Ministers are working to ban political donations made with cryptocurrency but the crackdown is not likely to be ready for the elections bill in the new year, Whitehall sources have said. Rowena Mason has the story.

Planning ministers have delayed a decision on a new Chinese “super-embassy” in London until January, PA Media reports. PA says:

In a letter to concerned parties, released by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), the Planning Inspectorate said the deadline had been pushed back to 20 January.

The letter said the extension followed a letter from the home secretary and foreign secretary saying they had reached “an arrangement” with the Chinese government on “consolidating” Beijing’s diplomatic presence in one site.

Housing Steve Reed had previously extended the deadline to 10 December.

MPs from across the political spectrum have urged the government to reject China’s application for a new embassy on the site of the former Royal Mint, citing security concerns.

The decision has already been delayed at least twice.

Steven Swinford from the Times says the government is now expected to approve the project in January, around the time Keir Starmer is due to visit China. In a post on social media Swinford says:

The government is expected to formally approve a new super-sized Chinese embassy in the heart of London next month after being given the green light by MI5 and MI6.

The Home Office and the Foreign Office, which represent the services, submitted their formal responses last week. They did not raise any objections

I was told they were happy as long as all Chinese diplomats were relocated to the new embassy. Someone said, only partly joking, that it was to ensure that ‘all the spies were in one place’

However their late response means that Steve Reed, the housing and local government secretary, needs more time to consult other bodies as part of the planning process

Claire Waxman, who will start as the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales in the new year, has issued a statement implying that she supports the plans to restrict access to jury trials.

She says she will scrutinise the plans from the viewpoint of victims, and that the government must listen. But “the status quo is untenable”, she says. She says:

Our courts system is currently failing victims on a scale that is unsustainable and unacceptable. With backlogs projected to reach over 105,000 cases and trials already being listed in 2030, we are asking the impossible of victims. This distress compounds their trauma; to many, this is justice in name only.

The sheer scale of the challenge before us means that ‘business as usual’ is no longer an option. As Sir Brian Leveson himself has rightly stated, tinkering around the edges will not suffice. No amount of efficiencies, funding, or extra sitting days alone can fix a system this broken. We are past the point of sticking plaster solutions.

This crisis demands bold decisions and radical reforms. Above all, we need action now. The longer we delay, the harder the road to recovery becomes. Every day the backlog grows, victims’ access to justice diminishes further.

During his Commons statement David Lammy, the deputy PM and justice secretary, said that using juries to decide criminal cases was unusual in other common law jurisdictions. He went on: “And, let’s be honest, it’s a peculiar way to run a public service.”

Jess Brown-Fuller, the Lib Dem justice spokesperson, said that she was troubled by this phrase. She explained:

David Lammy’s description of jury trials as “a peculiar way to run a public service” is deeply concerning. Jury trial is a cornerstone of our justice system and a fundamental safeguard of liberty and fairness. It’s not a peculiar inconvenience; it’s a fundamental right.

The answer to fixing the justice system does not lie in taking a sledgehammer to jury trials. Any solution worth its salt must first tackle the myriad of shocking inefficiencies that plague our justice system and waste countless hours of sitting time.

The Law Society of England and Wales, like the former lord chief justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (see 3.27pm), has said that the government should have stuck to the Leveson plan to restrict the use of jury trials.

In a statement, Brett Dixon, the society’s vice president, said:

Sir Brian Leveson’s recommendations, including two magistrates sitting alongside a judge in the new court, retained an element of lay participation in determining a person’s guilt or innocence. The government’s proposals remove this.

Allowing a single judge, operating in an under resourced system, to decide guilt in a serious and potentially life changing case is a dramatic departure from our shared values.

The government cannot justify stripping away this fundamental right without publishing clear evidence that putting more cases in the hands of a single judge will tackle the horrendous backlogs in our courts.

The Leveson proposals, while an uncomfortable compromise, were understandable given the extensive challenges the criminal justice system faces including unacceptable delays for victims, witnesses and defendants. Going beyond them is not.

