Westminster blog

David Cameron has been quoted saying he will not rule out quotas for women on boardrooms as a way to get more women into top executive jobs. Speaking at a summit in Sweden, the prime minister said he wanted to “accelerate” the increase in women on the boards of top UK firms – even if this was ideally without quotas.

A year ago an official report by Lord Davies into the issue urged companies to more than double the number of women on boards by 2015. At present the proportion of female FTSE 100 directors is about 15 per cent, though they tend to be non-executives rather than executives.

Mr Cameron said Scandinavian countries were “leading the way in Europe” on the issue of women in top executive jobs. In Norway, where quotas were introduced in 2008, the proportion is 40 per cent. (Other countries are following suit with quotas including France and Spain).

The issue of cuts to council tax benefit may sound esoteric; what’s one more cut in a world of public sector austerity?

Yet most cuts to benefits are relatively simple to administer: you still give people money, just less of it.

Council tax is rather different, as it involves taking money from people. Cutting council tax benefit means that you need to collect even more money from them.

There is already a high level of non-payment of this levy and some local authorities are worried that the problem will only get worse when the cut comes into force.

I explain the full situation in this article.

In a nutshell, the government is not only cutting the benefit by 10 per cent but also shifting responsibility to councils. But ministers have made it much harder for local authorities to carry out the cut as they have ordered them to exempt pensioners and “vulnerable groups”, thought to include the disabled and families with children.

That means that out of 5m people who receive the benefit, only an estimated 1.3m may have to take the impact of the cut – implying they could be hit with a reduction of almost a third.

That would mean an average of £330 per person, equivalent to the average household’s

It is hard to know who will take the political credit for Network Rail’s directors dropping their plan for any annual bonus this year: Ed Miliband or Justine Greening? Both had made clear their concerns about any extra pay-out to the board of the quasi-private company (which receives £4bn of taxpayers’ money every year) ahead of the announcement. Ms Greening, the transport secretary, had even vowed to turn up to a public meeting of the group on Friday to vote against its recommendations. Meanwhile there was growing pressure in the form of an early day motion by former Labour transport minister Tom Harris, signed by 30 MPs.

The news came through some five minutes ago: Not only will Network Rail delay its meetings of around 100 board members, which was due for Friday.

Also chief executive Sir David Higgins and his board will not keep any annual bonus this year if one is decided at a separate meeting in May. Instead they will donate the money to the  safety improvement fund for level crossings. (Network Rail pleaded guilty a few days ago to failings which led to the deaths of two teenage girls at a level crossing.)

Sir David said:

“Even if this (annual bonus) situation does arise this year, I and my directors decided last week that we would forego any entitlement and instead allocate the money to the safety improvement fund for level crossings. I can confirm that remains our intention.”

In fact Friday’s meeting had also been to discuss a “long-term incentive plan” – worth much more than the annual bonuses – and this will still go ahead.

Ms Greening had made clear that she was not against performance-related performance per se; but instead she wanted Network Rail to wait for the result of a “control paper” on the group’s corporate governance which will not be published for a couple of weeks.

In other words, her vote would have been as much about timing as it was about limiting the annual bonus. The five-year incentive plan is as likely to remain as ever, even if not quite in its original form.

Greening still wants to “beef up” taxpayers representation at NR and will seek to do so by getting a “special director” on the remuneration committee. This will be recommended in the command paper.

There has been no similar instance of ministers getting involved in NR’s corporate governance since the 2005 dismantling of the Strategic Rail Authority, according to coalition insiders. They point out that Labour ministers always used to wash their hands of final decisions on Network Rail remuneration, telling the Commons repeatedly that it was a “private company.”

Then again Tom Harris tells me that the power to appoint a special director has always been in the DfT’s powers over Network Rail: and therefore ministers could just do it without the command paper.

Nick Clegg has raised the prospect of greater devolution for Scotland even if there is a “no” vote in any imminent referendum on independence.

In an attempt to close down calls for a compromise option on the ballot paper – such as “devo max” – the deputy prime minister said that a “no” vote would not end the gradual process of devolution.

There would be the possibility of a further relaxation of control from London with the potential for further fiscal powers passed to Holyrood, he said. This would be beyond the current Scotland Bill going through Parliament at the moment.

The comments came this morning during a meeting of the Lords constitutional committee, chaired by Baroness Jay.

The development of unique institutions and greater powers for Scotland was a “process” rather than a fixed point, Mr Clegg told the committee.

“Devolution is not a tablet of stone it is a process, there are so many devolved states around the world,” he said. “Look at

Continue reading: “Nick Clegg says Scots will still get more devolution if they vote no”

You can read our full story here on ft.com about Fred Goodwin losing his knighthood. Here is my backgrounder on other well-known names who lost their honours.

Meanwhile here is the Cabinet Office statement:

It will soon be announced in the London Gazette that the Knighthood conferred upon Fred Goodwin as a Knight Bachelor has been cancelled and annulled.

This decision, not normally publicised in advance, was taken on the advice of the Forfeiture Committee, which advised that Fred Goodwin had brought the honours system in to disrepute.

The scale and severity of the impact of his actions as

Continue reading: “Cabinet Office justifies Goodwin losing knighthood”

I wrote in this morning’s FT about how Lord Mandelson has sidestepped a new requirement for peers to disclose certain business clients after exploiting a loophole in the system. As I wrote:

He had been expected to be among a wave of peers to publish a full list of their clients under new rules voted through the House of Lords last November.

