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» Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Rendition

Asked if the Government had any reaction to the recent report on rendition by the Council of Europe, the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS) said that he had nothing to say since there were no new facts in the report to respond to. Asked if the UK would be cooperating with the Council of Europe's investigation as Mr Dick Marty MP of Switzerland had asked, the PMOS said that we had already gone further than that.

Briefing took place at 16:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (0)

Incapacity Benefit

Asked if there was not a lot of fraud in the incapacity benefit system, why had the numbers of people claiming gone up from 700,000 to 2.7 million over the past few decades, the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS) replied that what was important to realise was that we were now seeing one third less people joining the list than in 1997. If people looked at the rate of increase in 1997, if that had continued, then by this stage, there would have been approximately 4 million people claiming benefit, whereas there were now 2.7 million. Therefore, some of the measures that had been taken to help people were important. The basic root of our approach to incapacity benefit was that if people were on incapacity benefit for two years, it was highly unlikely that they would ever come off it as things stood at the moment.

Briefing took place at 16:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (3)

Inter-Faith Meeting

Asked what the Prime Minister might be saying in his speech this evening, the PMOS said that he could not give too much detail as the launch was being primarily driven by Lambeth Palace and had been set up as a result of work initiated by Lambeth Palace. The Prime Minister was going along to support it. The Prime Minister would however take the opportunity to express his sadness at the death of Dr. Badawi and pay tribute to him. Dr. Badawi had been a scholar with an international reputation and a pioneer in the area of inter-faith relations.

Briefing took place at 16:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (0)

Rendition

Asked if the Prime Minister had any view on the Council for Europe's report about rendition, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister had no view of it. The PMOS said that there seemed to be no new facts, therefore, we had no new view.

Briefing took place at 16:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (0)

Education

Asked if the Prime minister welcomed the remarks by the Chancellor on Education this morning, the PMOS said of course the Prime Minister welcomed the Chancellor's remarks. Asked about local authority control over Trust schools, the PMOS said that he would not get into the detail of the Bill before it was published. However the Prime Minister had set out his approach yesterday, which was that we should build on what the experience of the past few years had shown to work.

Briefing took place at 16:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (0)

Education White Paper

Asked if the intervention of Gordon Brown meant that it was less of a "high wire act" for the Prime Minister on the Education White Paper, the PMOS said that of course, the Prime Minister welcomed the remarks from the Chancellor. Equally, however, he recognised that there were still others who had different views, and therefore, we would have to keep trying to convince those people. The Prime Minister had set out the reasons yesterday why he believed that we needed to apply the lessons of what had worked in schools in recent years. If people looked at the letter today from Andrew Adonis in "The Guardian", where he said there had been a 73% improvement in the percentage of pupils getting five good GCSE results in the fourteen Academy schools, it underlined what had worked, as some of those schools had been set up in some of the most deprived areas in the country.

Briefing took place at 16:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (2)

Reshuffle

Asked if the Prime Minister was expecting a busy afternoon tomorrow, the PMOS said that he had a sense of where this question might be heading. To put it another way, so far he had had a relatively quiet week and nothing as yet indicated that it would not continue to be. But he could be wrong.

Briefing took place at 16:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (0)

Afghanistan

Asked if we were expecting an announcement concerning the deployment of troops in Afghanistan, the PMOS said that he was not expecting anything this week.

Briefing took place at 16:00 | Read whole briefing | Comments (0)

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» Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Rendition

Incapacity Benefit

Inter-Faith Meeting

Rendition

Education

Education White Paper

Reshuffle

Afghanistan

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