable”. Cable says he is surprised that Ed Miliband has taken his party down the “cul-de-sac” this represents.

12.28pm: Nigel Evans, one of the deputy Speakers, has just said that there will only be one vote. The Speaker has not accepted any of the three amendments. (See 11.04am.) And the two motions in Vince Cable’s name – one allowing tuition fees to rise to £9,000, and another technical one – will be taken together. The vote will be at 5.25pm.

12.25pm: The debate will be starting very soon. Business questions is just wrapping up. But the Labour MP Chris Byrant made a good point about tuition fees just now. He said that if any Lib Dem MPs “abstain” by voting both for and against the rise, they should be given a chance to explain themselves in the Commons tomorrow. MPs are allowed to vote both ways in a division, and sometimes they do this if they want to make it obvious that they are abstaining. If they just choose not to vote, you never know whether or not they are “paired” with another MP. But the Speaker has said in the past that he disapproves of the practice of being both for and against the same measure.

12.16pm: There’s much excitement in the Twittersphere about the suggestion that the Tory MP Matthew Hancock will vote against the government. That’s because Hancock used to work for George Osborne. The suggestion came from the National Union of Students .

But it’s not true. I’ve just spoken to Hancock’s office, who tell me he will definitely vote with the government.

Perhaps the NUS muddled him up with the Lib Dem MP Mike Hancock, who is voting against the government. If so, it won’t be the first time that they have been confused. It happened on one famous occasion that led to Mike Hancock being praised for his honourable behaviour and being described, by the Financial Times’s Alex Barker, as “the Lib Dem who saved George Osborne” .

11.57am: Before we get stuck into the tuition fees debate, here’s a reading list for anyone who wants to explore the issue in more depth:

– The Browne report. This is the report (commissioned by Labour) that recommended an increase in fees and a new payment mechanism. The government’s plans are based on these recommendations, bit ministers rejected his proposal that there should be no cap at all on fees.

– The government’s plans. These are the government proposals announced in November . They are based on the Browne recommendations. Since November, ministers have changed some of the minor details but announced more about how the national scholarships programme will operate.

– The Institute for Fiscal Studies’s verdict on the plans. The IFS has published a 12-page report and a summary . “The government’s proposals are more progressive than the current system or that proposed by Lord Browne,” the IFS says.

– David Cameron’s speech yesterday defending his plans .

– A YouGov poll about tuition fees. It includes s ix questions on this issue , including one showing 49% of people opposed and 38% in favour.

– The Higher Education Policy Institute’s response to the government’s plans .

– A report from the University and College Union on the impact of government cuts on universities and local economies.

– A report by Universities UK on why universities matter.

11.27am: The standards and privileges committee report also covered complaints about Sir John Butterfill, Patricia Hewitt and Adam Ingram and what they said when they met an undercover journalist posing as a lobbyist. All three were cleared of wrongdoing. Here are the conclusions in relation to them :

Sir John Butterfill

The commissioner has not upheld the allegations against Sir John Butterfill. We agree with the commissioner that Sir John did not breach the code or the rules, although we do consider that – like the other members – he was unwise to agree to the meeting and we believe that some of his comments were unfortunate. We make no recommendation in this case.

Patricia Hewitt

The commissioner has not upheld the allegations against Patricia Hewitt. We agree with the commissioner that Ms Hewitt did not breach the code or the rules, although we do consider that – like the other members – she was unwise to agree to the meeting. We make no recommendation in this case.

Adam Ingram

The commissioner has not upheld the allegations against Mr Ingram. We agree with the commissioner that Mr Ingram did not breach the code or the rules, although we do consider that – like the other members – he was unwise to agree to the meeting. We make no recommendation in this case.

11.20am: Richard Caborn has also been criticised by the standards and privileges committee in relation his meeting with an undercover reporter posing as a lobbyist. It said that he had breached the rules when sponsoring three events in parliament because he did not declare a relevant interest. He will lose the parliamentary pass that he has as an ex-MP for six months. Here’s an extract from the report.

The [parliamentary commissioner for standards] concludes that Mr Caborn committed several breaches of the rules of the house, which he suggests were more likely to be the result of careless oversight than of deliberate intention …

We recommend that for breaching the code of conduct Mr Richard Caborn apologise to the house through this committee in writing and that his entitlement to a parliamentary photopass be suspended for six months, with effect from 1 January 2011.

11.17am: The standards and privileges committee report has also criticised Geoff Hoo n, the former defence secretary. It has urged him to apologise to the Commons in writing and said that he should lose the parliamentary pass he has as an ex-MP for five years.

