Rishi Sunak’s immigration conundrum

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘Rishi Sunak’s immigration conundrum’

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Robert Shrimsley
The problem is the Conservatives have lost control of an issue that they have ramped up.

Lucy Fisher
Hello, Lucy Fisher here, the FT’s Whitehall editor. You heard there the FT’s Robert Shrimsley talking to me about migrant numbers here on Political Fix. So welcome. It’s my first time in the hot seat on the FT podcast that takes you inside Westminster. And as Robert indicated, on the menu today is a subject liable to make both the Conservatives and Labour wince — immigration.

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Latest figures show the government is way off target with its pledge to cut the number of people coming to live and work in the UK. I’ll be picking through the reasons why and the politics that underscores this issue with two of the FT’s top political columnists, Stephen Bush . . . 

Stephen Bush
Hello.

Lucy Fisher
 . . . and Robert Shrimsley. Hi Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hi Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
We’ll also be talking about the latest row engulfing Boris Johnson. That icon of blonde ambition may have been 8,000 kilometres away in Texas this week, but that hasn’t stopped him seizing headlines. Plus, trouble in Teesside. We’ll bring you the latest on an FT scoop about the government’s flagship regeneration scheme in the north now under scrutiny amid allegations of cronyism and waste.

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Robert, Stephen, before we get down to the discussions of the week, tell me what’s caught your eye in recent days, Stephen.

Stephen Bush
So for me, the government has abandoned its plans to legislate a new animal welfare bill, judging, I think correctly, that every single opposition amendment or backbench amendment that the government chooses not to accept would lead to them going viral on Facebook in particular for Tories do act on animal cruelty, which was one of the viral stories which helped them lose their majority in 2017. But of course, ironically, this comes at the cost of them going viral on social media for not having done an animal rights bill. What I particularly like about this is it’s a reminder of a very old truth about British politics and a new one, the old truth being people in Britain love animals. They’ll do anything to protect animals other than stop eating them. And then the second truth is the way that social media has disintermediated political power, right? In the past, if you wanted to abandon a bill, one, you wouldn’t have needed to because there would be no concept of going viral for having voted against an opposition amendment. But, you know, you would have talked to newspaper editors, you’d have talked to the stakeholders in the humane society and whatever, and now you can’t. And so, yeah, I think it’s a fun story.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, how about you?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, for me, I think the high point has been a slightly under-remarked aspect of the Suella Braverman speeding affair where she was caught speeding and was offered the chance to have a speed awareness course rather than take penalty points and got into trouble for attempting to fix up a special course for herself on the grounds she was home secretary and couldn’t be seen doing this course with ordinary people. And when that failed, she decided to take the points rather than do the course, which I’ve studied. And I think, you know, 20 per cent of the country’s driving population has done it, absolutely fine. And it just struck me that one of them was going on about how she had to go because she’d abused her position, which I don’t actually agree with. Not enough people thought of the fact that she’d made one of the worst decisions ever in choosing to take the points rather than do the course. And if that’s the calibre of her decision-making, then, you know, maybe she’s not right for the job.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I loved your column, Robert, and I’m sure listeners will have read it too. So two sparkling examples of government. Good judgment from you too. Let’s move on to a third area, immigration. What a mess. We’ve heard repeated government pledges to reduce inward numbers, yet the trend is for ever higher levels. In this week’s PMQs, Keir Starmer hammered Rishi Sunak and his government for presiding over a major increase.

Keir Starmer
They’ve lost control of the economy, they’ve lost control of public services, and now they’ve lost control of immigration. And if he were serious about weaning his government off the immigration lever, he would get serious about wages in Britain and get serious about skills and training.

Lucy Fisher
Well, that was before the official figures came out on Thursday showing that net immigration to the UK has reached an all-time high of 606,000 in 2022. After the numbers were revealed, Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick stood up to parliament to pledge action.

Robert Jenrick
The public rightly expect us to control our borders, whether that is stopping the boats and addressing illegal migration, or whether it’s ensuring levels of legal migration do not place undue pressure on public services, on housing supply or integration. The government is taking decisive action on both counts.

Lucy Fisher
So, Robert, these figures, well flagged, in fact, they fell far short of some of the most extreme estimates that we could have seen inward migration of up to a million. How damaging is this for Rishi Sunak?

