Tory MP Robert Halfon quits as minister and James Heappey confirms resignation, paving way for mini reshuffle – as it happened

• A damning inspection report has found multiple failures in the Home Office’s system for awarding care worker visas, including 275 granted to a care home that did not exist.

• Rishi Sunak has denied there is a “crisis” in local government funding despite warnings that well-run councils are on the brink of bankruptcy and local services at risk without more support.

• Sunak has carried out a mini reshuffle, after two ministers who are standing down at the next election resigned from the government. (See 6.07pm.)

• The UK’s leading local election analysts have said the Conservative party could lose half the seats they are defending in the local elections in May. In an analysis published in the Local Government Chronicle, Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher say:

If the Conservatives repeat their poor performance of 2023, when the national equivalent vote put them below 30%, they stand to lose up to 500 seats – half their councillors facing election. Labour may make about 300 gains, with the Liberal Democrats and Greens both likely to advance. We will not know the extent of any Reform party challenge until nominations close, but it cannot be completely discounted.

• Stormont’s leaders have insisted a new body aimed at strengthening links across the UK does not undermine existing political structures of the Good Friday agreement, PA Media reports. PA says Sinn Féin first minister Michelle O’Neill and DUP deputy first minister Emma Little-Pengelly were commenting after attending the inaugural meeting of the East-West Council in London. The forum designed to improve business and educational links between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK was created under the deal that restored powersharing in Northern Ireland earlier this year.

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Downing Street has announced the outcome of a mini reshuffle triggered by the resignation of James Heappey and Robert Halfon. Two MPs have joined the government, two junior ministers have been promoted, and one minister of state has moved sideways (but to the Foreign Office, which probably feels like a promotion).

Nus Ghani becomes minister for Europe (at minister of state level) in the Foreign Office. She was a minister of state jointly covering the Department for Business and Trade department and the Cabinet Office.

Leo Docherty becomes armed forces minister. He is now a minister of state, and previously was a parliamentary under-secretary (a more junior minister) at the Foreign Office.

Kevin Hollinrake, the postal services minister, has been promoted, so he is now a minister of state at the Department for Business and Trade, and not just a parliamentary under-secretary in the same department.

Luke Hall becomes a minister of state in the Department for Education.

Alan Mak becomes a junior minister (parliamentary under-secretary) at the Department for Business and Trade and the Cabinet Office.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has described the two reports published from David Neal today (see 3.21pm and 5.06pm) as “scandalous”. In a statement she went on:

They expose a Conservative government which has lost control of our borders and our border security.

From allowing high security risk flights to swan into the country with zero in-person checks, despite risks from drugs, guns and people smuggling, through to rampant labour exploitation in the social care visa.

Even now ministers are hiding the true scale of the flaws, redacting much of the vital information, and slipping the reports out when parliament can’t respond.

The Home Office has also issued a response to David Neal’s report about Border Force checks at London City airport. (See 5.06pm.) It is more critical than its response to the Neal report covering care worker visas (see 3.56pm), because it argues that Neal’s methodology was flawed and that, as a result, his findings don’t have wider implications for airport border controls.

The Home Office says:

The report highlights inconsistencies in guidance between the Border Force operating mandate and GA [general aviation] guidance and the need to reinforce training for staff. It also identifies where improvements to assurance activity by the national GA team can be achieved. In particular, it is critical of perceived poor performance in terms of the number of GA flights physically met by Border Force at LCY [London City airport] and of the subsequent record keeping. This largely relates to a specific issue at that port where GA flights have been assessed and recorded in a manner that differs from the rest of Border Force and is contrary to standard practice. It results in a misleading picture of performance which national leads had already identified and were seeking to address and is an issue which merited clarification prior to the inspection concluding.

James Heappey has posted a thread on X about his resignation as a defence minister. It starts here. “Endex” is a military term, apparently, to refer to the end of a hard exercise, and the feeling of relief that comes with that.

In his letter to Harlow Conservative association announcing that he is standing down at the next election, Robert Halfon quotes JRR Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings.

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Halfon did not use this line (“you will need no help … among the great you are”) in his letter to Rishi Sunak resigning as a minister. (See 4.23pm.)

The second report from David Neal published today (see 3.21pm) covers how Border Force checked arrivals at London City airport. As PA Media says, Neal says in his report that an inspection identified “a significant risk to security” after it found that private jets were landing in the UK without undergoing proper security checks.

PA says:

A spot-check inspection carried out by Mr Neal’s team at London City Airport in east London earlier this year found “failings at a local, regional, and national level” in Border Force’s response to general aviation – defined as any civil flight not operating to a specific and published schedule.

