Dominic Raab claims hotel accommodation acts as ‘incentive’ for small boat arrivals – UK politics live

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Danny Kruger (Con) goes next. He asks if the government has had a consistent growth strategy over the past few years.

Hunt says, with the exception of the mini-budget, there has been consistency.

Baldwin asks about the Office for Tax Simplification. Kwasi Kwarteng abolished this when he was chancellor. Baldwin asks why Hunt has not reversed that. Is that because the tax system does not need simplification?

No, says Hunt. He says he still wants to simplify the system.

He will take that as a personal responsibility, instead of having a body in charge of it.

He says he will be asking his officials to simplify measures before budgets; he just does not think a special body is needed.

Jeremy Hunt gives evidence to Commons Treasury committee about budget

Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, has just started giving evidence to the Commons Treasury committee about the budget.

Harriett Baldwin (Con), the chair, put it to Hunt that the budget projections based on the assumption that fuel duty will rise next year are a “fiction”. She made the same point to Rishi Sunak yesterday.

Hunt said he did not accept that. When it was put to him that he would not be putting up fuel duty by 12p in an election year, he said that he did not know what he would do.

Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s new first minister, has posted a picture on Twitter of his family praying this morning after breakfast in Bute House, the first minister’s official residence.

Severin Carrell has written an article setting out the challenges facing Yousaf in his new job.

Overseas aid budget cut to meet soaring costs of housing refugees in UK

A third of the UK’s overseas aid budget was spent by the Home Office on housing refugees in a poorly managed programme that contained few cost-saving incentives, the government’s independent watchdog on aid has found.

Here is the report from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. And here is our news story by Patrick Wintour.

Dominic Raab claims hotel accommodation acts as ‘incentive’ for small boat arrivals

Good morning. We are getting a statement in the Commons later on plans to stop housing new asylum seekers in hotels, and instead to put them in disused army barracks, on ships – and possibly even on a barge.

Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy prime minister, has been giving interviews this morning and he told Sky News that one reason for moving people out of hotel accommodation, which is costing the government more than £6m a day, was that it was acting as an “incentive” for small boat arrivals.

We must end this perverse incentive through the hotels and more generally with the hospitality that in a broader sense this country gives, encouraging the wrong people, which is the criminal gangs and illegal migrants, to make these very dangerous journeys.

But on Sky, and in other interviews, Raab was less keen to confirm one of the most eye-catching claims in some of the reports about today’s announcement – that asylum seekers will be placed on a barge.

In its story the Times reports:

Ministers have procured an “accommodation barge” capable of holding hundreds of migrants, which is being refitted. They have yet to decide where it will be moored, although it will be in a port rather than at sea.

The Refugee Council said it was “deeply concerned” by the plans, saying the suggested accommodation is “entirely unsuitable” to the needs of asylum seekers.

Asked in various interviews to confirm that a barge would definitely be used to house asylum seekers, Raab just said it was an option. As Sunder Katwala, from the British Future thinktank, explains in this Twitter thread, similar ideas have been briefed by government repeatedly in the past, without actually happening. The Guardian has been told that the Home Office is considering using a former cruise ship from Indonesia. But that might sound a bit too luxurious for papers like the Daily Mail, and so it is not hard to see why their story is about barges instead.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.45am: Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, gives evidence to the Commons Treasury committee about the budget.

Noon: Dominic Raab faces Angela Rayner at PMQs. Rishi Sunak is away at Betty Boothroyd’s funeral.

After 12.30pm: Robert Jenrick, the immigration minister, gives a statement to MPs about plans to house asylum seekers.

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