Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen, including Yvette Cooper at a press gallery hustings and the report on the whether MPs need to leave parliament for a £3bn restoration

4.40pm BST

We want that to be a referendum that can be carried. It is critically important that Britain stays a central and leading player in the European Union of the future. In that we will be as supportive and as constructive as we can. It doesn’t mean we will follow you blindly on every issue. But insofar as the process is concerned I want to see that leading to a decision by the British people to stay in European Union because that is where the future for everybody lies.

3 Tory MPs voted for @UKLabour amdt to give 16/17 year olds the vote in EU Referendum: @PeterBottomley_ @JasonMcCartney @sarahwollaston

I am not in favour of an independent Scottish Labour Party as I am not in favour of an independent Scotland, because I believe in solidarity.

4.25pm BST

MPs have just voted down a Labour bid to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to vote in the EU referendum. The proposals was defeated by 310 votes to 265. The SNP supported Labour, but the result was not even close.

As I said earlier, the Tory MP Sarah Wollaston gave a powerful speech in favour of the idea. Here’s an extract.

We all visit schools in our constituencies, and I am sure I am not alone in thinking that some of the most thoughtful and challenging discussions in those visits have been with 16 and 17-year-olds. Do I feel that they have the capacity to understand the information, to weigh it and to communicate their views? Absolutely I do. The question is whether Members of Parliament have the capacity to change our view and give those young people a voice and a vote. I could not return to my constituency, look those young people in the eye and tell them that I had denied them the opportunity to take part in the forthcoming referendum …

I absolutely agree … that the time has come. The time came in Scotland, and we saw very clearly how important that was for young people. More than 90% of young people in Scotland registered to vote. They now permanently have a voice and a vote, and I do not think they will accept its being taken away from them now. That would be infantilising. We should accept that they have the capacity to make these decisions, and the House should embrace that.

3.52pm BST

If you are looking for a candidate embodying change, or excitement or a fresh start in the Labour leadership contest, then Yvette Cooper is unlikely to find her name at the top of your list. Like all the candidates, she has paid ritual lip service to the need for Labour to come up with new ideas, but, apart from being strong on the future feminist agenda (she was particularly good on the caring challenge for women), essentially she sounded like someone who would pick up where Labour left off in 2010.

And yet – it was an impressive performance, that will reinforce suggestions that Cooper is catching up. (According to Mike Smithson, that’s what the bookies think too.) Why? Because, although Cooper did not say anything particularly novel or revelatory, she made it clear that she could talk about a range of issues with knowledge and authority, and some humour too. On policy, she is probably the most substantial of the four candidates. She was particularly fluent on the economy (a subject on which, partly because it was colonised by her husband, she has said little for the last five years). And she made a good fist of addressing the claim that she had too much “baggage”. As Rafael Behr says (see below) there may be dangers in her running the ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman’ line, but she is probably right about David Cameron. If Andy Burnham, her main rival, wins, then Cameron will have his PMQs script sorted for the next five years (Mid-Staffs, Unite, Mid-Staffs, Unite, etc etc, ad nauseam). Handling Cooper he would probably find more tricky.

I think that David Cameron has a blind spot on women. He does not quite see it. He does not quite see issues that affect women in different ways. We had all the history about the “Calm down, dear” moment and so on. I don’t think he quite knows how to handle women in parliament as well. So I do think he has an issue. He’s often had a blind spot in terms of doing the cabinet reshuffles in the past, and I think we should be calling him out on it.

I suspect Cooper is right abt Cam struggling against a woman at PMQs, but not necessarily right to be making that a big sell in this contest

I think we can challenge Boris Johnson on a whole serious of things. And do you really want Boris Johnson to be the person answering the phone when Angela Merkel calls and says ‘What are we going to do about Vladimir Putin?’ The challenge to Boris Johnson is about whether or not he can be a serious government minister, never mind anything more serious than that, and I think in parliament we can challenge him on that in a way that he can’t be [challenged] as mayor. We’ve got to make sure that we do so.

It’s hugely serious and I do worry that there seems to be a growing view about how to handle the problem of Greece that is similar to the kind of view we saw in the US Treasury over Lehman Brothers bank where the view seemed to be that somehow we can cut them off, cauterise the problem by letting them go. We saw what happened. The US Treasury thought that they could do that over Lehman Brothers and in fact it was catastrophic and caused huge instability in the financial markets.

My warning to the government and across Europe is do not do a Lehman Brothers over Greece. Do not think that you can simply cauterise a problem without there being huge financial and economic instability and we need a long term solution for Greece.

2.57pm BST

Here are two comments from journalists on Yvette Cooper’s performance.