The [parliamentary commissioner for standards] has concluded that Mr Hoon committed a “particularly serious” breach of the rules of the house in making statements to the undercover reporter about disclosing confidential information he implied he was receiving or could access from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) about the UK’s strategic defence and security review for the benefit of business clients who might be considering seeking contracts with the MoD and for the benefit of a private equity fund. In the commissioner’s judgment, Mr Hoon’s conduct brought the House of Commons and its members generally into disrepute, contrary to paragraph 15 of the code of conduct …

We recommend that for committing breaches of the code of conduct, one of which was a particularly serious breach, Mr Geoff Hoon apologise to the House through this committee in writing and that his entitlement to a parliamentary photopass be suspended for five years, with effect from 1 January 2011.

11.14am: Stephen Byers (left) has been strongly criticised by the standards and privileges committee for what he said to an undercover reporter posing as a lobbyist before the election. As punishment, he is going to lose the pass he gets as a former MP giving him access to the Commons. Here are extracts from the report .

Mr Byers’s suggestion [to the undercover reporter] that, as the architect of the Enterprise Act, he knew ways round it was untrue, as were other statements about amending food labelling regulations, about what was said at a meeting he had held with Lord Adonis, about working for Rio Tinto, about influencing Ofwat’s investment programme, and about contacts with civil servants on behalf of water companies. By telling these untruths, Mr Byers brought the house and its members generally into disrepute, contrary to paragraph 15 of the code of conduct …

We welcome Mr Byers’s full acceptance of the commissioner’s conclusions and his unreserved apology to the house for his conduct. We agree with Mr Byers that he was wrong to make the statements he did. The deep regret that he has expressed goes some way towards putting right the wrong. But this was, as the commissioner has found, a particularly serious breach of the code. We do not believe that the matter can be allowed to rest with an apology.

We recommend that, for committing a particularly serious breach of the code of conduct, Mr Stephen Byers’s entitlement to a parliamentary photopass be suspended for two years, with effect from 1 January 2011. If Mr Byers had not accepted that his conduct was wrong and had not apologised in such unequivocal terms, we would have recommended that this entitlement be withdrawn for a much longer period.

11.04am: John Bercow is not going to put any of the three amendments to the tuition fees motion (see 9.04am) to the vote, I’m told by a Commons source. That means there will just be a straight yes/no vote on the Vince Cable motion at around 5.15pm.

10.52am: According to a survey for ConservativeHome , 79% of Tory activists want the party to govern on its own after the general election. Only 16% want the coalition to continue.

The 79% won’t be happy, then, if they read Benedict Brogan in the Daily Telegraph today. He claims that some kind of Conservative-Lib Dem electoral pact is now looking increasingly likely.

At the senior level, Tory members of the cabinet have concluded that it will be difficult to avoid some kind of election arrangement with the Lib Dems. The only significant minister who seems dead set against it is Liam Fox. Others, who just a few months ago were doubtful, have been persuaded both by collegiate proximity to their Lib Dem colleagues and by an enthusiasm for maintaining the pace of radical change …

In fact, the pain Lib Dem ministers are suffering over tuition fees makes it all but impossible to contemplate Tories campaigning hard against them in a general election. “Are we really going to stand a candidate against Nick Clegg? Or against David Laws?” one senior Tory asks. It is now plain that the first plank of an informal pact is in place. Ministers of either party will be given a clear run at their seats on election day.

10.51am: I’m concentrating on parliament and politics today. But my colleague Peter Walker will be covering the student protests on a live blog. You can read it here .

10.37am: Turning to a different subject for a moment, Paul Waugh at PoliticsHome says the localism bill has been delayed again. It was originally due to be published last month. Now it has been delayed until next week, or possibly into the new year. “Sticking points are understood to include a proposal to extend directly elected mayors, as well as plans to end ‘council houses for life’,” Waugh writes.

10.27am: Don Foster, the Lib Dem MP for Bath, has just told BBC News that he has not yet finally made up his mind how he will vote today. That’s worrying for the whips. He was not thought to be a potential rebel.

10.18am: There’s a lot of interest in the Twittersphere this morning in an article that Michael Gove wrote in the Times in 2003 – when he was a journalist, not an MP – rather brutally putting the free market case for university tuition fees. Here’s an extract.

