In the Commons Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, will shortly be making the nuclear investment announcement. Although the focus has mostly been on Sizewell C, there are in fact three components to the nuclear energy strategy announced today. The Treasury has set out them all in a news release. This is how it summarises the three linked announcements. Sizewell C Sizewell C will provide 10,000 people with employment at peak construction and support thousands more jobs across the UK, including 1,500 apprenticeships … Despite the UK’s strong nuclear legacy, opening the world’s first commercial nuclear power station in the 1950s, no new nuclear plant has opened in the UK since 1995, with all of the existing fleet except Sizewell B likely to be phased out by the early 2030s. Sizewell C was one of eight sites identified in 2009 by then-energy secretary Ed Miliband as a potential site for new nuclear. However, the project was not fully funded in the 14 years that followed under subsequent governments. The government’s nuclear programme is now the most ambitious for a generation - once small modular reactors and Sizewell C come online in the 2030s, combined with Hinkley Point C, this will deliver more new nuclear to grid than over the previous half century combined. Small modular reactors The government’s nuclear resurgence will support the UK’s long-term energy security, with small modular reactors expected to power millions of homes with clean energy and help fuel power-hungry industries like AI data centres. This follows reforms to planning rules announced by the prime minister in February 2025 to make it easier to build nuclear across the country - changing the rules to back the builders of this nation, and saying no to the blockers who have strangled our chances of cheaper energy, growth and jobs for far too long. The government is also looking to provide a route for private sector-led advanced nuclear projects to be deployed in the UK, alongside investing £300m in developing the world’s first non-Russian supply of the advanced fuels needed to run them. Fusion energy The government is also making a record investment in R&D for fusion energy, investing over £2.5 billion over 5 years. This includes progressing the STEP programme (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production), the world-leading fusion plant in Nottinghamshire, creating thousands of new jobs and with the potential to unlock limitless clean power. This builds on the UK’s global leadership to turbocharge economic growth in the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, while helping deliver the UK’s flagship programme to design and build a prototype fusion power station on the site of a former coal-fired plant. Nigel Farage has just finished his press conference. It was his second in two days, and he took a large number of questions. Tim Montgomerie, the journalist who set up ConservativeHome and who is now a Reform UK supporter, says he thinks Farage has taken almost 100 questions from reporters at press events in the last fortnight, far more than any other party leader. The Q&A covered a lot of topics but what was most interesting was Farage’s repeatedly willingness to float hard right or extreme propositions – while at the same time not quite fully adopting them. A good example came when he was asked about Reform UK’s position on the death penalty. Farage said that he expected calls for the restoration of the death penalty to become a major political issue over the next decade – while stressing that he was personally opposed. The result was that a hardline GB News viewer keen to see murders hang may have concluded that, under Farage, this would all be getting more likely – while a liberal-minded, Reform-curious former Tory voter watching may have concluded that Farage was reliably moderate on this issue after all. Asked by a reporter from the Sun what the party’s position on the death penalty was, Farage replied: These are issues of conscience, just as the assisted dying debate will be when it comes up on Friday, just as the abortion limit. These are all issues of conscience. Nothing on the death penalty will be part of party policy. I have to say, personally, given there have been 500 quite serious miscarriages of justice in this country since the early 1970s, I don’t think I could ever support it. But I understand why others take a different point of view. Although I do think it’s quite interesting there’s a younger generation coming through who seem to increasingly support the death penalty. And I suspect it will be back within the next decade as an issue of major national debate. Not quite yut, but it’s coming. But, certainly, these things will not be party policy, far, far from it. Farage was referring to this polling from More in Common UK released in January. In a report on what it shows, the Evening Standard said: A majority of Britons support reinstating the death penalty in the UK, with Millennials showing the strongest support, a poll has found. Three in five, (58 per cent) of Millennials born between 1981 and 1986, believe capital punishment should be reintroduced. David Bull has been confirmed as Reform UK’s new chair, PA Media