Robert Shrimsley
I think it’s hugely problematic for the Conservatives for two reasons. First of all, we’re now at the subject of legal immigration, the stuff the government can control. Setting aside the illegal migration of the small boats where they’ve made pledges and are failing to meet them so far, we’re on to the stuff that the government is in charge of and the numbers are going up at a time when they’ve been promising they’re going to come down. There have been reasons for this, specifically around Hong Kong and Ukraine, exceptional numbers which should begin to taper off. But the problem is the Conservatives have lost control of an issue that they have ramped up. You know, they saw the immigration issue coming towards them. There was swerved into the path of this lorry. It’s a measure of how problematic it is for them that Labour feels comfortable talking about this in prime minister’s questions because this is not a good subject for the Labour party in general. And yet things are so awkward politically for the Conservatives now that Keir Starmer feels happy to raise it at prime minister’s questions and even come up with his own limited suggestions about how to tackle the numbers.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. Stephen. I mean, on Thursday after these figures came out, Rishi Sunak cleaved hard to that pledge in the 2019 manifesto that overall numbers should come down. I mean, notably he didn’t put a figure on what he wants to get them down to. But the problem here is that the economy, particularly the NHS and care sectors, universities, absolutely rely on foreign migrants coming to this country. So is there a way of solving this, of getting the numbers down and keeping the economy sort of trying to grow?

Stephen Bush
Uh, no. Yeah, I mean. (Laughter)

Lucy Fisher
We can end the podcast there.

Stephen Bush
Sorry. I know it’s not a very interesting answer, but, you know, we shouldn’t forget one of the reasons why we have persistently higher inflation than the rest of Europe is we do not have the same ready access to the free movement of people. You can still see it just by looking at the number of vacancies, you know, the fact that Lidl has just had to hand out this very generous raise in the basic rate of their employees, which of course put further pressure on social care because it’s now much more lucrative to work for Lidl than it is in social care, which is why social care is on the occupational shortages list.

So, yeah, in many ways, immigration is . . . well it’s in microcosm, the broader Conservative party problem, right? Whenever we bump into an MP in Westminster, what’s the first thing they’ll say: Oh, you know, I want tax cuts. And then they’ll say, oh, but I’d like more money for the army, or I’d like more money for the hospital. My constituents are angry about potholes. And broadly speaking, the median anti-immigration voter in the United Kingdom goes, that number’s too high. I’m glad we helped the Ukrainians, I’m glad we have so many Hongkongers, I’m glad there are people working in the NHS, I’m glad there are people picking fruit, I’m glad there are people working in social care.

So basically the solution for the Conservative party would be to invent time travel, (Lucy laughs) go back to 2010, someone will hold David Cameron by the lapels and go, mate, this promise is something you can’t keep. It will destroy your own premiership because it will be one of the reasons why we leave the EU, forcing you out, and it will become this albatross around the neck of your successors. But if you’re Rishi Sunak, what else is there to do?

Robert Shrimsley
I’ve gotta say, by the way, I would not want to be one of the early users of a time machine invented by the Conservative party. I think I’d want to see it road-tested a few times. The other point is it plays to some of the economic and employment structures that the Conservatives had immediately post-Brexit. One of their big arguments was industry has got too hooked on low-cost labour. They need to mechanise, automate, get productivity gains and also pay British workers more. And that was quite an attractive slogan back in 2019. But now we have an inflationary situation where the last thing you want is employers being forced to pay their workers more right now. So the problem is if they were to be successful in implementing reductions in immigration, they’re actually gonna add to the inflationary problems that currently trying to tackle.