The government is about to introduce a new test for those considering a university career. The central question will be punishingly direct. Do you want to run up a debt of £21,000 in order to go to the best British universities? Some people will, apparently, be put off applying to our elite institutions by the prospect of taking on a debt of this size. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is all to the good.

The first point that needs to be made about the so-called deterrent effect of a £21,000 loan is that anyone put off from attending a good university by fear of that debt doesn’t deserve to be at any university in the first place. Incurring such a relatively small debt to pay for the huge economic benefit conferred by proper higher education is a fantastic deal. Over a lifetime, the direct financial benefit in higher earnings is around £400,000. Those who attend our best universities can expect to earn even more. Borrowing £21,000, at preferential rates, to secure 20 times that sum, is an offer you’d have to be a fool to turn down. And if you’re such a fool that you don’t want to accept that deal, then you’re too big a fool to benefit from the university education I’m currently subsidising for you …

Higher education is now a nationalised industry, with universities utterly dependent on state support for their survival. Like all the nationalised industries which taxpayers had to subsidise in the past, from British Coal to British Leyland, UK universities suffer from grotesque inefficiencies, low motivation, ministerial second-guessing, poor salaries, and a stifling excess of bureaucracy. But at least with British Coal the taxpayer was subsidising the poor. Although it was a hideously inefficient mechanism, giving taxpayers’ money to British Coal did transfer resources from the wealthy to keep working-class people in jobs. The stunning injustice of our current higher education system is that working-class people in jobs are paying taxes to subsidise the wealthy. Because anyone who graduates from university, whatever their social origins, is then in a position to make far more money for themselves than they ever pay out for their degree.

At Next Left, Sunder Katwala has written a post on this with the headline: Has Michael Gove revealed the real thinking behind the fees hike? This answer is actually yes. When I conducted a long interview with David Willetts about this subject a few weeks ago , he was quite explicit about wanting to introduce more market forces into higher education (although these are not arguments that his Lib Dem colleagues have been using with any force).

10.06am: John Denham, the shadow business secretary, has accused Nick Clegg of telling untruths. This is what he told BBC News earlier:

Nick Clegg cannot go through this saying things that are not true. I just heard him say that part-time students won’t pay any upfront fees. [See 9.24am.] It’s not true. The government’s own report says that only a third of part-time students will benefit from the loan system. Two thirds [of part-time students] face higher fees that they will have to pay upfront. There has been too much of this, going around making things up in a desperate attempt to impose the highest university fees of any public university system in the industrialised world.

Denham is right. Part-time students will not have to pay upfront fees, but only if they are studying for a certain proportion of their time. Originally they had to be studying 33% of their time to qualify for full loan support. Yesterday, in a concession, Vince Cable announced that that would be cut to 25% . But any part-time student who is doing less than that – for example, working four days a week but studying one day a week (20%) – will not qualify for help.

As my colleague Patrick Wintour reported in the Guardian last wee k, the business department estimated that two thirds of part-time students would not qualify for full loan support when the threshold was 33%. The department also said it would save a total of £316m between 2012 and 2014 by cutting teaching, fee and course grants to part-time students.

9.58am: Ed Miliband has challenged all Lib Dem MPs to vote against the tuition fees increase.

Today is a day of judgment on the Liberal Democrats. Before the election, they promised families and young people that they would oppose any increase in tuition fees. Today it looks like many Lib Dems will break that promise. To abstain in this vote will simply allow the government to increase tuition fees. I am calling on all MPs – including Lib Dems – to vote against this increase.

9.45am: My colleague Jessica Shepherd, the Guardian’s education correspondent, has sent me this:

The Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) thinktank has pointed out that students who drop out of university have been “airbrushed” out of the argument. In a report, published last month on the government’s proposals, the thinktank states that ministers refer to “graduates”, but do they mean “former students” too?

“The reality is that there will be large numbers of former students without any higher education qualifications with large loans,” Hepi says. “The number of people in this position is likely to increase, firstly because loans will in future be provided to part-time students, where non-completion rates are much higher, and, secondly, because the financial incentives for institutions to ensure that students complete their year of study will be reduced. Under the current arrangements, students who do not complete their year of study are not included when calculating a university’s grant. With fees, universities will retain a part or the whole of the fee that replaces the grant. The penalty that a university suffers if a student drops out will be reduced, if not removed.”

9.40am: Today the Daily Telegraph has published extracts from emails that the National Union of Students sent to the Department for Business apparently showing that the NUS was urging ministers to cut grants and increase the interest students have to pay on their loans as an alternative to raising tuition fees. Here’s an extract from the story:

In one email to the department’s officials, dated 1 October, [Aaron Porter, the NUS president] suggested that £800m should be “deducted from the grants pot” over four years. That would cut total spending on grants by 61%. Mr Porter also proposed the “introduction of a real rate of interest” for student loans.