The Commons public accounts committee is set to launch an inquiry into the crown estate following questions over its lease of Royal Lodge to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

The PAC announced the inquiry as it published the unredacted lease given to Mountbatten-Windsor, and letters about the arrangement from the Crown Estate and from the Treasury.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the PAC chair, said:

We would like to thank The crown estate commissioners and HM Treasury for their considered responses to our questions.

In publishing these responses, the public accounts committee fulfils one of its primary purposes – to aid transparency in public-interest information, as part of its overall mission to secure value for money for the taxpayer.

Having reflected on what we have received, the information provided clearly forms the beginnings of a basis for an inquiry. The National Audit Office supports the scrutiny function of this committee.

We now await the conclusions the NAO will draw from this information, and plan to hold an inquiry based on the resulting evidence base in the new year.

The PAC will consider what witnesses it wants to call to give evidence once it has considered all the written submissions.

In theory it could summon Mountbatten-Windsor to appear. But there is no precedent for a member of the royal family giving evidence in person to a parliamentary committee in modern times and, if the committee were to invite Mountbatten-Windsor, given his approach to public scrutiny, he would probably refuse to appear. The committee does not have the power to force him to attend.

The Lammy statement is over.

PA Media has filed a good explaining giving more details of the backlog in crown court cases in England and Wales that has led to David Lammy proposing to limit access to jury trials. PA says the backlog is at a record high, with sexual offences accounting for a growing proportion of cases with the longest delays.

Here is the PA explainer.

How large is the overall backlog?

There were 78,329 outstanding cases in the crown court system in England and Wales as of 30 June 2025.

This is a record high and is up 10% from 70,893 a year earlier.

The backlog has more than doubled in the past six years, having stood at 34,184 in June 2019.

How long have cases been in the backlog?

There were 19,164 cases in June 2025 that had been open for at least a year, up 17% from 16,378 a year earlier.

It is the highest number of cases open for at least 12 months since current data began.

Some 5,913 cases had been open for at least two years.

This number peaked at 6,298 in April-June 2023, since when it has fallen slightly.

How long are defendants waiting for cases to be completed?

The median average time from charge to completion for defendants dealt with at crown courts stood at 179 days in April-June 2025.

This is up slightly from 176 a year earlier, but is below the peak of 222 days in October-December 2021.

Before the pandemic, this figure stood at about 140 days.

In cases sent to trial where a not guilty plea was entered by the defendant, the median duration from charge to completion in April-June was 392 days.

This is down year on year from 414 and is below the peak of 448 days in April-June 2023.

But it is well above the pre-pandemic level of around 250 days.

How does the backlog of cases break down by type of offence?

Nearly a third of the crown court backlog at the end of June were cases involving violence against the person (31%), with around one in six being sexual offences (17%) and around one in seven drug offences (14%).

What offences make up the cases with the longest delays?

Sexual offences account for a growing proportion of cases with the longest delays in crown courts in England and Wales.

Nearly one in five (18%) backlog cases that had been open for at least two years as of the end of June 2025 were for this category of offence.

Some 431 rape cases had been open for at least two years as of June, compared with 273 12 months earlier and 261 in 2023.

Martin Vickers (Con) says the Tony Blair government tried to bring in plans like this, but had to abandon them. He urges Lammy to apply a sunset clause to these plans. That might be the only way the government can get them through the Commons.

After Lammy earlier said these plans would be permanent (see 1.14pm), he dismissed a subsequent suggestion, from the Labour MP Kim Johnson, for the law to be subject to a sunset clause (a time limit, after which the law would lapse). Lammy told Johnson he did not think that would be appropriate.

And he tells Vickers that the situation is “vastly different” from the Blair era.

Sarah Russell (Lab) says she is particularly worried about people being denied trial by jury if they are charge in relation to the right to protests, where the law has been tightened a lot by governments of both parties. She says juries should continue to be involved in these cases, even if they are “either way” offences (where, under Lammy’s plans, cases would not go to a jury).

Lammy says it should be up to magistrates and the judiciary to decide.

Jeremy Wright, a former Tory attorney general, asks if Lammy views these changes as a temporary, emergency measure, or if he expects them to be permanent.

Lammy says he expects these changes to be permanent.

He suggests changes in the nature of evidence considered in sexual offence cases, like smartphone evidence, means that backlogs are likely to be an ongoing problem.