Lucy Fisher
It’s really interesting because one thing I’ve noticed that’s really entered this debate is the idea that you’re getting people to come in to do low-skilled, low-wage jobs. Increasingly, I’m hearing Tory MPs talk about benefits, wasters and scoundrels who don’t want to get off the couch and would prefer to claim, you know, they’ve got mental health issues. It feels to me there might be a coming return to some of the sort of anti-benefits culture that we had under the coalition era. But Robert, that is an issue, isn’t it? A sort of design fault in the post-Brexit visa system, as has been pointed out by Edward Leigh in the Commons, Tory MP, who said the median salary in the UK is £33,000 a year and yet the minimum threshold salary to come to this country is £26,000 a year. So people can come in for lower-pay jobs.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah. Social care is a particularly good example. The sector is short of people. The reason the pay is so bad in social care is because the government won’t fund it adequately, either directly or through its grant to local authorities. So it goes back to Stephen’s entirely correct point, which is that they want all things and you can’t have them. Either you want a properly functioning social care sector or a properly functioning NHS or a thriving hospitality sector, or you want wages to be held down and you want lower immigration numbers. The problem is they’re trying to square a circle. It’s not doable at the moment.

Lucy Fisher
Stephen, part of me wonders whether if the government could get a grip on so-called illegal migration. If they could stop the boats, then there could be more of an argument made for legal migration. It feels to me that legal migration is partly a problem in tandem with illegal migration. What do you make of that?

Stephen Bush
So maybe, I guess the difficulty is ultimately, and spoiler alert, they ain’t gonna stop the boats, right? So if the boats are the aggravating issue then, you know, it’s a bit like saying I could be the first man on the moon if we hadn’t gone there. We have gone there.

Lucy Fisher
Good for me, I can’t be proved wrong.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. I guess the long history of immigration policy in the UK is we have periods of liberal immigration policy followed by public backlash and restriction. We see that in the invention of the first passports in 1905, after a prolonged period of Jewish refugees fleeing Tsarist pogroms in what was the Russian empire; we see that in the 1950s when we go from having incredible openness to all Commonwealth citizens to the gradual eroding of the rights of Commonwealth citizens and the introduction of the de facto colour bar in 1962. And indeed we saw it in 2016 when the country reacted to a long period of immigration from people in central and eastern Europe by voting to leave the European Union.

So one argument is that what voters don’t like is rapid level of change, and at some point we will see that political reaction again. The other argument is it actually is genuinely different this time because broadly speaking, the groups of people who are coming here are coming from countries where there are already a lot of people who have heritage there already, right? So I think to be honest, if they hadn’t made these impossible promises that they don’t want to keep and they made arguments for the economic choices they wanted to make, they would not be in this mess. The problem is how can you possibly exit from it? You can’t turn around and go, yeah, bad news, guys. We’ve been lying to you for 13 years. The bill for that political strategy which used to work brilliant for us is now coming due.

Now, what would comfort me if I were a Conservative is that it seems to me that the Labour party is basically looking at the trap that David Cameron climbed into and going, well, that trap looks really comfy. (Lucy laughs) I mean, it is true that we have a problem, particularly with reskilling workers, but broadly speaking, skilled workers move. Like every year, basically, 1 per cent of all NHS-trained doctors leave the UK. Skilled workers are mobile. Just ask any fan of a Premier League football club. And what Keir Starmer is doing is saying, oh well, if we skilled people then immigration would fall. That is almost certainly untrue. Broadly speaking, we are in a war for talent, as are all nations in the rich world, and you either compete on pay, which means having fairly hefty tax rises, or you have a measure of immigration to fill some of these jobs and in some cases you have a bit of both.

Robert Shrimsley
It’s very striking the extent to which the Labour party has actually accepted most of the Conservative agenda on immigration. There are differences in tone for sure, and there are differences around, say, the Rwanda policy. But even with the Rwanda policy, the primary Labour argument is that it won’t work. Labour hasn’t accepted the points-based system. It’s basically accepted the changes that they’ve just introduced on making it much harder for dependants of higher degrees to come to this country. They put forward their own proposal of stopping employers being able to pay migrants less than home-born workers. So actually the debate itself is in a very narrow territory of agreement. The consensus on immigration is set in this country. It is that it’s got to be controlled, that the numbers have got to come down. It’s just nobody’s really worked out a particularly credible way of doing it.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, do you think that the public buy Labour’s newer hardline stance on immigration? Because I know it’s an attack line the Conservatives deploy a lot that Keir Starmer is Mr Flip-Flop and you know, previously and maybe really underneath this new disguise, he’s still Mr Open Borders.