From the New Statesman’s George Eaton

Yvette Cooper impressive at Press Gallery lunch: funny, relaxed, politically and economically authoritative.

Cooper lacked the surprise factor/headlines of Liz Kendall’s lobby lunch, but that was a solid showing. She’s quietly moving through gears..

Lab debate verdict : Cooper crunching thru gears after slow start. Burnham will regret "putting party first". Kendall showed ruthlessness

2.33pm BST

Q: Jim Murphy this week attacked the “boss politics” of the unions. Are you worried about the power of the unions?

Cooper says unions will not play the role in this contest that they did in previous contests because the rules have changed. The relationship between Labour and the unions must be modern, she says.

2.30pm BST

Q: If you become leader, will Ed join you on stage as your husband?

Cooper says, when Ed ran for leader, she made it clear she would never join him on stage in that role. She would not expect him to do that, she says.

2.29pm BST

Q: How do you respond to the charge you have too much “baggage”?

This is a tough job, and it needs experience. All the candidates have experience of some kind. She makes no apologies for running a big department, taking charge of the future jobs fund, setting up Sure Start. Experience is important.

2.27pm BST

Q: Should Labour take any blame for the financial crash?

The problem was with the risks being taken by the banks. No one around the world understood the scale of that risk. Financial products were amplifying the problems of imbalance in the economy. Regulation was not adequate, and Labour has to take responsibility for that. But other parties wanted less regulation.

2.25pm BST

Q: Is there any evidence Cameron has a woman problem?

Cooper says polling during the parliament showed the Tories were doing worse among women than men. There is some evidence that narrowed during the campaign.

2.20pm BST

Q: How would you assess Labour’s election campaign?

It was too narrow, she says. Labour did well in cities, but not in towns.

2.17pm BST

Q: Should Labour have stamped on the idea of a Labour/SNP deal more?

We did stamp on it, Cooper says.

2.15pm BST

Q: Did your husband, Ed Balls, give you any tips on how to win the leadership?

Cooper says Balls told her that, by the time the hustings are over, the candidates end up using each other’s stories.

2.13pm BST

Q: What do you think of Osborne’s proposed budget surplus law?

Cooper says Osborne does not have a plan to deliver a surplus.

2.10pm BST

Q: Do you accept schools in the north did not improve as much as schools in London under Labour? What would you do about that?

Cooper says schools improved across the board. You could learn lessons from the London Challenge and apply them to raise standards elsewhere in the UK.

2.08pm BST

Q: What did you mean when you said the EU needed a sensible approach to Greece?

Cooper says she will not get into exactly what Greece should do. Clearly it needs to reform. What she is saying is that it would be a mistake to think Grexit could be contained.

2.06pm BST

Q: Is it easier for you to present yourself as Labour’s future now Ed Balls has lost his seat?

Cooper says Balls’ election defeat was very hard. But they have always done different jobs at different times. She was elected to parliament some time before him.

2.05pm BST

Q: Are you party first or country first?

Country first, says Cooper, but she says you need a strong party to change the country.

2.04pm BST

Q: If Cameron did dilute workers’ rights, would you withdraw support for the Yes campaign.

Cooper says it is strongly in Britain’s interests to be in Europe. She would campaign for those rights to be re-instated.

2.03pm BST

We are now on to questions.

Q: Would you have a separate Yes campaign from the Tories?

2.01pm BST

Cooper turns to other issues. She says Cameron is ignoring problems facing the UK, like the widening gap between rich and poor. Families are being stretched. Family life is stretched to fit around work. It should be the other way round.

Labour needs to “write a different future for the country”.

1.56pm BST

Cooper says she will start with Europe.

We have to remain part of Europe, she says. It promotes jobs and growth, and the EU is an organisation that has helped Europe avoid war.

1.49pm BST

Yvette Cooper is speaking now. She says this is the first time she has spoken at a lobby lunch.

Normally lobby lunches are three-course affairs. Today it is just canapes. Cooper says she thinks we have taken the Tory cuts mantra too seriously. She was promised a packed lobby lunch, she says. Instead, it is more of a lobby packed lunch.

1.31pm BST

Yvette Cooper is speaking at a Labour leadership hustings at the press gallery this afternoon. She is the second leadership candidate to speak here. Liz Kendall appeared last month.

It will start very soon. She will deliver a short speech, then take questions from journalists. I will be covering it in detail.

1.09pm BST

You can read the full report on the options for the restoration of parliament here.

1.05pm BST

They are two politicians that come to these issues from different perspectives and differing views but there was clearly an appetite on both sides on how you can work together to solve this.

