Starmer says Chagos Islands deal will cost £101m a year
At the press conference Starmer is now taking questions.
Q: How much will the deal cost?
Starmer says the average annual cost of the deal is £101m.
And, he says the net overall cost, over 99 years, amounts to £3.4bn.
(Quite how those figure add up is not clear. The PM does not explain.)
He says this is slightly less than the average annual cost of running an aircraft carrier – without the aircraft.
And he says the cost is similar to what allies like the US and France pay to hire bases.
Key events
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Starmer suggests any MPs opposed to deal ‘not fit to be PM’, because they would be risking future of Diego Garcia
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Starmer says Badenoch and Farage have lined up with Russia, China and Iran in opposing Chagos Islands deal
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Starmer says Chagos Islands deal will cost £101m a year
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Keir Starmer holding press conference on Chagos Islands deal
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NEU teaching union threatens industrial action over government not fully funding pay award
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BMA calls for talks with Streeting over 4% pay offer to ‘avert strike action’
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Mahmood says judges to get 4% pay rise, not 4.75% as recommended, but recruitment problems being reviewed
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Prison officers to get 4% pay rise, Mahmood says
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Phillipson says teachers will get 4% pay rise, but schools will have to fund quarter of this from own budgets
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GPs and hospital doctors to get 4% pay rise, Streeting says, and nurses and other NHS staff to get 3.6%
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Members of armed forces to get 4.5% pay rise, John Healey announces
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Government starts publishing public sector pay awards, with senior civil servants getting 3.25% pay rise
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High court lifts injunction stopping Starmer signing Chagos Islands deal
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Starmer suggests any MPs opposed to deal ‘not fit to be PM’, because they would be risking future of Diego Garcia
Starmer says no responsible PM would have put Diego Garcia at risk. Any person who would have done that (ie, any person who would not support this deal, he implies), “is not fit to be prime minister”.
Q: What do you say to people who ask how the government can find £100m a year for this deal, but not money to support people with disabilities?
Starmer says keeping the country safe and secure is the first duty of a prime minister.
Starmer says Badenoch and Farage have lined up with Russia, China and Iran in opposing Chagos Islands deal
Repeating the point made by John Healey earlier, Starmer says all the UK’s allies back this deal.
In favour are all of our allies, the US, Nato, five eyes, India. Against it – Russia, China, Iran and surprisingly, the leader of the opposition and Nigel Farage are in that column, alongside Russia, China and Iran, rather than in the column that has the UK and its allies.
Starmer says Chagos Islands deal will cost £101m a year
At the press conference Starmer is now taking questions.
Q: How much will the deal cost?
Starmer says the average annual cost of the deal is £101m.
And, he says the net overall cost, over 99 years, amounts to £3.4bn.
(Quite how those figure add up is not clear. The PM does not explain.)
He says this is slightly less than the average annual cost of running an aircraft carrier – without the aircraft.
And he says the cost is similar to what allies like the US and France pay to hire bases.
Starmer says the injunction, in a way, was a good thing.
It means a court heard the argument, and approved the government’s right to go ahead with the deal.
The Chagos Islands deal will cost the government £101m per year, the goverment has said.
John Healey, the defence secretary, says without a sovereignty deal, the Diego Garcia base would have become inoperable.
That is why the PM has signed the sovereignty deal, he says.
Healey says the UK’s allies back the deal. But countries like China, Russia and Iran want the deal to fail, because they want the base to claim.
Keir Starmer holding press conference on Chagos Islands deal
Keir Starmer is speaking at a news conference about the Chagos Islands deal which he says he has now signed.
He says the government had to strike a deal over sovereignty because the UK was likely to lose cases in international courts if it continued resisting Mauritius’s claim of sovereignty.
And, even if the UK ignored those court rulings, other organistions would act on them. And that would make it harder for the UK to continue to operate the Diego Garcia military base, he says.
NEU teaching union threatens industrial action over government not fully funding pay award
The National Education Union, the largest teachers’ union in the UK, has threatened the government with industrial action over its decision to require schools in England to part-fund the teachers’ pay award from their own budgets. (See 2.02pm.)