reports. PA says: The former television presenter and medical doctor was announced as the party’s chairman at a press conference in Westminster this morning. His appointment comes after businessman Zia Yusuf resigned from the position last week. Speaking at the press conference, Yusuf said that he is “hugely excited” that Dr Bull was taking the role. “I wholeheartedly congratulate him and I know he’s going to do an incredible job for us,” he added. Nigel Farage said Bull would come to the chairman’s role with “terrific verve, energy, enthusiasm”, adding: “It’s going to be great fun”. Yusuf returned to Reform over the weekend, just 48 hours after he quit, saying he had made an “error”. He will lead the party’s plans to cut public spending – the so-called “UK Doge”, based on the US Department of Government Efficiency which was led by tech billionaire Elon Musk. Yusuf quit as chairman after an internal row in which he described a question asked to the prime minister by the party’s newest MP, Sarah Pochin, about banning the burka as “dumb”. At his Q&A at a college in Ipswich, Keir Starmer said today’s announcement about Sizewell C going ahead was a “statement of intent”. It meant “no more dithering”, he said. The last reactor was 1995, 30 years ago, and I think that was Sizewell B. So here, to put this down today, is really important. It’s not just an important decision for the future, it’s a change of mindset. No more dithering, no more delay, no more being unclear about what we’re going to do, a real statement of intent as we go forward. Having our own energy in this country that we control, gives us security, gives us independence, so Putin can’t put his boot on our throat. And it means that we can control the prices in a way that we haven’t been able to in recent years, which has meant very high prices for businesses, for households and for families. Unemployment in the UK rose in April to the highest level in almost four years, official figures showed, as tax increases introduced by Rachel Reeves added to a broader slowdown in the jobs market. Richard Partington has the story. The Telegraph is today running a story under a headline saying that Yvette Cooper is “on resignation watch” after a row with the Treasury about the spending review. It says: Yvette Cooper’s rows with the Treasury over spending have been so heated that officials fear she will resign. The home secretary is understood to have warned Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, that Labour election promises were at risk from a lack of investment in policing. Commenting on the story, a Home Office source said “every aspect of that headline is bonkers and not true”. Asked about the story on LBC this morning, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said: Don’t believe everything you read on the websites. These spending reviews, I’ve been through a lot of them because I’m quite old. These spending reviews always, always involve lots of toing and froing. [Cooper is] doing an excellent job and, and I wouldn’t believe that. More than 300 Foreign Office staff have been told to consider resigning after they wrote a letter complaining they feared it had become complicit in Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza, Patrick Wintour reports. Q: What advice would you give to students? Starmer says he is slightly nervous when a slightly older person – he corrects himself, '“perhaps a much older person” – gives advice to young people. He says older people tend to think they know what younger people are thinking. But he goes on: There’s a tendency to think that’s that looks like an exciting, interesting job, but it’s probably not. For me, it’s the sort of little voice in the head. And if I had one piece of advice, it would be to knock that voice on the head, knock it out of the head. Because actually, as we’ve seen in the course we had this morning, we had people who had done different things come in, doing electrical apprenticeships now, hadn’t necessarily thought that’s what they wanted to do, but absolutely loving it and thriving on it. So don’t allow your head to tell you this isn’t for me. It’s for somebody else. If it excites you, if it’s interesting, it probably is for you. (Starmer’s career advice may reflect, in part, his own experience as a teenager, growing up in a working-class family and choosing to study law.) Q: What will you do to ensure further education qualifications are recognised by employers? Starmer says this is about making sure that employers work with colleges on the courses they run. Business should be putting their “fingerprints” on what goes on, he says. For the second time this week, No 10 has scheduled news to coincide with a Nigel Farage press conference. Keir Starmer is doing a Q&A with students. Sky News has a live feed of the Starmer event here. And, if you want to watch the Reform UK press conference, it is on their YouTube channel here. Q: The employment rights bill must be just the beginning. What will you do on equal pay? Reeves says this is a campaign “very close to my heart”. It is 55 years since Barbara Castle introduced the Equal Pay Act, she says. But the gender pay gap is still about 15%. She says the employment rights