On issues around free movement and welfare, the president came to that with an understanding of some of the challenges that can be presented by free movement across the EU after his time as a mayor in Germany, where he spoke of facing some of these challenges. He is very clear that you must respect the principle of free movement, which the prime minister has himself been clear he supports, but there are issues that should be looked at here and further discussions needed.

12.48pm BST

Tom Greatrex, Labour’s former UK energy spokesman, said there were still significant unanswered questions about the actual number of onshore projects that will be hit by the UK government decision to stop renewables obligation funding a year early.

Greatrex, who lost his seat to the Scottish National party at the general election, said he suspects not many schemes will stop as a result, but the policy would still have a significant political impact – helping the Tories and the Scottish National party, he added. He said:

The significant question which hasn’t been answered yet is how many of the onshore wind projects currently in planning were likely to reach the April 2017 cut off date for the closure of the renewables obligation and won’t reach 1 April 2016 or the grace period arrangements.

It suits both the Tories, who need to keep their anti-onshore awkward backbenchers on board, and the SNP who get a new front of constitutional outrage rather more. With Scotland receiving around a third of renewables support payments with less than a tenth of the consumer base, simply passing a population share of the budget to Holyrood does not provide a solution.

12.41pm BST

All candidates standing for election as a select committee chair had the chance to produce a mini “manifesto”. You can read Frank Field’s here and although, as he says, it will be for the new work and pensions committee to decide its agenda, he has already identified four areas that he wants to focus on. They are:

1 – Getting the Department for Work and Pensions to pay benefits more effectively and making sanctions fairer.

The committee must therefore seek to work with the Department for Work and Pensions to yield improvements in the delivery of benefits. Indeed, if the Department could set itself the goal of delivering benefits promptly, and move toward a fairer system of applying sanctions, then the numbers of people needing to go to food banks would be halved. The gains to poorer people from making progress on this front are therefore huge

The reform allowing people to draw down safely their pension capital has at last been delivered. But there is now a real danger that groups, similar to those who have already ripped off pension savers so consistently over the latter post-war years, will be at it again.

12.25pm BST

The new chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee, Crispin Blunt, has not wasted any time setting his agenda, according to the BBC’s Ross Hawkins.

Chilcot cd face MPs’ enquiry. New foreign affairs cttee chair Blunt tells me he’s sure new ctte will want to pursue issue urgently.

12.21pm BST

David Cameron met Martin Schulz, president of the European parliament, at Number 10 this morning. Afterwards Schulz said that Cameron would have to compromise over his demands for EU reform. He said:

Dialogue is necessary. Solutions are always coming via dialogue and at the end via compromise. There is a long list of common interests and I think common ground could be found by analysing and discussing content. That is what we did.

There were some controversial items and it is not surprising that in the European Parliament some views are different than here in London.

I think that these discussions have got off to a good start. We have got a long way to go in this reform and renegotiation, a lot of difficult issues to discuss, things that I believe fundamentally need to change, but it has been good to start these discussions today.

11.51am BST

The Department of Energy and Climate Change is rejecting claims that its decision today to abolish wind farm subsidies will lead to prices going up for consumers, as RenewableUK (see 9.20am) and Greenpeace (see 10.25am). This is from a DECC spokesman.

We have a cap on the cost of renewables to consumers, so this won’t push up bills. We have enough onshore wind now – including projects that have planning permission, we have as much as we’d projected. If we’d allowed the RO [renewables obligation] to stay open longer, we could have ended up with more projects than we can afford – which would have led to either higher bills, or other renewable technologies losing out on support.

11.30am BST

Culture committee: Jesse Norman, the Conservative Edmund Burke biographer and critic of “crony capitalism”, saw off four rivals to win this post. The biggest threat came from Graham Stuart, who chaired the education committee in the last parliament but who, unusually, tried to switch to another committee. On the first ballot Norman got 221 votes and Stuart 157 but, after the votes of the other three candidates were redistributed, Norman won with 319 votes to Stuart’s 211.

10.58am BST

Some 621 MPs voted in the select committee chair elections.

Until relatively recently, the whips got to choose which MPs would chair Commons select committees. As a result, the committees were not always as robust and independent as they might have been.

10.40am BST

John Bercow has just announced the winners of the elections to Commons select committees.

Here they are:

10.30am BST

The main industry body for wind energy in Scotland, Scottish Renewables, has warned that the cancellation of onshore wind subsidies could cause huge damage to future investment, cutting spending on new projects by £3bn and thwarting efforts to speed up the shift to low carbon energy.

In a statement, Scottish Renewables’ chief executive Niall Stuart said they saw no justifiable rationale for scrapping the renewables obligation.

10.28am BST

And this is from Patrick Harvie, the co-convenor of the Scottish Greens.