In a statement, Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s general secretary, said:
Whilst we acknowledge and welcome additional funding to that initially offered by government, it is still the case that the pay award is not fully funded.
In many schools this will mean cuts in service provision to children and young people, job losses, and additional workloads for an already overstretched profession.
Unless the government commit to fully funding the pay rise then it is likely that the NEU will register a dispute with the government on the issue of funding, and campaign to ensure every parent understands the impact of a cut in the money available to schools, and that every politician understands this too.
Registering a dispute is the opening stage in the process a trade union has to follow if it wants to engate in industrial action. It does not mean a strike is inevitable.
The NAHT, which represents school leaders, was slightly more positive, but it also expressed concern about the pay award not being fully funded. Paul Whiteman, its general secretary, said:
While there remains some way to go to achieve full pay restoration, this uplift is another step in the right direction.
Further investment is critical to recruiting and retaining the high-quality professionals that the nation’s children need.
However, school leaders are rightly concerned about the affordability of this year’s pay uplift.
The news that the schools will be receiving additional funding to help cover some of the costs is welcome, but they will remain concerned that they will still need to find a proportion from within their existing budget allocations.
BMA calls for talks with Streeting over 4% pay offer to ‘avert strike action’
The British Medical Association has called for talks with Wes Streeting, the health secretary, over the 4% pay award for doctors (see 1.49pm), which it says does not do enough to restore relative pay to what it used to be.
Prof Philip Banfield, chairman of council at the BMA, said:
The health secretary can avert strike action by negotiating with us and agreeing a route to full pay restoration.
Doctors’ pay is still around a quarter less than it was in real-terms 16 years ago and today’s ‘award’ delays pay restoration even more, without a government plan or reassurance to correct this erosion of what a doctor is worth.
The DDRB (Doctors and Dentists Remuneration Body) has failed doctors.
No-one wants a return to scenes of doctors on picket lines – we’d rather be in hospitals, in GP practices or in the community seeing patients, improving the health of the public – but today’s actions from the government have sadly made this look far more likely.
John Healey, the defence secretary, is going to make a statement to MPs at 5pm about the Diego Garcia military base, the Commons authorities have announced.
Mahmood says judges to get 4% pay rise, not 4.75% as recommended, but recruitment problems being reviewed
But Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said she will not accept the recommendation from the pay review body covering judges (the Senior Salaries Review Body). It recommended a 4.75% pay rise for them in 2025-26. But, in her written ministerial statement, Mahmood says they will get 4%. She says this “strikes a balance between addressing SSRB’s advice and managing the overall affordability to my department”.
Mahmood says she accepts that the judiciary has a recruitment and retention problem, which is why the SSRB recommended 4.75%. But she says she has already launched a major review of the judicial salary structure to look at this. She says:
The major review is the right place to address these areas through targeted reform, and presents better value than the flat rate pay uplift of the annual pay review. I look forward to working closely with the SSRB over the course of the major review.
Prison officers to get 4% pay rise, Mahmood says
Prison officers in England and Wales will get a pay rise of 4% in 2025-26, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has announced. This will cover managers and governors too. In a written ministerial statement she says she is accepting in full the recommendations from the Prison Service Pay Review Body. She says:
This government values the vital contribution the almost 6 million public sector workers make across the UK, delivering the public services we all rely upon. The acceptance of the PSPRB’s recommendations is expected to further stabilise the recruitment and retention position in the Prison Service. This is key to ensuring prisons have the staff they need to deal with ongoing capacity pressures.
Phillipson says teachers will get 4% pay rise, but schools will have to fund quarter of this from own budgets
And teachers in England will also get a 4% pay rise, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has announced. In her ministerial statement, she says:
Today I am … accepting in full the independent STRB [School Teachers’ Review Body] recommendations for 2025/26, implementing a pay award for school teachers and leaders of 4% from September. This means school teachers will see an increase in their pay of almost 10% since this government took power and over 22% over the last four years. This will provide a competitive starting salary of almost £33,000, attracting talented graduates into the teaching profession, and we estimate the average teacher can now expect a salary of over £51,000 from September, helping retain talented existing teachers to deliver high standards for children.