Robert Shrimsley
I don’t think people who feel incredibly strongly about immigration put it in their top one or two are likely to be persuaded by the Labour party because the Conservatives are always going to seem more hardline and more convincing in their belief on this. But the problem that the Conservative party have given Keir Starmer the opportunity to attack them on it for their own incompetence. You said this was important and you can’t do it, and Starmer can now make himself look tougher than he intends to be simply by attacking Conservative incompetence.

Lucy Fisher
Well, listen, we’ve got to move on now to another perennial that’s come back to haunt the Conservatives this week, Boris Johnson and party gate. To recap, the former prime minister has been referred to the police by the Cabinet Office over further potential breaches of coronavirus regulations during his time as UK prime minister. Stephen, what have you made of this business?

Stephen Bush
(Sighs) Uhm.

Lucy Fisher
Weary?

Stephen Bush
Ah, yeah. No, I mean, to be honest it is very much like in the that joke’s not funny anymore zone. Look, the serious point is, this is the best thing to happen to Rishi Sunak this month, right? Because although there are lots of people who are very noisy on the right of the party, the average Conservative MP believes Rishi Sunak is their best asset, wants him to lead them into the next election and is increasingly impatient about things that damage Rishi Sunak and therefore by extension the Conservative party. And it both deepens that sense in the Conservative party and it reminds slower learners within some factions of the Conservative party, of which there are some, that they hated it by the end. We forget, right? It wasn’t even party gate that brought him down. It was another scandal and it reminds them of how much they had all come to loathe the whole show by the time it was finally cancelled. And so it’s an opportunity for Rishi Sunak to do something he hasn’t yet done, which is to demonstrate real change, right?

Lucy Fisher
Mmm-hmm.

Stephen Bush
That was Boris Johnson’s great trick in 2019, to make it seem like a new government, not an old Conservative one. That was John Major’s great success in 1992, to make it seem like a new government. That was Gordon Brown’s great failure in 2007. And thus far, I don’t think anyone could say Rishi had made the party look new. I think it’s unlikely he’s gonna take this opportunity, but it does give him the opportunity to kind of very performatively go, oh, this awful corrupt era. Oh, you know, of course he should have the (inaudible) attention I’m gonna vote for it to do something big and visible, which demonstrates this is a fresh start for the Conservative party. As I say, I think it’s unlikely he will take that.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, well, it’s quite a murky business, isn’t it? Because, I mean, one of the ironies I was really struck by is that it was the government-funded lawyers working on Boris Johnson’s behalf for the Covid inquiry who discovered in his official diary and these events at Chequers and Downing Street that they think may have broken the rules. Now, of course, Johnson’s team say the allegations are totally untrue and have called the handling of the situation bizarre and unacceptable. Robert, is there something a bit fishy about the way this has been handled? I mean, the pandemic is, for all intents and purposes, ancient history to many people. Are the police charging anyone else in the country for possible historic breaches?

Robert Shrimsley
Can I just say, I think I’m shocked that you’re just not prepared to take a denial from Boris Johnson at face value. I mean, he’s denying. I think that’s enough. Honestly, what is the country coming to? Is there something fishy about this? I don’t actually think there is. I mean, I think it suits the most rabid Johnson defenders to claim . . . 

Stephen Bush
Are there any non-rabid Johnson defenders left? I mean, at this point . . . 

Robert Shrimsley
No, but there are libel lawyers (Laughter) to try and divert attention from the possibility that he broke lockdown rules in a whole load of other ways we hadn’t previously conceived. I say, look, it’s just proof of the plot to get him. There is an element of sort of belt and braces. Oh, we found this out. We better tell the police. I don’t think the police are going to thank them for having this information passed over. I don’t think they want to have a look at this. But I suspect there is an element which we just have to do it this way. Do I think that they might have been more obliging if the Conservative government hadn’t spent three years completely rubbishing the entire civil service, the government legal department, making them out to be the enemy? Do I think they might have been more friendly in their approach to this? Well, it’s possible, but I don’t think this is a conspiracy. I think they found it and they’ve passed it on. And the only blame if blame is to be apportioned for this lies with the person who may have broken the rules.

Lucy Fisher
And what do you make of Stephen’s point that Sunak could and should perhaps use this as an opportunity to really distance himself from Johnson and frankly, try and crush him? I’m always struck by the regrets of those around Blair, who, looking back during the Corbyn era, said, oh, you know, when Corbyn and McDonnell, with their faction on the left were down but not out, it was a real mistake not to bury them and to leave open a route for them to make a comeback. Could Sunak fall into the same trap here with Johnson?