bill, the minimum wage and national living wage, and better nursery provision should all help. And that is the end of the Q&A. The next question, from a woman working in the pottery industry, asks what is being done to bring down high energy prices which are a huge problem for the sector. Reeves says she understands the problem. There are many sectors were energy prices are making industry unproductive. She says the government will soon publish its industrial strategy. That will include measures to help energy-intensive industries, she says. The next question is about what the government is doing to promote jobs in the defence sector in places like Barrow. Reeves says that is exactly what the government wants to do. Tomorrow, in the spending review, she will talk about using procurement, and skills policy, to promote these sort of job opportunities. Reeves is now taking questions. The first comes from a delegate who says the proposed welfare cuts are wrong. Will the government think again? Reeves says the last government did not do nearly enough to support people back into work. The government is going to invest £1bn in this, she says. She says it wants to get people off sickness and disability benefits into work. The current system is “not sustainable”, she says. People who cannot work will always be protected, she says. Reeves is now talking about the government’s decisions to save British Steel. She says she can announce £420m extra funding today for Sheffield Forgemasters. Security also means energy security, Reeves says. And she says that is why she can announce “the biggest roll out of nuclear power for a generation”. The govenment will provide £14.2bn for Sizewell C. It will be the first state-funded nuclear power station since 1988, she says. She says the project will power six million home, employ 10,000 people and support thousands more jobs. Reeves says the spending review will allocate investment worth £113bn. The government is going for growth, she says. It is investing in the defence sector, she says. (The GMB representers workers in defence manufacturing.) Reeves turns to Reform UK, saying they claim to speak up for workers. But Reform UK opposed the employment rights bill, and they are not supporting Ukraine, she says. Reeves says the government has been taking “Labour choices”. She cites policies like the rise in the minimum wage, the employment rights bill, which will modernise workers’ rights, and the decision to extend free school meals to up to 500,000 children. That will lift 100,000 children out of poverty. UPDATE: Reeves said: I know that not enough working people are yet feeling that progress, and that’s what tomorrow’s spending review is all about – making working people better off, investing in our security, investing in our health, investing in our economy. This government is going for growth because that is the best way to create jobs, boost wages, lift people out of poverty, and sustainably fund our schools and our hospitals and all the public services we rely on. And we’re doing things differently, because unlike the Tories, I don’t think that the only good thing that a government can do is get out of the way. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is speaking at the GMB conference. There is a live feed here. In his Times Radio interview Ed Miliband was asked how Rachel Reeves would fund the winter fuel payments U-turn announced yesterday. He replied: I’ll let the chancellor set that out in the budget ... I’m really confident that Rachel Reeves will find a fair way of ensuring that we pay for this. I don’t think anyone looking at Rachel Reeves’s record over the last 11 months would say she has been fiscally irresponsible. Yesterday Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said Reeves would probably have to raise taxes, or cut welfare, to fund the WFPs decision. Ed Miliband was on radio and TV this morning to talk about nuclear energy, but he spent much of the time in interviews talking about winter fuel payments (WFPs). In particular, he was asked if the government would apologise for cutting WFPs last year, given that it has now decided to restore them for most pensioners. No, was the answer. Miliband told Times Radio: We’re not going to apologise for the actions we took to stabilise the economy. That’s what happened last year. The chancellor came into office, saw a massive black hole in the nation’s finances. She took a whole series of measures. Now, what’s happened since then is two things. One, we have stabilised the public finances and secondly, we’ve listened to people. Now, we haven’t changed the principle that the winter fuel allowance should be means tested but we have listened to people on the threshold of how high the threshold should be for qualification. Personally, I think it’s the right thing that the chancellor has done. While being asked continually to apologise for the original WFP cut may have been irritating for Miliband, and will be for Keir Starmer when he inevitably gets asked the same question today, paradoxically it is a sign that the U-turn announcement yesterday has been relatively successful. That is because if the opposition, and the oppositon media, are focusing on