In an email the following day, Graeme Wise, an NUS political officer, suggested that ministers seeking cuts should start with the “student support” package of grants and loans.

He wrote: “It would be better in our view to first mitigate the cuts to provision by seeing how student support can be better focused at lower cost.” Mr Wise also suggested that the cuts in support could be imposed on students currently at university.

The NUS plans also called for £2.4bn to be cut from the universities’ teaching budget over four years, a reduction of 48%.

A “coalition source” is quoted in the paper accusing the NUS of hypocrisy.

But Porter told Sky this morning that the report was “a cynical misrepresentation of the truth”. The emails were quoted in the Telegraph in a way that was “very selective”, he said. According to PoliticsHome , he went on:

We simply said that Vince Cable’s assertion that fees had to treble wasn’t necessarily the case and there are other ways in which the savings could be made which would not have resulted in fees rising at all.

9.27am: I’ll be focusing on tuition fees today, but there’s a report out from the standards and privileges committee at 11am that could be interesting. It covers Sir John Butterfill, Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt, Geoff Hoon, Richard Caborn and Adam Ingram and it’s about the complaints about what they said to undercover reporters before the election posing as lobbyists trying to hire MPs.

9.24am: Nick Clegg and Vince Cable have both been giving interviews this morning about tuition fees. Here are the key points, courtesy of the Press Association news agency and PoliticsHome .

– Clegg urged students to look at the details of the government’s plans before condeming them.

My message to the students who are protesting is to ask them, one final time, to look at what we’re actually proposing rather than what they are alleging we are proposing. Actually under our system they will all, all the demonstrators, will pay out less per month than they do at the moment. All the part-time students who are demonstrators wouldn’t pay any upfront fees whatsoever. Many of them would never pay the full value of their lone whatsoever.

– Clegg said the government’s plans were “the best possible choice we could have made at this time”. – Cable dismissed the latest Lib Dem poll figures. (See 8.41am.)

I’m sure we will turn this around [in the next four years]. I was chosen as a candidate in my constituency in Twickenham and I think we had about 3% in the polls but I was elected a few years later and our number of MPs has grown progressively since then.

– Cable said that he “didn’t feel apologetic” about his tuition fees decision and that he did not see this as an issue of trust.

I’d love to be Father Christmas and hand out lots of very popular policies and hand out lots of money … but I think trust comes from seeing governments making difficult choices.

– Cable said he was “proud” of what the government was proposing.

I am proud of the fact that we’ve managed to craft a set of proposals which is more progressive than existing arrangements, which does provide universities with a reliable source of income so we can have world-class universities. But it’s not easy politically, I don’t pretend that for a moment, but in government we have to make tough choices. We’ve made them and I think we’ve produced a better system.

– Cable said he had “no difficulty” with Simon Hughes or any other Lib Dem backbencher deciding to abstain.

The abstention is provided for under the coalition agreement. You know the background to this. We would not like to get into this position of having to raise the fee cap. It’s not something we wanted. But we’ve had to compromise under the coalition agreement. Other colleagues like Simon Hughes can and will abstain and I have no difficulty with that.

9.04am: Here’s some more detail about the voting:

MPs are going to be asked to approve a motion tabled by Vince Cable, the business secretary, allowing universities to increase tuition fees to up to £9,000 from September 2012. Under the Higher Education Act, this can be done with a simple vote. Ministers want to get this through now because universities will send their brochures out for 2012 next year. MPs are not voting on the entire package of tuition fee reforms. That will not happen until next year.

Three amendments have been tabled. One, tabled by the Green MP Caroline Lucas, says tuition fees should be scrapped from next year. Another, tabled by the Lib Dem Julian Huppert and the Plaid Cymru MP Jonathan Edwards, says tuition fees should be phased out. These almost certainly will not be put to a vote.

A third amendment says that the government has “failed to convince many people of the fairness and sustainability of its proposals” and that any decision about raising tuition fees should be delayed until the government publishes a white paper. This has all-party support. John Denham, Labour’s business spokesman (and the lead spokesman on this issue, because the Department for Business is in charge of universities) has signed it, as well as the Tories Julian Lewis and Andrew Percy, the Lib Dems Greg Mulholland, Tim Farron, John Leech and Ian Swales and various other Labour, Plaid Cymru, SDLP and DUP MPs. If this amendment gets put to a vote, this is where the rebellion will be strongest.