Robert Shrimsley
I don’t know. Obviously the scenarios Stephen described. I mean, that’s what would happen in the West Wing. But in Westminster, I just don’t think it’s viable for Sunak to orchestrate the destruction of Boris Johnson. But happily for him, he doesn’t have to. Because if the privileges committee decide that he’s broken the rules sufficiently to merit a 10-day or more suspension, the trigger for a potential recall and a by-election, that would almost certainly become a free vote matter in the House of Commons. I don’t think Sunak would wish to whip it in Boris Johnson’s favour and I wouldn’t wish to whip it against him. So it becomes a free vote and he probably doesn’t need to do anything. I can’t imagine him voting against Boris Johnson. I think he might be strategically out of the country when the vote comes. Anybody who wants to be leader of the Conservative party won’t vote against Boris Johnson because there’s no upside for them. But I think there are enough who might just slip away and let the non-conservative majority carry the day. So, I don’t think Rishi Sunak has to show himself to be brave on this occasion to get the desired result.

Lucy Fisher
Well, we’ll have to come back to this when the privileges committee into Johnson reports, which could be a matter of weeks away now. Robert, Stephen, stay with me. We’ll come back to you a little later.

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Lucy Fisher
But first, I wanted to hear a bit more about a big scoop by the FT’s north of England correspondent, Jennifer Williams. She’s been closely following the controversy surrounding the redevelopment of a large industrial site on her patch. It’s a saga that has all the hallmarks of a great novel: allegations of cronyism, waste and secrecy and the involvement of a Tory mayor once seen as the government poster child for levelling up. And here to tell us more is Jen herself. Hi, Jen.

Jennifer Williams
Hi.

Lucy Fisher
So just to remind listeners, this redevelopment scheme in Teesside has been overseen by the Conservative party’s highest profile regional mayor Ben Houchen, who’s defended his handling of the project. In fact, his 2020 election campaign centred on this particular pledge.

Ben Houchen
I stand before you to make another promise today. If elected, I’m announcing that I will bring back steelmaking to Teesside. This is a solemn pledge to the people of Teesside, Darlington and Hartlepool to right that significant injustice. I will work tirelessly to deliver the investment and jobs needed in our steel industry.

Lucy Fisher
So Jen, that was Houchen’s original promise to voters. You’ve now published a huge in-depth investigation that’s turned up a lot of curious connections. There’s a whole host of characters, many of whom have business links to each other. At its simplest, tell us the nub of your findings.

Jennifer Williams
So this project is probably the government’s biggest levelling up project — certainly its most high-profile one. So obviously levelling up is supposed to be their policy designed to close regional economic divides. So Teesworks, which is the name of the project which sits inside Teesside freeport, is the biggest of those and it has always been a very high priority, not only for Ben Houchen himself as the Conservative mayor of Teesside, but also for a lot of the senior ministers in government, both under Boris Johnson’s administration and now under Rishi Sunak’s, as Rishi Sunak is a particularly big fan of freeports. So it’s politically significant for that reason and it’s also economically significant because it is Europe’s biggest brownfield site, and the idea was that they would raise it from the ashes. They would replace the jobs that were lost when Redcar steel site closed in 2015 with modern green industrial jobs, whether it’s wind farm jobs or hydrogen or carbon capture or whatever the case may be.

And essentially Ben Houchen oversaw a really big land assembly project that saw them collect together all of these post-industrial plots of land under the guise of the South Tees Mayoral Development Corporation. Essentially, these are bodies which are aimed at fast-tracking development, kind of cut through red tape. So he oversees that body and that body’s job was to get this site developed.

What seems to have happened since the outset in 2017, which is when he was elected and the project kicked off, is that we’ve gone from a position where there was a reasonable amount of local consensus about how that should be done and the government was gonna put in large amounts of money. It’s put in over £200mn to date to clean up very toxic land because it’s got decades of remnants of industrial activity on it. And then bit by bit, they would parcel up the land, they would clean up the land and they would start leasing that out. And then the revenue from each of those tenancies would then gradually allow them to clean up more plots of land over about a 25-year period. It was kind of broad agreement that this was the best way forward.