The inspection found Border Force staff at the airport missed targets on the number of flights they were supposed to check in person.

But much of the key information from the inspection – including how many general aviation flights had been physically met by Border Force staff – was redacted when it was published by the Home Office.

In his report, which was submitted to the Home Office on 14 February, Neal says:

Guidance designed to keep the country safe directs that all GA flights identified as high risk are met by Border Force staff, except in exceptional circumstances. At LCY, only [redacted] were met in 2023. Guidance also directs that a third of low-risk flights are met. Only [redacted] were met at LCY in 2023. This is shocking and something is clearly very wrong.

Local managers told inspectors that they approached GA operations on a ‘resource to risk’ basis given the other priorities they have to resource under the Border Force Operating Mandate. They were satisfied that their operational response was adequate. By any measure this is not acceptable. This is compounded by the observation that nobody in the chain of command for LCY appeared to be taking action, even though they were aware that this was taking place.

On the basis of this spot check inspection, the Home Office needs to urgently examine failings in the Border Force response to GA flights at a local, regional, and national level, and take rapid action to address the GA system failings this report identifies at LCY.

The Conservative MP Robert Halfon has announced that he is standing down at the next election. More surprisingly, he has revealed that he has resigned as an education minister too. He has posted his resignation letter on X.

Ministers who declare they will stand down at the election do not have to leave government immediately, but prime ministers normally want to have people in their team who are looking forward, and geared up to fighting the election, not counting the days until retirement.

With James Heappey also resigning from government (see 4.01pm), Rishi Sunak will need to conduct a mini reshuffle. As yet, we don’t know whether or not this will turn into a bigger one.

Simon Hart, the government chief whip, moved the writ for the Blackpool South byelection in the Commons this morning.

The byelection, triggered by the resignation of Scott Benton, is expected on Thursday 2 May, the date of the local elections.

Armed forces minister James Heappey has resigned, according to sources, paving the way for Rishi Sunak to carry out a mini-reshuffle of his team, PA Media reports. Heappey, the Conservative MP for Wells, Somerset, earlier this month announced his intention to quit as an MP and to stand down as a minister before then.

Alongside the David Neal report into the care worker visa system (see 3.21pm), the Home Office has published its response. It says it does not accept some of the specific details in the report, and it says it does not accept reports published last month, based on a briefing from Neal, saying the inquiry found that 25% of people with care visas were abusing the system. The Home Office explains:

We have concerns regarding the reference within the foreword in this report to another inspection (An Inspection of Illegal Working Enforcement) where care visa holders are purported to have been encountered working illegally in 2 of 8 visits conducted as part of the inspection of illegal working enforcement. This reference has been extrapolated in the media to portray 2 in 8 care workers (around 25,000) are working illegally. The Home Office considers this to be a false representation based on flawed analysis. There is also a lack of clarity as to whether these individuals were working illegally or just encountered on the premises.

But the Home Office does not seem to quibble with the main point being made by Neal, which is that, once care workers were added to the shortage occupation list, the visa system was subject to abuse. The Home Office says this coincided with the start of the Ukraine war, and one reason why enforcement was not tighter was that officials were preoccupied with setting up a system for Ukrainian refugees, “which saved countless lives”.

More interestingly, the Home Office suggests it deserves credit for increasing the rate at which foreign care workers arrived in the country so quickly. This may be fair – but it is hard to square with recent statements from No 10 that net migration is “far too high” and must come down.

The Home Office says:

The government agreed to implement the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) recommendation in February 2022 to allow those working in social care to use the immigration system. This was due to compelling evidence from the committee on the short term need to provide an immigration response to fill roles that were deemed to be in significant shortage.

This work was undertaken during a time when the department was under immense pressure coordinating large scale resettlement efforts for Ukrainians who had been displaced due to the Russian invasion of the same year.

Our response to this humanitarian crisis, which saved countless lives, meant that it took priority over the implementation of the care route. When resourcing allowed, work began at an early stage to support the sector in transitioning to using the health and care visa. This allowed migrant workers to fill the reported 160,000 vacancies in the sector and meet the objectives of the Department of Health and Social Care in using care facilities to facilitate the discharge of individuals from NHS wards to ease winter pressures.

Unfortunately, some bodies operating within the adult social care sector, or masquerading as doing so, abused this opportunity. The Home Office identified these abusive practices at the earliest opportunity despite the operational focus on the Ukrainian response, commissioning focussed compliance activity as early as June 2022.