You can read the wording of the amendments on the Commons order paper .

The debate will start after business questions ends. This could be any time from 12.10pm to 12.30pm. The first vote will take place five hours later, or by 5.30pm at the latest.

8.41am: For the Liberal Democrats, the day of agony has finally arrived. MPs are voting on the government’s plans to allow universities to raise tuition fees to up to £9,000, a huge public spending reform that will in effect privatise arts and humanities teaching at university (because they will lose all government subsidy) and affect anyone planning to go to university in the future.

But it’s also a day that could have profound consequences for the Lib Dems (and perhaps the coalition as a whole). Nick Clegg’s party is going to split down the middle, with potentially more than 20 MPs voting against the government. An opinion poll today puts the Lib Dems on 8% , their lowest rating since September 1990. Of course, a poll is just a poll, and the next general election is not due until 2015. But what happens today, and the fact that Lib Dem ministers will be breaking an explicit promise they made not to vote for a tuition fee increase, could damage Clegg and his colleagues for years to come. This is a big day.

My colleague Allegra Stratton has a list of the Lib Dem rebels at the end of her Guardian story . The debate will start at around 12.15pm and the voting will start at around 5.15pm. I’ll be focusing on this all day, covering all developments this morning and reporting the debate and the results in full. Tuition fees Education policy Public finance Public sector cuts House of Commons Liberal Democrats Liberal-Conservative coalition Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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The UK economy will will grow by less than expected next year, a report by the British Chambers of Commerce predicts.

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– Andrew Sparrow with all today’s political news, including George Osborne’s ‘autumn statement’ on the state of the UK economy – Read Andrew Sparrow’s lunchtime summary

2.04pm: While I wait for the BBC to catch up, here’s some reaction from Graeme Leach, chief economist at the Institute of Directors. He sounds slightly mystified as to why the forecast for the number of public sector jobs being lost isn’t higher.

The really interesting story from the OBR is the slashing in public sector job losses from 490,000 to 330,000. This means that the projected public-sector employment losses are almost half those seen in the 1990s. The peak-to-trough reduction in public spending in the 1990s was 7.4 per cent of GDP. The comparable reduction now is 7.9 per cent of GDP by 2015-16. So the spending squeeze is on a par with the 1990s but the employment shake-out is far less. This is puzzling, even when we allow for a greater burden of the cuts falling on welfare spending this time around.

Leach also thinks the OBR’s growth forecasts are still a bit optimistic.

The OBR’s 2011 GDP growth forecast still looks a bit optimistic even after the downgrade. We face very strong headwinds next year. Real take-home pay faces a sharp squeeze, and the savings ratio is already very low. Throw in ongoing problems in the financial system and anaemic money supply growth, and our judgment is that the economy will be weaker than expected.

1.58pm: Sky have stopped showing the press conference. BBC News are broadcasting it, but their feed seems to be about five minutes behind Sky’s live coverage.

1.55pm: On the change in the forecast for public sector job cuts, he says there is now around 2.5% more money available to pay for general government employment than the government expected in June, because the government is raising more money from welfare cuts than it was planning at that point.

1.50pm: Robert Chote is winding up now. He says he wants to address whether government policies are consistent with balancing the books over the long term.

Public sector net debt “is comfortably on a downward trajectory”, he says.

But demographic change could put pressure on the budget, he says. The effects of the population will eventually put net debt on an upward path, he says.

(I did not realise the OBR was looking that far ahead. Some of the charts in the reports go up to 2050. Chote seemed to be saying that George Osborne’s sums may add up in the medium term, but in the long run he’s going to have to find more money because we’re all living longer.)

1.41pm: Faisal Islam, Channel 4′s economics editor, has spotted an interesting line in the OBR report. He’s posted this on Twitter :

OBR assumes property prices will fall 2.7% in the next fiscal year.

That’s the Daily Express’s OBR story sorted.

1.40pm: Robert Chote is now talking about the Irish bailout. He says the bilateral loan is the only part of the British contribution that will feature in the national finances. He says the details of the loan were not available when the OBR produced its figures. But the sums involved are too small to make a difference to its overall figures, he says.

1.38pm: Robert Chote is still making his opening statement at the press conference.

General government employment is now expected to fall by 330,000 over the next four years. That’s 160,000 fewer than the figure the OBR produced in June. It has changed its forecast because the government is now saving more money than expected at the time of the budget from welfare cuts. But the OBR is predicting a further loss of around 80,000 government jobs in 2015-16.