Robert Jenrick is responding to Lammy.

He calls him the “Lammy dodger”, accusing him of refusing to come to the Commons to tell MPs about prison release errors. (See 10.37am.)

He says that Lammy and Keir Starmer are both on record as highlighting the importance of the jury system.

Referring to Lammy’s comments about Magna Carta (see 8.59am), Jenrick dismisses the idea that medieval barons would have approved his plans.

He claims that, if Lammy were willing to fund more court sitting days, the goverment could address the courts backlog without reducing access to jury trials.

And he claims the plans announced today will be “the beginning of the end” for jury trials if they are allowed to go ahead.

Lammy says he is going to follow Leveson’s recommendations.

Cases where a sentence is likely to be three years or less will be heard by a judge, he says.

And he says he will remove the right defendants have in some cases to choose what sort of trial they can. He says other judicial systems do not let defendants choose a jury trial, as people can do in England and Wales.

He says Leveson thinks this will lead to cases being processed 20% more quickly.

He says that he will give magistrates longer sentencing powers. He says they will be able to sentence people for up to 18 months.

He says he may extend that to two years, if necessary.

And, for trials that are likely to be long and complicated, judges will hear them without juries.

But juries will continue to be “the cornerstone of the system for the most serious offences”, he says. Cases likely to attract a sentence of more than three years will go before a jury, including all indictable-only offences.

David Lammy, the deputy PM and justice secretary, is making his statement to MPs now.

He says Sir Brian Leveson provided the government with a blueprint for “once in a generation reform”.

A quarter of police forces in England and Wales are yet to implement “basic policies for investigating sexual offences”, an official report has found, with women still being failed despite promises of change after the murder of Sarah Everard four years ago. Vikram Dodd has the story.

Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, will make a statement to MPs on this after the David Lammy statement about courts.

The Treasury committee’s hearing with the two most senior figures at the Office for Budget Responsibility, Prof David Miles and Tom Josephs, has now finished. Here are some of the main points.

• The OBR declined to criticise Rachel Reeves over the speech she gave at the start of November implying that she would need to raise income tax. The Tories have claimed that she lied when she gave the breakfast-time speech in Downing Street on 4 November because she had been told by the OBR that she was likely to meet her fiscal targets, but the speech implied she had a big black hole to fill. Asked about this, Miles told the committee:

My interpretation was, and others might interpret differently, that the chancellor was saying that this was a very difficult budget and very difficult choices needed to be made.

And I don’t think that that was in itself inconsistent with the final pre-measures assessment we’d be made which, although it showed a very small positive amount of so-called headroom, it was wafer thin.

• But the OBR said that any claims that Reeves received better forecasts from it after her 4 November speech were not true. But he did not explicitly blame the Treasury for those claims. Miles told the committee:

It’s certainly true that there wasn’t any immediately good bit of news in that particular window …

I don’t think it was misleading for the Chancellor to say that the fiscal position was very challenging at the beginning of that week.

Whether a message was then put out to say ‘well, it’s less challenging by the end of the week’, I don’t know, and I don’t know where that message would have come from.

It certainly didn’t reflect anything that was news from the OBR being fed into the government.

When it emerged later that month that Reeves had dropped her plans to raise income tax, some journalists were briefed privately by government figures that she had changed her stance because updated OBR forecasts were better than before. Reporters believe they were misled. The OBR had presented the Treasury with forecasts that, in some respects, were better than expected, but that happened before the 4 November speech, not after it.

• The OBR complained to senior Treasury officials in the run-up to the budget about a flurry of leaks that it said spread “misconceptions” about its forecasts, MPs were told.

• The OBR has denied being at war with the Treasury. Asked about this, Miles told the committee:

I wouldn’t say we were at war with the Treasury.

I mean, we have a very close relationship with the Treasury. In fact, we rely not just on the Treasury but other departments in government for analysis of many sorts of measures.

Robert Peston, ITV’s political editor, has more on the hearing on a post on social media here. He concludes:

The disagreement between the OBR and the political Treasury is not over what the Chancellor actually did in the budget.

It is about what journalists, voters and investors understood for weeks before the budget about the health of the public finances and how the OBR’s assessment was changing - which the OBR saw as seriously wrong.

