Rolling coverage of all the day's political developments as they happen
I'm off to the Number 10 lobby briefing now. I'll post again after 11.30am.
You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here.
As for the rest of the papers, here are some stories and articles that are particularly interesting.
It's work experience but not wage experience, and looking back at your first, lousiest jobs you must admit that both kinds mattered. It was good to be doing something the world found useful, but also it was good to know you'd earned your money. The scheme offers only half of that satisfaction.
It would no doubt be an administrative nuisance, not least owing to the mandatory minimum wage, if the system offered employers the equivalent of the benefits but told them to give the work-experience kids a proper payslip. Or, still better, told them to add a minimum tenner a week and feel free, without paperwork, to slip in a further bonus for hard work. I gather that some small participants do this out of petty cash, and goodness knows how the paperwork deals with that. Or more likely, doesn't.
? Mary Ann Sieghart in the Independent says Nick Clegg has little hope of achieving Lords reform.
"It's one of the most unpopular causes of all time," says a Tory minister about Lords reform. A Cabinet minister professes himself baffled that Clegg is prepared to expend so much time, energy and political capital on it. Another claims to be delighted that the Liberal Democrats will be indulging in displacement activity for the next couple of years. "It means they can't disrupt things elsewhere. From our point of view, it keeps the children occupied while we can get on with something else. They'll talk about House of Lords reform, and we'll talk about things that matter to voters, like the economy and welfare."
Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, Oliver Letwin, the Cabinet Office minister, and Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister's chief policy guru, called for Britain's official child poverty measure to be scrapped amid signs that it would produce a string of bad headlines for the Government.
The trio argued that the measure was too crude and concentrated on an arbitrary "poverty line", according to sources. Children living in households that live on 60 per cent of Britain's median income are deemed to be living in poverty under the legal measure set up by Labour.
However, the plan was met by fierce resistance from Nick Clegg and Sarah Teather, the Child Poverty Minister, who said that any attempt to stop publishing information on the number of children living in relative poverty would be seen as a cynical attempt to "fiddle the figures" ....
A compromise over child poverty has now been reached within the coalition. The income measure will be retained, but others will be added to create a more "nuanced" picture of child poverty in Britain. They are likely to concentrate on a child's access to education and health services.
Ed Matthew, of Transform UK, said: "More people die every year in the UK from living in a cold home than die on our roads. Millions more struggle to make ends meet in the face of high energy bills. This is a national scandal."
Some 30 families are receiving �1,500 a week ? three times what they would be earning on a national average wage ? to pay their rent while another 60 are receiving up to �5,000 a month, according to the Department for Work and Pensions ...
In total 130 families are given more than �1,000 a week, including 80 who receive at least �1,100 a week, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The move, which would lead to thousands of people from the Armed Forces being driven into the commercial property market, is part of a plan to reduce Services accommodation under a "New Employment Model".
It indicates a potential shift away from the tradition of encouraging soldiers to move with ease around the country and overseas with their spouses and children.
Subsidised military housing for those with families is a career-long entitlement and has been referred to as a "staunch pillar" of the military covenant that the coalition has pledged to uphold. The MoD is discussing ending the right to a home after eight years of service.
The Leveson inquiry is starting a new strand of its investigation today, looking at links between the media and the police. Talking about this on Radio 5 Live this morning, the Labour MP Chris Bryant said News International almost "owned" the Metropolitan police.
What ended up happening at News International is they almost felt that they owned the Metropolitan Police. They had such a close relationship with senior figures at the Met, right the way up to commissioner that they felt that it was pretty easy to make sure a full investigation into the News of the World never came to pass.
It should be an important day at the Leveson inquiry. There are full details at our Leveson live blog.
Ken Livingstone has gone to Downing Street to deliver a letter to David Cameron saying that the law should be changed to stop the London mayor having a second job.
It's his way, obviously, of highlighting the fact that Boris Johnson earns a reported �250,000 a year writing a column for the Daily Telegraph. Here's an extract from the letter.
In 2009, ahead of the general election, you said that members of your shadow cabinet would have to give up their outside interests, in order to concentrate on politics.
It ought to the case that if that principle applies to your senior Parliamentary team, it should also apply to the Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Even without you prevailing upon him to do so, I believe that Boris
Johnson should have responded in keeping with the mood of the times and clear direction of travel, and ditched his second job.
The mayor's role is now so significant that he or she can affect the quality of life of millions of people, from fares to policing and crime. Those who are affected by those decisions should have full confidence that the person making them is fully committed to the job.