But the former Labour business secretary has avoided any need to do so after simply moving his advisory firm, Global Counsel, from one category to another on the Lords register.

The company was previously registered under Mandelson’s name under “category one”, indicating a directorship.

But by shifting Global Counsel to “category 2”, which covers “remunerated employment”, Lord Mandelson no longer strictly has to provide this information.

Continue reading: “Mandelson sidesteps Lords disclosure rules”

We wrote this morning about the Tory backlash to Nick Clegg’s speech in which he called for an acceleration of the personal tax allowance – which is currently pencilled in for 2015.

One way to interpret his words was a further attempt by the Lib Dem leader to stamp his brand over the tax giveaway, one of the few pleasant fiscal moves of recent years. (Although how progressive the change is has been the subject of debate.) The Lib Dems have been tacitly authorised to “own” the personal allowance issue – just as the Tories have ownership of scrapping the 50p rate. The difference is that raising the allowance is part of the coalition programme and scrapping the highest income tax rate is not.

But is Clegg being realistic by suggesting that the move could be hastened even further? Nowhere did we hear any mention of the potential extra cost yesterday of accelerating an already expensive (£4bn) plan.

Today there are two figures knocking around – £1.5bn in the FT and £9.5bn in the Times.

Neither is wrong; they are just based on different calculations as to what might happen. (The Treasury estimates that each increase of £100 in the allowances costs just under half a billion pounds).

The Times calculation is based on the tax change happening in full

Ed Miliband has done an interview with Paul Waugh in the House magazine: there are a few interesting nuggets.

The Labour leader has dismissed the idea of a new Royal yacht, at least with any public money. He says that the “welfare state is too inadequate in some parts” – such as child care, elderly care and social care.

Miliband meanwhile plays down the idea of any big conflict with the unions, saying that he thinks the moment will pass and there probably won’t be any “big” disafiliations: “Labour party leaders and trade union leaders go through their watershed moments quite often it seems to me.”

Nick Clegg is making a speech today where he will call for the £10,000 personal tax allowance to be accelerated faster than its 2015 target – indicating that the wealthy will be squeezed in the Budget to pay for this.

This threshold policy is clearly branded as a Lib Dem policy; the 2011 Budget saw a significant lift of the figure by some £630 or so. Party strategists believe that it is an easy concept for the public to understand and casts them in a positive light.

Clegg is determined to remove from Ed Miliband the mantle of “champion of the squeezed middle“, although he uses slightly different rhetoric like “alarm clock Britain”. It’s an easier marketing sell in opposition than in the cabinet, however.

And how will he pay for the increased personal allowance? For now that is the big question. It’s easy to talk about tax avoidance – and measures are being taken to crack down on this – but less obvious that it will reap the desired windfalls. Meanwhile the economic slowdown does not point to higher tax receipts in the coming months. Inflation automatically lifts the allowance by a certain amount, but not as far as Clegg would like.

It’s easy to forget but back in November Clegg said some similar things about how the rich would be the ones mainly paying for measures in the growth review such as a £1bn fund for getting people back to work:

Over the last year and a half we’ve increased capital gains tax, we’ve slapped on a big bank levy, we’ve made sure that the loopholes that the wealthy enjoy are closed and we will have more of this kind of thing to make sure that the people with the broadest shoulders pay their fair share.

Perhaps unsurprisingly this was seen as a signal that the growth review would be progressive in terms of who had to pay the most. The end result, however, was that changes to tax credits (which support those in the “squeezed middle”) cost around £1bn while a small change to the bank tax is set to raise only a few hundred million pounds.

This morning’s legal decision against Chris Huhne’s department, DECC, may serve as a welcome distraction for the energy secretary given his other thorny issue.

(He is of course awaiting a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether to prosecute him over allegations that he asked his former wife to take speeding points on his behalf.)

Then again it may just add to the pressure on the beleagured Lib Dem cabinet minister.

Solar companies are today celebrating victory over the government after the Court of Appeal upheld an earlier legal decision that recent cuts to household solar subsidies were illegal.

Three Court of Appeal judges ruled that parliament did not have the power to make such a modification “with such a retrospective effect.”

The government must now pay costs for the solar industry and has been refused permission to appeal.

It will also have to pay its original higher subsidy for customers who installed panels between early December and the start of March – a cost which could run into tens of millions of pounds in the long term.

The verdict is in some ways a Pyrrhic victory for the industry as solar subsidies will still be halved as of March 3. But companies which would have seen their subsidies

Friday will see Mark Harper, Cabinet Office minister, unveil a consultation on a statutory register of lobbyists – with the potential for many other groups (unions, law firms etc) required to sign up. I’ve written the news story here.

More quietly, however, a major change is taking place at the House of Lords where officials are tightening up their disclosure criteria on the “register of interests”.

Lord Mandelson will be among scores of peers forced to disclose their business clients for the first time under this quiet rules change.

The Lords authorities have written to about 90 peers, including the former Labour business secretary, asking them to identify the clients of their consultancies.

Brendan Keith, registrar of Lords’ interests, told the FT that the current “loophole” would be closed under which peers only had to name the advisory companies they owned or worked for – and not their clients.

Some members had been “mystified” by the new disclosure rules, which have to be obeyed by January 27, said Mr Keith.

The changes are part of a broader amendment of the code to oblige greater transparency from peers: “The philosophy is one of disclosure and openness,” he said.

Lord Mandelson, who was European trade commissioner before returning to a senior role in Gordon Brown’s government, has set up a ”strategic advice consultancy“ called Global Counsel. WPP, the marketing group, is an investor in the company.