David Lammy has spoken of his own “traumatic” experience of being racially abused at school as he called on Nigel Farage to apologise for comments he allegedly made while a teenager, Daniel Boffey reports.

The Department for Education has today launched what it describes as “the biggest national conversation on Send [special educational needs and disabilities] in a generation”. The consultation will run until the end of January, ahead of the publication of plans to reform Send provision in England next year.

Last week the Office for Budget Responsibility highlighted a £6bn shortfall in funding in 2028-29, rising to £9bn in 2030-31. The DfE says Send reform should be able to lead to costs being reduced, but it has not explained, and parents worry that provision will be cut back.

In its news release, the DfE says:

The government inherited a Send system on its knees, with too many children let down and parents fighting just to be heard. Building on conversations to date, the government is now launching a public engagement campaign, spanning every region of the country, putting families at the heart of its plans to create a reformed SEND system that will stand the test of time.

Minister for school standards, Georgia Gould is hosting nine face-to-face events, run in partnership with the Council for Disabled Children, and five online events covering the department’s five principles of reform. This will provide tens of thousands spaces for parents, families and the sector to share their views – opening up a direct line to the people who know the system best.

Today the Institute for Fiscal Studies thinktank has published a report describing the scale of the problem. Darcey Snape, one of the report’s authors, said:

The special educational needs system in England is a mess – with big fiscal costs as well as costs to children, their families and their schools. New forecasts published alongside last week’s Budget provide welcome clarity on the scale of the fiscal challenge, and should make the problem harder to ignore.

The former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner will lay an amendment on Wednesday to speed up the workers rights’ bill, after “considerable anger” that unelected Lords forced the watering down of day-one rights, Jessica Elgot and Pippa Crerar report.

Twelve more prisoners have been mistakenly freed in the past month and two are still at large, David Lammy has said.

As PA Media reports, earlier data showed 91 accidental releases took place between 1 April and 31 October this year.

In interviews this morning, Lammy, the justice secretary, said 12 inmates had been freed in error since he last gave a statement to the Commons on 11 November. He said he had been “reassured” that the two prisoners still missing are not violent or sexual offenders, but refused to give further details about them.

He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:

I’m not going to give details of those cases, because these are operational decisions made by the police, and you’ll understand if they’re about to arrest somebody they don’t want me to blow the cover.

Lammy said he was pleased with a “downward trend” in accidental releases after he announced stronger security checks for prisons in the wake of Hadush Kebatu’s mistaken release on 24 October.

Miles said there were ‘“misconceptions” about the OBR in the material that was leaked or briefed to the press.

He said some reports suggested that the forecasts were fluctuating wildly. That was not true, he said.

And he said some reports suggested that the OBR got to choose what window it would use for borrowing prices when it made its final forecast.

UPDATE: Miles said:

I think we felt that there was a need in that letter to set the record straight on the process by which the forecasts were created by the OBR, in particular to remove some misconceptions about them that we saw circulating in the media …

It might have appeared to some, reading the media, that the OBR came under certain pressure and may have acceded to that pressure on several things, for example removing the window that we used to assess market expectations of interest rates in a way that might have been helpful to the government.

think there was some speculation that we had helpfully come up with extra money, so to speak, some funds found behind the back of the sofa.

Hillier started by asking about the letter sent by the OBR to the Commons Treasury committee on Friday explaining what the OBR told the Treasury in the run up to the budget about its forecasts.

Prof David Miles said the OBR decided to send the letter because there were a lot of misconceptions about the role played by the OBR this time.

He said the letter was meant to be published on budget day. But that was delayed because of the leak of the budget report.

Q: Did anyone from the OBR complain to the Treasury about the pre-budget leaks?

Miles said:

I don’t think there was any formal complaint.

But he said there was more information in the press about what OBR forecasts were saying than was usual ahead of the budget.

There was lots of information appearing in the press which wouldn’t normally be out there and this wasn’t, from our point of view, particularly helpful.

He said concerns were raised with Treasury officials. He went on:

I think it was clear that we did not find this helpful.

Q: Do you know where the information was coming from?

Miles said it was hard to know.