And then early 2020 onwards, two developers, Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney, have come into the picture and they are local Teesside developers and through a series of deals, they have essentially ended up with 90 per cent of the shares in this project. So it’s gone from public ownership to almost entirely private ownership, and they are also taking half of the proceeds from the sale of scrap metal on the site, which previously would have been used by the public sector to clean up the land and so on. And Ben Houchen’s explanation for this is that we needed to move more quickly than we originally anticipated.

We’re now in a freeport as of 2021, and the freeport provides time-limited tax incentives for the businesses that will move into it. So we’ve only got five years to clean up this land. We don’t have enough money to do it in that period of time, so what we’ve done is we’ve transferred these assets to these developers, and the developers will then take on the liabilities for the remaining clean-up of the land. One key reason that this is so controversial is those decisions took place in private, and that has kick-started a real debate on Teesside that has now reached Westminster about how and why these deals were done, whether they were good value for money. And really the nub of all of this is the kind of lack of evidence to date that these developers have actually put any of their own money into the project, but they have definitely taken steel dividends out from the sale of the scrap metal. And fundamentally, that’s at the heart of the row that’s now going on. 

Lucy Fisher
Well, as I think all listeners will understand, this has all come to light, particularly how Ben Houchen has transferred without public knowledge 90 per cent of the Teesside steelworks to two local developers, thanks to your painstaking investigation, Jen. And I know you’ve told me you’ve been looking at all this for a year, so it’s this sort of public service journalism that the FT is all about. And this is clearly so serious that Michael Gove has this week announced an independent investigation. Tell us a bit about that and why this investigation itself has come under scrutiny.

Jennifer Williams
Yeah, so one of the first things I would say about the journalistic side of this is that Private Eye has done an immense amount of work on this and I think they started publishing articles about the real kind of detailed financial questions about the project about last summer. So it’s been a very difficult story to get to the bottom of, partly because of the private sector involvement, and particularly since 2021, when the majority of the project has been in the hands of the private sector. That means a lot of things are essentially behind the wall of commercial confidentiality. So even if you put a freedom of information request in, you’re not necessarily going to get the information that you’re looking for. In many respects, that fuels the suspicions that exist because people don’t really feel like they have a completely clear picture of it.

What, increasingly, people have been saying — and this includes the Labour party, but it includes other experts in the legal and audit fields — what they’ve said is, really, the only way we will get to the bottom of whether this has been done in a way that’s value to the taxpayer, but also whether due process is being followed, whether governance has been robust enough is to get the National Audit Office to go in and have a look at it and open up the books and actually understand how some of these processes worked and how the deals were made and how the math stacks up.

The issue with that is that the National Audit Office doesn’t have the ability unilaterally just to go in to have a look at a local body’s accounts. There used to be a body called the Audit Commission whose role was essentially that, and that was scrapped after the 2010 election under the coalition. So since then, local authorities have hired their own private auditors to do their books. And there’s a kind of longstanding issue with weaknesses in the local audit market and it’s widely recognised that system is not particularly fit for purpose.

So people have said, well, the National Audit Office, although it’s not normally its role, it should go in, but that then requires the agreement both of the mayor, who has agreed and said he would welcome them to come in and clear everything up, but also the relevant minister, which in this case is Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary. People had been hoping that he would say yes to that, but on Wednesday afternoon he sent a letter to Ben Houchen saying I’ve decided not to send the National Audit Office in; I’ve decided instead to appoint an independent panel. I will appoint the terms of reference. We don’t know yet who will be on the panel, what their scope will be and potentially how long that inquiry will take place. But he did say that it would look specifically at allegations that have been raised partly by Labour MPs in the area, who have made allegations of corruption and cronyism in the House of Commons, which is strenuously denied by everybody involved in the projects and by the government. And the inquiry will also look more broadly at issues around governance and decision-making at the Mayoral Development Corporation.

So there’s a lot of unanswered questions, and critics, including Labour MPs, are basically saying that is not really sufficient to get to the bottom of what’s actually happened. And it does raise a question as to how exactly you would trigger the National Audit Office to go in in a situation like that, because, of course, there is so much commercial confidentiality around the numbers in the books. And so actually it would be difficult for anybody to meet the threshold that Michael Gove is applying to this in order to send in the National Audit Office. So there’s your controversy. There is going to be an inquiry, but it might not be the inquiry that people wanted.