calls for an apology in relation to a policy issue, that generally means they have run out of other, more important, things to complain about. While the media (see the Sun’s splash), and MPs, seem to care a lot about apologies, members of the public may be more interested in the substance of what the government is doing. That is the case Miliband made to Times Radio. He said: I’ve talked to lots of people on doorsteps about the winter fuel allowance. I can’t remember anyone who said, you should apologise. People wanted us to change the policy and that’s what we’ve done. Opposition MPs say the government should apologise because cutting the WFP was a bad decision in the first place. Privately, many ministers probably agree. But the government is arguing that the cut was needed because of the state of the government finances last year and ministers are not going to abandon that position. Good morning. As you will probably have heard already, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has announced plans to build a new nuclear power station in Suffolk, Sizewell C. Here is the Guardian story. Oops. That is our story from 2009, when Gordon Brown was prime minister, Miliband was energy secretary for the first time, and Sizewell C was first getting the go-ahead from government. Often reading about British politics (and writing about it) can feel like being trapped in a circular doom loop of stasis, particularly when the government is talking about infrastructure policy. But this time it is different, Miliband claimed in interviews this morning. In an interview with Today, when Justin Webb, the presenter, pointed out that the last Conservative government also said that it was committed to Sizewell C and asked what was different this time, Miliband had a simple answer. We’re funding it. And that’s the big difference. We’re actually putting put forward the money to make it happen. Miliband went on: This is the biggest investment in nuclear, new nuclear, in more than half a century in Britain. Sizewell C. Small modular reactors, Rolls-Royce, it was announced at 7am this morning, have won that competition. Nuclear fusion. We’re doing this because we want energy security for the country, long-term energy security. Good jobs, 10,000 jobs, at Sizewell alone. And, frankly, something I care a lot about, to tackle the climate crisis, because we’ve got to get off insecure, volatile fossil fuels, both for security and for climate reasons. Here is our overnight story, by Jessica Elgot. Miliband was doing an interview round this morning, and he will be in the Commons making a statement about this later. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is also giving a speech this morning that will cover nuclear power. At Westminster, opposition to the Sizewell C announcement is likely to be limited. The last Conservative government was in theory in favour. In the past the Liberal Democrats were sceptical about nuclear power, but that has changed under Ed Davey. Judging by Nigel Farage’s speech yesterday, you might conclude that Reform UK back opening coalmines as their preferred answer to the energy crisis, but they have not spoken out against nuclear power stations. So, on this issue, the Green party have the opposition side of the pitch all to themselves. This morning Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader and MP for Waveney Valley, which covers parts of Suffolk and is not far from Sizewell, issued this statement. He said the money could be “far better spent” on green energy and better insulation. Nuclear power is hugely expensive and far too slow to come on line. The only thing delivered by EDF so far at Hinkley Point in Somerset is overspend and delay. Electricity was promised by 2017 with a price tag of £22bn but this has mushroomed to 40bn and Hinkley is still producing no power. The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable. We should also be investing in genuinely green power such as fitting millions of solar panels to roofs and in innovative technologies like tidal power. All this would create many more jobs than nuclear ever will. Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in Suffolk. 10.30am: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is speaking at the GMB conference. 11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a press conference to announce the party’s new chair. According to the Daily Mail, the new chair is the TV presenter and former Brexit party MEP David Bull. 11.30am: Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, takes questions in the Commons. Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing. After 12.30pm: Miliband is expected to make a statement to MPs about the plan to go ahead with the Sizewell C nuclear power station. 3pm: Angela Eagle, minister for border security and asylum, gives evidence to the Commons home affairs committee on asylum accommodation. 3pm: Adm Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff, gives evidence to the Commons defence committee. If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word. If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary. I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
Author: Andrew Sparrow