The Commons Treasury committee is taking evidence from Prof David Miles and Tom Josephs, the two most senior people left at the Office for Budget Responsibility after the resignation of its chair, Richard Hughes, yesterday. Miles and Josephs are members of the OBR’s budget responsibility committee – the three-person committee that runs the OBR. The third member is, or was, the chair.

Josephs started the hearing by offering an apology on behalf of the OBR for the early release of its budget report.

Meg Hillier, the committee’s chair, said today’s hearing would not cover that error.

Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary and a cabinet minister when the last Tory government was cutting back on engagement with China, has hit back at Keir Starmer for what he said in his speech last night. (See 9.52am.) She has described the speech as a “love letter to the Chinese Communist party” and Starmer as “Beijing’s useful idiot”.

In a statement she said:

From China’s continued flouting of economic rules to transnational repression of Hong Kongers in Britain, Stamer’s‘reset’ with Beijing is a naïve one way street, which puts Britian at risk while Beijing gets everything it wants.

Starmer continues to kowtow to China and is captivated by half-baked promises of trade. Coming just days after the latest Chinese plot to interfere in our democracy was exposed, his love letter to the Chinese Communist party is a desperate ploy to generate economic growth following his budget of lies and is completely ill-judged.

While China poses a clear threat to Britain, China continues to back Iran and Russia, and plots to undermine our institutions. Keir Starmer has become Beijing’s useful idiot in Britain.

In his speech at the speech at the Lady Mayor’s Banquet last night, Keir Starmer defended his policy towards China and said that the decision by the last Tory government to cut back on engagement with Beijing was “staggering”.

Again, here is the relevant quote in full.

For years the narrative ran that China was the coming power.

Well now it has arrived. And the UK needs a China policy that recognises this reality.

But instead , for years we have blown hot and cold.

We had the golden age of relations under David Cameron and George Osborne, which then flipped to an ice age, that some still advocate.

The result is that, whilst our allies have developed a more sophisticated approach, the UK has become an outlier.

President Trump met President Xi in October, and will visit China in April. Since early 2018, President Macron has visited China twice – and he’ll be again there later this week. German leaders have visited four times, and Chancellor Merz will be there in the New Year.

Yet, during this same period, no British Prime Minister has visited China. And until I met President Xi last November, there had been no leader-level meeting at all for six years.

I’m talking here about the second biggest economy in the world – a nation that accounts for over a quarter of global R&D, and leads in some critical technologies that are key.

With Hong Kong, it is our third largest trading partner, supporting around 370,000 British jobs.

And, My Lady Mayor, I’m also talking about a country that is projecting its power. A permanent member of the UN Security Council, and one of the world’s most powerful militaries that is rapidly growing its nuclear stockpile.

And yes, a country that poses real national security threats to the United Kingdom.

With all that in mind, the absence of engagement is just staggering – a dereliction of duty – because it means that, unlike our allies, we have not been standing up for our interests.

Well, no more.

It’s time for a serious approach – to reject the simplistic binary choice. – neither golden age, nor ice age – and recognise the plain fact that you can work and trade with a country while still protecting yourself.

In fact, we protect ourselves better because we engage.

The British people instinctively understand this. They know we have to deal with the world as it is.

Last night Keir Starmer delivered his speech at the Lady Mayor’s Banquet in the City. Traditionally it is a big foreign policy speech and, although it was overshadowed by the resignation of the chair of the OBR, there was some proper news in it.

In his most critical language about Brexit probably since becoming Labour leader, he condemned the “wild promises'” made by Brexiters that he said had not been fulfilled.

And, in a reference to the parties calling for the UK to leave the European convention on human rights (the Conservatives and Reform UK), he said that to take Brexit as a foreign policy model was “utterly reckless”.

Here is the passage in full.

I want to speak very frankly.

The Brexit vote was a fair, democratic expression.

And I will always respect that.

But how it was sold and delivered was wrong.

Wild promises were made to the British people. And not fulfilled.

We are still dealing with the consequences today, in our economy, and in trust – in the degradation of political debate.

Now I raise this not to rake up the past, but to learn from it – and to use it to inform what comes next.

The idea that leaving the EU was the answer to all our cares and concerns has clearly been proved wrong.