The deficit is expected to fall from 11.1% of GDP this year to 1% by 2015-16, Chote says.

The forecast for debt is marginally lower than it was in June. But it will still peak at around 70% of GDP.

1.31pm: Robert Chote is summarising his findings at the press conference. I’ve mentioned some of the key findings already.

Forecasts for net borrowing have changed “only modestly”, Chote says.

The government has a “better than 50%” chance of meeting the borrowing targets it has set itself, he says.

On current evidence, the government’s fiscal consolidation is consistent with the targets it has set itself (to eliminate the deficit), consistent with modest growth, Chote says. But he says deciding whether the government is cutting the deficit too quickly is a matter that is beyond the remit of the OBR. He concedes that this is an issue on which there is disagreement.

The recovery will be slower than in the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s, Chote says.

1.25pm: Here’s more from the OBR report:

– The economy has recovered “more strongly” since the spring than the OBR expected in June.

– Growth will be “relatively sluggish” during the medium term.

Our central forecast is that the economy will continue to recover from the recession, but at a slower pace than in the recoveries of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. This relatively sluggish medium-term outlook reflects the gradual normalisation of credit conditions, efforts to reduce private-sector indebtedness and the impact of the government’s fiscal consolidation.

– Growth will be at its slowest in the first quarter of next year, when it will be 0.3%.

– Unemployment will rise to just over 8%, on the ILO measure, next year. Then it will fall to just over 6% by 2015.

– Employment will rise from 29 million this year to 30 million in 2015 “as private sector job creation more than offsets falling public sector employment”.

Robert Chote, the new head of the OBR, is now holding a press conference.

1.13pm: Here are the Press Association snaps about the OBR report:

The Office for Budget Responsibility lifted its 2010 forecast for UK economic growth from 1.2% to 1.8% today but lowered its estimates for 2011 and 2012 from 2.3% to 2.1% and 2.8% to 2.6% respectively.

The OBR slightly lowered its forecast for public borrowing in the current 2010-11 financial year to £148.5bn from £149.5bn.

The OBR slashed its forecast for public sector job losses over the next four years from 490,000 to 330,000.

And here’s the top of the PA story:

The outlook for the economy is “inherently uncertain” and recovery will be slower than after previous recessions, the UK’s tax and spending watchdog warned today.

The Office for Budget Responsibility said the impact of government deficit-busting measures – which include a hike in VAT to 20% and an £81bn package of spending cuts – would lead to “sluggish growth” in the medium term.

The new report, Economic and fiscal outlook, is now on the OBR’s website .

12.54pm: The Office for Budget Responsibility is due to release its revised economic forecasts at 1pm. They should be available on the OBR’s website after 1pm. At 1.20pm the OBR is hosting a news conference.

Here’s the report it produced at the time of the budget in June .

12.41pm: Here is a lunchtime summary:

– Downing Street has condemned the release of confidential US government information by Wikileaks. “Clearly, we condemn the unauthorised release of classified information,” the prime minister’s spokesman said. “The leaks and their publication are damaging to national security in the US, Britain and elsewhere.” (See 11.53am.)

– More than 100 Liberal Democrat activists who stood as candidates at the general election have signed an open letter saying the party will “rightly face many more years back in the political wilderness” if Lib Dem MPs break their promise to vote against an increase in tuition fees. As Patrick Wintour reports in the Guardian today , Simon Hughes is trying to persuade his colleagues to abstain, although Lib Dem ministers are under pressure to vote in favour of the government’s plans. (See 9.31am.)

– Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, has announced that the British Film Institute will take responsibility for distributing grants to British filmmakers following the abolition of the UK Film Council. (See 12.14pm.)

12.14pm: Ed Vaizey, the arts minister, announced today that the British Film Institute will become “the flagship body for the delivery of UK film policy”. He also said there would be a 60% increase in lottery funding for film by 2014. My colleague John Plunkett has a story about this on the Guardian’s website , the culture department’s press notice is here , and the full text of Vaizey’s speech is here .

12.07pm: Lord Mandelson (left) is launching an international consultancy. Sky’s Mark Kleinman has broken the story and he’s got more details on his blog:

Global Counsel LLP, which is expected to be chaired by Lord Mandelson and run by Ben Wegg-Prosser, a long-standing ally of the former Labour minister, has secured a significant investment from WPP Group, the FTSE 100 marketing services giant, I’m told.