Last month the Home Office published 13 reports all at the same time from David Neal, the former independent chief inspector of borders and immigration. Neal was a little too independent as chief inspector and he was sacked after he started to leak the contents of some of his reports because he was tired of the way, for month after month, the Home Office was refusing to publish them.

As expected, the 13 reports contained some embarrassing findings. Rajeev Syal wrote about them here.

This afternoon the Home Office has published two further reports from Neal. If anything, these are even more embarrassing.

One report covers the immigration system as it applies to the care sector, covering the period from August to November 2023. It says.

In his foreward to the report Neal says:

In December 2021, the Home Office accepted a recommendation by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to add care workers and home carers to the shortage occupation list. Responding to the needs outlined in the MAC report published earlier that month, the Home Office worked at pace to fit pressing ministerial priorities to help alleviate staff shortages in the social care sector.

This inspection report details the consequences of the Home Office’s limited understanding of the social care sector, its underestimation of demand for the Care Worker visa, the inappropriateness of its sponsor licensing regime for low-skilled roles, and the mismatch between its meagre complement of compliance officers and ever-expanding register of licensed sponsors. There are echoes of previous inspections that have highlighted the consequences of the Home Office’s failure to accurately forecast, such as small boat arrivals. Fundamentally, the Home Office selected a route that was designed for a largely compliant sector and applied it to a high-risk area – migration into an atomised and poorly paid sector is miles away from the recruitment of highly skilled workers being sponsored by multinational corporations. This should have been obvious to Home Office policymakers.

The net effect of these mistakes is that the Home Office created a system that invited large numbers of low-skilled workers to this country who are at risk from exploitation. Moreover, its control measures to mitigate the risk were totally inadequate. There is just one compliance officer for every 1,600 employers licensed to sponsor migrant workers.

This report details the shocking results of the policy’s implementation, including the case of 275 certificates of sponsorship being granted to a care home that did not exist, and 1,234 certificates being granted to a company that stated it had only four employees when given a licence. In just these two examples, up to 1,500 people could have arrived in this country and been encouraged by a risk of hardship or destitution to work outside the conditions of their visa. While the inspection does not detail the extent of this abuse, my inspectors encountered migrants with care visas working illegally in two out of eight enforcement visits they observed during my inspection of illegal working enforcement (August to October 2023).

Neal, who submitted his report to the Home Office on 6 February, does accepted that the Home Office put measures in place in 2023 to address some of the problems he highlighted. But he says this happened too late, and he says “what worries me most is that the Home Office does not appear to have any process to identify the lessons from this debacle”.

Sir Bernard Jenkin (Con), chair of the committee, ends by asking about strategic thinking in government – a pet subject of his.

Q: Do you support setting up a national school of government of some kind?

Sunak says he is in favour of that proposal.

Jenkin says no other civil service around the world does not have a training centre.

Q: Should this offer training for ministers too?

Sunak says there is a training process for ministers already.

Q: Young people are not engaged in politics. Should parliament have something like a future committee, as they have in Finland, to ask the questions about what the country wil be like in, say, 30 years time.

Sunak says that would be a matter for parliament.

Jenkin says departmental select committees would not exist if Margaret Thatcher had not proposed them in a manifesto.

And that’s the end of the hearing.

I will post a summary soon.

Philip Dunne (Con), chair of the environmental audit committee, is asking the questions now.

Q: Do you agree parliament needs to play a bigger role scrutinising the next carbon budget?

Sunak agrees with the general point. He says last time a carbon budget was passed, it was debated for 17 minutes. That is not right, he says. He says Dunne’s committee has put forward helpful ideas on this.

Q: Defra announced yesterday that sustainable farming incentives would have to increase food production. Does that mean you accept food security is a public good.

Yes, says Sunak.

William Wragg (Con), chair of the public administration and constitutional reform committee, goes next.

Q: Are you still committed to cutting the size of the civil service?

Yes, says Sunak. He says he wants to see efficiency savings.

Q: Do you support Lord Maude’s proposal to split the role of cabinet secretary and head of the civil service?

Sunak says he is still considering that report.

Q: What do you think about Liz Truss’s claim that she was undermined by the deep state?

Sunak says that is a matter for her.

Wragg tries again, and again Sunak says that is a matter for her. Wragg asks if Sunak is a member of the deep state, and Sunak replies:

I probably wouldn’t tell you if I was.

This promotes proper laughter.

But it also answers the question, because it does tells us what Sunak thinks about Truss’s “deep state” conspiracy theorising; he is gently mocking it.