Yet Boris Johnson not only earns more as Mayor of London than you do as prime minister, he also holds a second job that pays him even more money. He is paid �250,000 a year for his column for the Daily Telegraph, an amount of money that he has described as 'chicken feed.
Livingstone's team have also launched a chickenfeed.org.uk website to publicise this.
What would an independent Scotland actually be like? My colleagues at Reality Check are doing a five-day special on the subject this week. James Ball is kicking it off today with a look at how much debt an independent Scotland would have.
Having elected police commissioners could bring corruption into policing, a chief constable has warned. Sir Norman Bettison, the West Yorkshire chief constable and a vice president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, made the claim in an interview in the Yorkshire Post. Here are his key quotes.
I am reminded of the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. There will be a lot of people appealing for the public vote simply because they want to make the world a better, safer place. Those people are to be celebrated. My fear is that [in other cases] it could be the door that unlocks corruption and anything that does has the potential to destroy public trust in policing ...
There is the potential for some corruption with a small 'c'. What I mean is not the problem of huge frauds and secret bank accounts in Monaco. An election brings with it the sense of obligation to people who have helped win the election or might help win a future election, and this is someone who can be elected on a frequent and recurring basis. My fear as a 40-year veteran is that a single person who has limited accountability to any other body runs the risk of looking to ensure that the people that can help him or her get elected are assuaged ...
To an old and crippled chief constable like myself, any hint of being required to do anything other than with integrity will be rebuffed. I can imagine that with younger chiefs with mortgages to pay, however, there is the danger or the risk or the fear of them being influenced.
Jamie Reed, the shadow health minister and coordinator of Labour's Drop the Bill campaign, has written an article for PoliticsHome. It's rather more hard-hitting than Ed Miliband's. (See 9.00am.) Reed describes the bill as "the largest, most aggressive and ideological reorganisation of the NHS since it was created". And he says that the Liberal Democrats will face electoral "oblivion" if they do not oppose the bill.
For the Liberal Democrats, unless they can summon the required courage to oppose this bill, only oblivion and ignominy beckons. They may yet save themselves, more importantly, they may yet help the people of this country, the medical professions and the Labour Party to save the NHS. No number of amendments will suffice, for the NHS as we know it to survive, this bill must be dropped.
Reed also claims that, in opposing the bill, Labour are also putting the national interest ahead of their party interest.
Labour's political and electoral interests would be best served by the passage of this bill, yet so damaging would the consequences of this bill be for the NHS, if enacted, that we are doing everything we can to ensure that this bill is dropped.
David Cameron's health bill misery continues. Peers are debating the bill again this week and, as Nicholas Watt reports for the Guardian, Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, is preparing to announce further concessions. And Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, has written an article for today's Times (paywall) renewing his attack on the bill.
For reforms to work, they must bring greater clarity ... The bill does the opposite. It creates a vast structure of Byzantine complexity. Estimates suggest that the number of statutory organisations will rise from 163 to 521. No wonder the NHS Confederation has warned of potential "paralysis in the system".
In the tightest spending settlement for a generation, when the NHS must make �20 billion of efficiency savings, the focus should be on patient care. Instead, staff are being distracted by a vast top-down bureaucratic reorganisation.
Years of upheaval lie ahead and patients will get a worse service.
The Lords debate starts at about 3pm. I'll be keeping an eye on it, but I think we will providing detailed coverage on our separate health bill live blog.
Here's the full agenda for the day.
9.30am: Conservative MPs from the Free Enterprise Group launch their pre-budget plan for growth.
10am: The Leveson inquiry resumes. Sue Akers, the Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner who is leading the phone hacking inquiry, Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, and Brian Paddick, the Lib Dem candidate for London mayor, are giving evidence.
10am: Ken Livingstone, Labour's candidate for London mayor, visits Number 10 to hand in a letter saying the London mayor should not have a second job.
1pm: Academics give evidence to the Commons Scottish affairs committee about the Scottish independence referendum.
2.30pm: Michael Gove, the education secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
3pm: Peers resume their debate on the health bill.
4.35pm: Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, and Mark Harper, the constitutional reform minister, give evidence to the joint committee on Lords reform. I'll be covering this hearing in detail.
As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm and another in the afternoon.
If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm on @AndrewSparrow.
And if you're a hardcore fan, you can follow @gdnpoliticslive. It's an automated feed that tweets the start of every new post that I put on the blog.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2012/feb/27/clegg-lords-reform-health-bill
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