The news will end six months of speculation about Lord Mandelson’s post-ministerial career. Global Counsel will advise multinational companies, and I suspect that one of its focuses given his background will be on exploiting opportunities in the world’s growth markets (particularly in Africa, Asia, Latin America and parts of eastern Europe – which dovetail neatly with WPP’s own priority regions for expansion).

11.53am: I’m just back from the No 10 lobby briefing, where the prime minister’s spokesman said the government “condemned” the latest release of US classified material by Wikileaks.

Clearly, we condemn the unauthorised release of classified information. The leaks and their publication are damaging to national security in the US, Britain and elsewhere … Governments need to be able to operate on a confidential basis when dealing with this kind of information and the fact that it has been leaked is damaging.

But the prime minister’s spokesman was not willing to identify any specific leak that may have caused any specific damage to the national interest. When pressed on this, he repeated his general point about the release of information like this undermining confidentiality. He also said that leaks like this “have the potential to damage national security”.

The spokesman also refused to say what David Cameron felt about the news that he had been criticised in the US files. The American ambassador, Louis Susman, briefed Downing Street officials about the leaks at the end of last week, but he did not speak to Cameron, and Cameron has not spoke to Barack Obama about the affair.

10.35am: You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here . And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today’s paper, are here .

As for the rest of the papers, I’ve already mentioned the FT’s interview with Alan Johnson (see 10.02am). Here are some other articles of interest.

– Duncan Gardham in the Daily Telegraph says the government is likely to cut the maximum limit for pre-charge detention for terrorist suspects from 28 days to 14 days when it concludes its review of counter-terrorism legislation. But control orders are likely to stay in a “refashioned” form.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is attempting to hold on to a refashioned version of control orders despite opposition from Liberal Democrats led by Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister.

The Government is conducting a review of terrorism legislation introduced in the wake of the September 11 attacks but the results have been delayed as the Government examines “every option known to man” to head off a Liberal Democrat revolt, according to one source.

It is understood that Mr Clegg believes control orders – the system of curfews under which terrorism suspects are electronically tagged – should be abolished while Mrs May, who has had extensive briefings from the security services and the police, thinks they must be retained.

The row threatens to split the Coalition if Mr Clegg decides to give his backbenchers a free vote.

– And Lord Carlile, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation, suggests in the Daily Telegraph control orders could be replaced by a three-tier system. He has already submitted this idea to ministers.

First, for those who simply want to travel abroad to train as terrorists, we could have foreign travel restriction orders founded on a raised standard of proof of ”reasonable belief” that the individual wishes to leave the UK for purposes connected with training a terrorist.

Second, we could have general travel restriction orders on reasonable belief that the individual has the more developed intent to participate in terrorist activity.

Third, for the most serious cases we could have activity restriction orders, where a judge was satisfied on the much raised standard of the balance of probabilities that the individual is a terrorist. The system would have an increasing scale of restrictions, including curfews (but not compulsory relocation) for the highest tier.

– George Parker in the Financial Times (subscription) says Liam Fox has dropped his pre-election promise to withdraw Britain from the European Defence Agency.

But Mr Fox has written to Lady Ashton, head of the agency, warning that Britain will block proposals for a 3.9 per cent rise in its budget next year, claiming it was “impossible to justify” at a time of austerity.

Although the EDA has a relatively small budget, Mr Fox has always viewed it as an unacceptable reflection of the expanding ambitions of Brussels. However, Mr Fox’s aides confirmed on Sunday that he was no longer committed to an immediate British withdrawal from the agency, although the UK’s longer-term membership was under review.

– Louise Armitstead and Harry Wallop in the Daily Telegraph say the government will today try to persuade companies to stay in Britain “by pledging an immediate reform of two corporate taxes that are blamed for driving businesses overseas”.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, and Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, are planning to announce the overhaul of the Controlled Foreign Companies tax and a lower rate for income generated from Intellectual Property.

Some of Britain’s biggest companies including WPP, the advertising group, and Shire, the pharmaceuticals company, recently moved their headquarters to Ireland citing the complicated and uncertain company tax regime as the main reason.

I’m now off to the Downing Street lobby briefing. I’ll post again after 11.30am.

10.22am: The cabinet is meeting today. It normally meets on a Tuesday, but the date has been changed because David Cameron is going to Zurich tomorrow to lobby on behalf of England’s 2018 World Cup bid. He’s going to be there for the best part of three days, although he is planning to nip back for PMQs on Wednesday.