Phillipson accepts that schools won’t have budgeted for this, and she says she is making £615m available to help them to fund these pay rises.
We recognise that this is beyond the costs for which many schools will have budgeted for. Therefore, we are providing additional funding of £615m this financial year to schools to support them with the costs of staff pay awards, on top of the funding already provided in their existing budgets. This funding has come from existing DfE budgets.
But schools will still have to fund some of this from their own budgets, she says.
Schools will be expected to find approximately the first 1% of pay awards through improved productivity and smarter spending to make every pound count. There will be those who say this cannot be done, but I believe schools have a responsibility, like the rest of the public sector, to ensure that their funding is spent as efficiently as possible.
GPs and hospital doctors to get 4% pay rise, Streeting says, and nurses and other NHS staff to get 3.6%
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, says that he is accepting a recommendation for doctors to get a 4% pay rise, and other NHS staff, including nurses, to get a 3.6% – even though these figures are above the 2.8% deemed affordable by the government in its own recommendation to pay review bodies.
But he says costs will have to be cut in other areas of NHS spending to pay for these salary increases, covering 2025-26.
In his written ministerial statement, which covers health workers in England, he says:
Today I am formally accepting the headline pay recommendations for NHS staff from the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB), the Review Body on Doctors and Dentists Remuneration (DDRB), and the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB). We are working closely with payroll systems to ensure staff receive their backdated pay uplifts from August.
I hugely appreciate the work of so many talented staff across the NHS. Accepting these recommendations gives them the pay rise they deserve. These awards are above forecast inflation over the 2025/26 pay year, meaning that the government is delivering a real-terms pay rise, on top of the one provided last year, underlining the extent to which we value our nurses, doctors, and other NHS staff ….
Through their deliberations, [the pay review bodies] have made recommendations above the level we stated as affordable in our evidence. I am however accepting their headline pay recommendations as fair and well-evidenced uplifts for public servants. To maintain financial prudence, I have had to make difficult decisions on other areas of spend to afford these uplifts.
The 4% will cover GPs, dentists, consultants and resident doctors (previously called junior doctors).
And the 3.6% will cover NHS staff covered by Agenda for Change – which means most NHS workers who are not doctors.
Senior managers will get a 3.25% pay rise.
In his written statement Streeting also says he wants to speed up the payments of pay rises. He says the pay increases for 2025-26 will arrive in pay packets two months sooner than they did last year, but he says he wants NHS staff in future to get their pay rises at the start of the financial year in April.
Normally they are announced later, which means pay has to be backdated.
Members of armed forces to get 4.5% pay rise, John Healey announces
And members of the armed forces are getting a 4.5% pay rise in 2025-26, John Healey, the defence secretary, has announced. In his written ministerial statement, he says the government is acccepting the pay review body’s recommendations in full. He says:
Along with subsidised accommodation, health and childcare, a generous pension scheme, and world class training, education and skills development, pay plays a key role in rewarding service personnel for the extraordinary sacrifices they make. To recognise that commitment I am announcing today that we will be accepting in full the 2025 pay award recommendations for armed forces remuneration made by the independent Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body (AFPRB) and Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB).
Senior officers will get a pay rise of 3.75%, he says.
Government starts publishing public sector pay awards, with senior civil servants getting 3.25% pay rise
The government is starting to publish its public sector pay announcements for 2025-26. The news is coming out in the form of written statements giving the government responses to public pay review body recommentations.
Georgia Gould, the Cabinet Office minister, has published the figures for senior civil servants.
She says the government is accepting that “all members of the senior civil service [SCS] should receive a 3.25% consolidated increase to base pay from 1 April 2025”.
But the government is also going to “fundamental review and ‘reset’ of SCS pay and reward frameworks”, she says.