The Conservative government is far too willing to appease the irrational climate deniers on its backbenches, and this can be the only rationale for pulling the plug on the renewable energy industry.

To do so while committing to decades of funding for nuclear energy, giving the green light to new fossil fuel extraction and dragging their feet on demand management shows that their energy policy is stuck in the 20th century and failing to grasp the challenges and opportunities facing us today.

10.25am BST

Greenpeace UK is also saying that the government’s decision to abolish wind farm subsidies will lead to bills going up for consumers. This is from Daisy Sands, a Greenpeace energy campaigner.

Ministers have just moved to raise everyone’s energy bills by blocking the cheapest form of clean power, whilst continuing to back the impossibly expensive Hinkley C and going ‘all out’ for unpopular, risky, and unproven fracking. Even if this omnishambles of an energy policy survives the many legal challenges threatened against it, it will send a clear message to international investors that the UK government is willing to wreck our power sector to please their most ideological backbenchers. This mistake will cost the UK dearly.

10.05am BST

Here’s Caroline Flint, the shadow energy secretary, responding to the government’s announcement.

Renewable energy investment was undermined by the mixed messages of David Cameron’s last government and sadly that looks set to continue.

Onshore wind is the cheapest and most developed form of clean energy and there are 1,000 projects whose investment plans could be affected by the latest moving of the goalposts. Ministers need to make clear which projects exactly the grace period will apply to.

9.42am BST

Adam Vaughan is the Guardian’s environment site editor. Here’s his take on today’s announcement.

Last night energy and climate secretary Amber Rudd told an audience in London how important she thought climate change is. This morning she has, as heavily trailed, cut subsidies for onshore wind power a year earlier than expected. There’s an obvious tension between her claim to be “keep[ing] bills as low as possible for hard-working families” and the fact that onshore wind is the cheapest form of renewable power. By contrast the offshore wind that the Tories have promised to prioritise instead is around twice as expensive.

9.39am BST

In its announcement about the abolition of wind farm subsidies, the government says there will be a grace period for projects that already have planning permission. (See 9am.) Emily Gosden, the Telegraph’s energy editor, says she think in practice this will make little difference.

Govt finally announces onshore wind subsidy axe by closing RO scheme early. Devil in detail; ‘grace period’ could mean it makes little diff

Govt plans ‘grace period’ for consented wind farms-most farms that don’t yet have planning consent wouldn’t have qualified for scheme anyway

Most wind farms now seeking planning permission are hoping for subsidies from a new scheme. Govt says nothing on that in announcement today.

Curious: gov’t says wind farm subsidy axe will be brought in through primary legislation. Previous changes were secondary.

Having said devil in detail…there basically is no detail yet. Apparently as primary legislation, a brief press notice is all we get today.

9.31am BST

The Scottish government said this morning that it may use judicial review to try to block the UK government’s decision to end wind farm subsidies early. In a lengthy statement Fergus Ewing, the Scottish energy minister, said this would have a disproportionate impact on Scotland because 70% of UK onshore wind projects in the planning system are based there.

This announcement goes further than what had been previously indicated. It is not the scrapping of a ‘new’ subsidy that was promised but a reduction of an existing regime – and one under which companies and communities have already planned investment.

Onshore wind is already the lowest cost of all low carbon options, as well the vital contribution it makes towards tackling climate change, which means it should be the last one to be scrapped, curtailed or restricted.

9.20am BST

RenewableUK, which represents the renewable energy industry, says today’s announcement from the government will lead to bills going up for consumers. This is from its chief executive, Maria McCaffery.

The government’s decision to end prematurely financial support for onshore wind sends a chilling signal not just to the renewable energy industry, but to all investors right across the UK’s infrastructure sectors.

It means this government is quite prepared to pull the rug from under the feet of investors even when this country desperately needs to clean up the way we generate electricity at the lowest possible cost – which is onshore wind.

9.07am BST

Here’s the statement from Amber Rudd, the energy secretary, about her plans to end wind farm subsidies early.

We have a long-term plan to keep the lights on and our homes warm, power the economy with cleaner energy, and keep bills as low as possible for hard-working families.

As part of our plan, we are committed to cutting our carbon emissions by fostering enterprise, competition, opportunity and growth. We want to help technologies stand on their own two feet, not encourage a reliance on public subsidies.

9.00am BST

At the election the Conservatives said they would end new subsidies for wind farms. But it is going to happen earlier than expected, the Department of Energy and Climate Change has announced today.

Here is the DECC press release.

The government is to end new subsidies for onshore wind farms by closing the existing payments schemes a year early, it has announced.

The move aims to fulfil a Conservative promise ahead of the election on ending new public subsidies for onshore wind farms and changing the law so local people have the final say on them.

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