Politics live blog - Thursday 3 February

Rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen

10.53am: Here's what the Department for International Development is saying about why it contributed almost 2m to the cost of the Pope's visit to the UK. (See 9.01am.)

DFID was one of a number of Government departments part-funding the Pope's visit to the UK. Our contribution recognised the Catholic Church's role as a major provider of health and education services in developing countries. This money does not constitute official development assistance and is therefore additional to the coalition Government's historic commitment to meet the 0.7% UN aid target from 2013.

10.48am: Sky's Joey Jones has been speaking to Harriet Harman's office about her rejected claim. (See 10.20am.) As he explains on Twitter, it turns out it was submitted under the wrong budget stream. The claim was resubmitted, accepted and paid.

10.20am: Ipsa says there are details of almost 26,000 claims submitted by 622 MPs with a total value of 3.64m being published today.

Inevitably, all the attention is focusing on the information it is publishing about 248 claims from 125 MPs that were not paid, or not paid in full, because they did not comply with the rules. In total, they were worth more than 15,000.

They include:

Nicky Morgan was refused 77 she claimed for a "Big Society" reception.

Bob Russell was refused 346.60 he claimed for advertising.

Harriet Harman was refused 75 she claimed for hiring a venue.

It's not exactly duck pond stuff.

10.12am: Ipsa has now published the latest tranche of MPs' expenses. You can find them here, although it's quite fiddly to use. Some colleagues are saying the site is crashing as they try to get in.

9.58am: Sir George Young, the leader of the Commons, has strongly criticised the! Indepen dent Parliamentary Standards Authority in his submission to the review of how it is operating.

I believe that the current expenses scheme, as designed, implemented and administered by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, is failing in many respects adequately to support MPs to undertake their responsibilities. There are some highly unsatisfactory features of the scheme that are at best distracting, and at worst impeding, MPs from doing their jobs. In addition, some aspects of the new regime are in danger of deterring people from less affluent backgrounds from becoming and in some cases remaining Members of Parliament and are also placing undue pressure on some MPs' family lives. This is unsustainable and it would be unacceptable to the House, if Parliament is to perform the task the country expects.

The full text is on the Leader of the Commons's website.

9.50am: David Cameron has issued a joint statement with the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Spain about the situation in Egypt.


We are watching with utmost concern the deteriorating situation in Egypt.

The Egyptian people must be able to exercise freely their right to peaceful assembly, and enjoy the full protection of the security forces. Attacks against journalists are completely unacceptable.

We condemn all those who use or encourage violence, which will only aggravate the political crisis in Egypt.

Only a quick and orderly transition to a broad-based Government will make it possible to overcome the challenges Egypt is now facing.

That transition process must start now.

9.48am: For the record, here are the latest YouGov GB polling figures.

Labour: 44% (up 14 points since the general election)
Conservatives: 36% (down 1)
Lib Dems: 9% (down 15)
Government approval: -2! 5

At 8 points, that's the largest lead Labour has had in a YouGov poll since the general election.

9.47am: Yesterday the Labour MP Tristram Hunt had an article in the Guardian criticising the government, and particularly the pro-market, Orange Book Lib Dems, for wanting to flog off national assets and having no respect for "little feel for the warp and weft of British life". He was on the Today programme this morning making much the same point. He was debating with Charlie Elphicke, the Tory MP for Dover who is campaign for the port to be taken over by a community trust. In his article yesterday Hunt said that Elphicke's idea was being blocked by "the Liberal Democrats' ideological fixation with the free market". But Elphicke said today that it was civil servants who were opposed to the "people's port" idea. Here's the quote, from PoliticsHome.

It's not about ministers. It's about the Whitehall mandarins [who] do not like the idea of communities charting their destiny and this is what this is about. Ministers need to decide and support this, beginning with Nick Clegg.

9.01am: The Department for International Development contributed 1.85m to the cost of the Pope's visit to the UK. Whitehall spent a total of about 10m on the visit, and the Commons international development committee, which has today published a report on the work of DfID in 2009-2010, has discovered that 1.85m came from the DfID budget. Malcolm Bruce, the committee chairman, wants to know how minister justify this.

Many people will be as surprised as we were to discover that UK aid money was used to fund the Pope's visit last year. Ministers need to explain exactly what this was spent on and h! ow it ta llies with our commitments on overseas aid.

8.44am: Egypt is still dominating the news, and there is not much happening at Westminster today that is likely to knock it off the top of the news bulletins. Still, even a quiet day down here can be reasonably interesting. Here are the items in the diary.

10am: The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority publishes details of MPs' expenses claims from September to October 2010. Rejected claims will be included.

10am: Liam Fox, the defence secretary, gives evidence to a Lords committee about UK/France defence co-operation.

10.30am: Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, answers environment questions in the Commons. She is going to be asked about her plans to privatise Forestry Commission land.

12.30pm: MPs debate a backbench motion tabled by Labour's Stella Creasy urging the government to cap the amount of interest that can be charged in the unsecured lending market. This is a key issue for Compass, which has been campaigning for an end to what it calls legal loan-sharking.

We're also getting three potentially good written ministerial statements: one about public service pensions from the Treasury; the government's proposals for reform of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority from Sir George Young, the leader of the Commons; and Lord Carlile's report on the operation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 in 2010.

As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at about 1pm, and an afternoon one at about 4pm.


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