10.02am: I’ll post a full review of the papers shortly, but Alan Johnson’s interview in the Financial Times (subscription) merits special attention because it’s full of good material. Here are the key points.

– Johnson said he would like Labour to cut taxes.

I’d like to see us reduce taxes. I’d like to see us reduce it for middle-income and low-income people.

– But he suggested that Labour would want to keep the 50p top rate of tax at the election.

It’s very difficult to imagine we won’t need a 50p tax rate. We need it now. It’s very difficult to imagine we won’t need it at the time of the next general election but, as Ed [Miliband] says, we’ll look at it at the time.

– He predicted that the more the public saw of Miliband, the more they would like him.

I think they’ll tune into Radio Ed and find something they really like.

– He said he would take his time before developing policy on issues like breaking up the banks. In the meantime, he would stay quiet on these issues, he said.

I’m a great believer in the philosophy that if you’ve not got anything to say, keep your mouth shut.

– He revealed what was on his economics reading list. When he got the job, Johnson joked about needing to read an economics primer. But actually he briefed himself by reading the Financial Times summer series about the respective merits of austerity policies versus stimulus policies.

9.46am: The Labour MP Margaret Hodge was on the Today programme earlier talking about how she defeated the BNP in Barking at the election. The campaign is the subject of a documentary, The Battle for Barking, which is on More4 tomorrow. According to PoliticsHome, Hodge said that “reconnecting with voters” and focusing on issues like potholes helped her to see off Nick Griffin.

What I did, because there was nothing I could do about immigration and there was nothing I could do about magicking up the jobs and the housing that created massive anger and frustration … everything I did was about reconnecting Labour with our local people … We do our politics now in a different way. I listened to what people have said and even if I can’t deliver on the big issues, I can deliver on things like potholes, pavements.

9.31am: As the BBC has been reporting, more than 100 people who stood as Liberal Democrat candidates at the last election have signed an open letter urging Lib Dem MPs to vote against the rise in tuition fees. The letter, which is on Derek Deedman’s website, explains very directly why breaking the pre-election promise to vote against any tuition fee increase would be so damaging to the party.

There is one thing that sets the Liberal Democrats apart from other political parties; this is that when we say we will do something during election campaigns we then do it in government. This can be seen in how the income tax threshold will rise to £10,000 by the end of this Parliament, the AV referendum on 5th May 2011, the reduction of MP’s to 600, the Pupil Premium and the delay over the replacement of Trident. We have achieved this and more despite the compromises of being in a coalition.

Nick Clegg emphasised this best of all during the televised leadership debates when he said that the Labour and Conservative Parties have given us “Nothing but broken promises”, he also emphasised that “The Liberal Democrats are different”. Finally and crucially he announced how he wanted to create a “New politics” and part of this vision was for parties to do in government as they claim they will in opposition …

We are different and must show that we are; especially now that we are in a position to do so. Otherwise this party will rightly face many more years back in the political wilderness having been labelled as ‘just like the other lot’.

9.21am: Even though half the country is covered in snow and it feels as if we are in the depths of winter, George Osborne has decided that today’s the day to deliver an ” autumn statement “. He will be the first chancellor to deliver one since Norman Lamont in 1992. By law the government has to deliver a financial report on the state of the economy twice a year. Chancellors used to do this in the autumn, and they would use the autumn statement to announce departmental spending allocations. Then Kenneth Clarke combined the autumn statement with the spring budget, because he thought it made more sense to announce tax and spending decisions at the same time, although he also made a summer statement about the economy to comply with the “twice a year rule”. When Labour came to power, Gordon Brown replaced the autumn statement with a pre-budget report, effectively a mini budget. Today, under Osborne, the autumn statement is back.

Osborne will deliver his statement at 3.30pm. Unlike Lamont, he won’t be publishing departmental spending allocations. He has already done that, in the comprehensive spending review. Instead he will be responding to the Office for Budget Responsibility, which at 1pm will be publishing its revised economic forecasts. As Patrick Wintour reports in the Guardian today , the OBR will raise the estimate of 2010 growth from the 1.2% contained in the June budget to close to 1.8% and cut projections for public-sector job cuts by nearly a fifth. Osborne will also publish a growth discussion paper.

Otherwise, it’s a relatively quiet day. The Wikileaks story is, of course, huge, but largely I’ll leave that to my colleague Matthew Weaver, who is covering it in a live blog . I’ll focus on the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. George Osborne Economic policy Andrew Sparrow guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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