Lucy Fisher
Fascinating stuff. We’ll have to catch up with you, Jen, as this inquiry unfolds. Jen Williams, thanks for joining us.

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Now Stephen, Robert, you were listening in there to that conversation. Robert, we know that Labour is looking as part of their programme for government at a lot more devolution to the regions. Is this the kind of problems with accountability, with transparency, with good value for money for the taxpayer that are frankly endemic to devolution?

Robert Shrimsley
What, it’s the kind of problem that can be and I think Jen touched on what to me is the crucial point here, which is the abolition of the audit commission by the coalition government. This wasn’t a perfect body, it got things wrong, but it was there to look at spending of public bodies and local councils. And I think clearly what we’re going to need is a body like that recreated. Unless you give the National Audit Office full powers you’re going to need something like this to go and look at finances, to look at controversies. And I think that’s the missing piece for the growing effort to push towards decentralisation.

Lucy Fisher
And Stephen, these kinds of mechanisms, getting rid of red tape were popular in the ’80s with Heseltine, and what he did with the Liverpool Docklands is obviously a big success story. Should we place more faith in these kinds of mechanisms generally if they have the right governance or are there always risks with these things becoming a little more complicated?

Stephen Bush
No, I think if you get the mechanisms right, they work brilliantly. The other missing piece of the puzzle, of course, is local journalism, right? In the 1980s, you still had robust, hugely respected, you know, huge presence in the Westminster lobby, presence on national television, which, with a handful of exceptions, is simply not the case for most local journalism, not just in the UK but across the western world. There is a problem of declining local journalism, and clearly, as we move away from the era of everyone having television there’s going to have to be a conversation about how we fund the BBC. I think alongside that, local journalism is going to have to have some form of public subsidy for it to keep going.

Lucy Fisher
Well, I think we can conclude it’s been a pretty heavy week in the political sphere. I just want to finish by asking if you’ve enjoyed any light relief this week, Stephen?

Stephen Bush
Yes. So I think the thing I’ve enjoyed most this week was Return to Seoul, which I saw for a second time. It is the story of a French woman who is adopted, so she returns for the first time since the early years of her childhood to South Korea. So it was a story of transnational adoption and finding yourself throughout your kind of 20s and 30s. And it’s a brilliant, very clever, very moving film. So the trick of it is there are three languages in it — Korean, French and English — and the audience are the only ones who get the full story, as it were. It’s a brilliant, brilliant film.

Lucy Fisher
Oh, that sounds great. Robert, how about you?

Stephen Bush
Well, I’m afraid I’m a bit lower brow this week. I’ve been on tenterhooks for the final episode of Succession.

Lucy Fisher
Oh me too.

Stephen Bush
It’s coming on Monday. It’s a bank holiday Monday — seems like ages since we had a bank holiday. And I’ve been spending far too much time this week looking at theories for the finale of how this fantastic — it’s very loosely based on the Murdochs — is going to come to an end and anyone who hasn’t been watching you’ve got a bank holiday weekend to watch every episode before the finale on Monday.

Lucy Fisher
That’s one way to waste the sunshine. As for me, this week, I tried National Theatre at home for the first time. I’ve got a 10-month-old baby at home, so it’s not as easy for my husband and me to hit the theatre in person. And we tried Lorca’s Yerma, an update on that classic tragic poem. I’ve got to admit, I was a little bit sceptical beforehand about whether the frisson and electricity of live theatre would work at home on the flat screen. And I’m really sorry to say, even though it had Billie Piper, who I think is a phenomenal actress, I wasn’t really as gripped or as convinced that it was the same kind of experience. So I’m a bit sceptical about trying theatre at home again.

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But listen, that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. If you like the podcast, do subscribe. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. We also appreciate positive reviews and ratings. It really does help spread the word. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, the FT’s Whitehall editor, and produced by Anna Dedhar and Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer and the sound engineers are Breen Turner and Jake Fielding. Original music also by Breen Turner. We’ll meet again here, same time, same place next week.

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