But that same spurious argument is now being made about the European convention on human rights, with the same wild promises being made to the country by the same people: Walk away, and all our problems will be solved.

To consider Brexit a template for our future foreign policy is utterly reckless.

Yes the ideology lives on.

It is an attitude of total impunity that says: insult our neighbours, sever our alliances, choose between the EU and the US, sever links with China.

Some even argue that we should leave NATO.

Let me be really clear about that.

At this moment, when war has returned to Europe leaving the most successful military alliance in history would be catastrophic.

As shadow Brexit secretary, Starmer was strongly critical of Brexit. He also pushed for a second referendum, which critics saw as tantamount to a refusal to accept the results of the 2016 vote.

But, by the time Starmer became Labour leader, the UK had formally left the EU. From that point Starmer was reluctant to says almost anything negative about Brexit, because Labour needed the support of leave voters to win in 2024 and it did not want to say anything that sounded as if they were being told the made a mistake.

Recently, though, Starmer has become a lot more confidence about highlighting the flaws in the Brexit project.

Good morning. David Lammy, the deputy PM and justice secretary, will today unveil plans to slash the use of jury trials in England and Wales. With the backlog of cases due to be heard in courts already at 78,000, and heading for 100,000, Lammy will argue that drastic action is needed to handle a “courts emergency”.

The full details will not be unveiled until Lammy stands up in the Commons. The Ministry of Justice is taking the principle that “parliament must be told first” a bit more seriously than some other government departments on this occasion, and the overnight press briefing was a bit short of detail. But Lammy has also given an interview to the Times, and written an article for the Daily Telegraph, and we know roughly where the decision has landed.

In July Sir Brian Leveson, a senior judge, published a report for the government recommending that “either way” offences, where the defendant can currently choose between having the case heard by a magistrate, or by a jury in a crown court, should instead by heard in a new system, with a judge sitting with two magistrates. According to the Times, Lammy proposes to go even further than Leveson – proposing that these cases should be heard by judges sitting alone.

But in another respect Lammy seems to have pulled back. Last week it emerged that he circulated a paper to colleagues proposing that jury trials should be abolished for all cases except those involving alleged rapists and killers. That generated a colossal backlash, and Lammy has reportedly had second thoughts. When Downing Street responded to the leak last week by saying no final decision had been taken, for once that phrase turned out to be true.

According to the leak, Lammy told colleagues privately there is “no right” to a jury trial in England. Today he is telling the Times that he is the saving the jury system. He says:

I will not be standing up in parliament … and announcing that we are scrapping jury trials, which remains a fundamental part of our system, and is one of the big contributions that flow out of Magna Carta — indeed, to much of the common law and the global community. This is about saving the jury system.

And, in a rare example of a minister taking an interest in constitutional history, he also argues that his changes are in keeping with the spirit of Magna Carta. In the Telegraph he says:

Some argue that reform is an attack on the traditions that define our legal system. They reach for Runnymede and Magna Carta, insisting that nothing must disturb the arrangements of centuries past. These are grand claims but they overlook what Magna Carta actually says. Clause 39 promises the judgment of our peers and the law of the land and, crucially, clause 40 warns that to no one will we delay or deny right or justice.

When a victim waits years for a trial, when the courts are so backed up that criminals fear no punishment, when an innocent person sits under a cloud of accusation – justice is denied. Magna Carta was a protest against state failure. If its authors saw the delays in our courts today, they would not urge us to cling rigidly to tradition. They would demand action.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

10am: The OECD publishes its latest economic outlook, including forecasts for the UK.

10am: David Miles and Tom Josephs, the two most senior people left at the Office for Budget Responsibility after the resignation of its chair, Richard Hughes, give evidence to the Commons Treasury committee.

Morning: Kemi Badenoch is making a visit in London.

11.30am: Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 12.30pm: David Lammy, the deputy PM and justice secretary, is expected to make a statement to MPs about plans to curb the use of jury trials.

2pm: The public accounts committee is due to publish responses from the Crown Estate and the Treasury to questions regarding lease arrangements for Royal Lodge, the home of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

2.30pm: Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, gives evidence to the Commons education committee.

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