Yvette Cooper ‘on resignation watch' after spending row with Reeves

Telegraph

4 hours ago

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.
In one meeting last week, Ms Reeves is said to have abruptly brought talks with Ms Cooper to a close. There are also claims a senior Home Office official stopped taking calls from the Treasury.
Sir Keir Starmer has had to directly intervene to end the stand-off over the spending review. Downing Street on Monday said Ms Cooper had agreed to accept the Treasury offer, which includes a real-terms increase in policing budgets.
Multiple well-placed government insiders told The Telegraph that the negotiations between Ms Cooper and the Treasury became so fraught that there was discussion about whether she would quit.
An ally of Ms Cooper on Monday evening denied that she might resign, noting she had been talking to aides about her diary engagements for the rest of the month earlier in the day.
But the fact that some figures in Downing Street and the Treasury have considered her departure a distinct possibility underscores how tense the talks became.
Labour promised in its 2024 general election manifesto to halve violence against women and girls, reduce knife crime and establish 13,000 more community police officers.
As Home Secretary, Ms Cooper is responsible for delivering those promises but it is the Treasury that decides how much money can go into policing.
Treasury insiders are framing the police as a winner in Wednesday's spending review, which sets departmental spending for the next three years, as the policing budget will rise in real terms.
But the degree to which police chiefs have launched into a public lobbying campaign against the Treasury – one still running over the weekend – suggests they fear it will not be enough.
The Tories believe that, even with real-term police spending rises, it is likely that total officer headcount in England and Wales will fall from its peak of 149,000 in 2024 in the years ahead.
Ms Cooper was the last cabinet minister left standing when Angela Rayner, the Communities Secretary, who has also battled with the Treasury, settled her budget on Sunday evening. The Home Secretary finally agreed a deal with less than 48 hours to go until Ms Reeves announces her spending plans.
One ally of Ms Cooper said of her tough negotiating approach: 'Yvette's been chief secretary of the Treasury. She knows all the best ideas in the book.'
A senior Whitehall figure acknowledged that the talks between Ms Cooper and No 11 had been fraught and prompted discussion among aides and officials that she could resign.
However any decision to go would likely mean the end of Ms Cooper's front-line political career, since she would not be expected to be welcomed back into the cabinet under Sir Keir.
The details of the policing budget, when they are published on Wednesday, will be closely scrutinised for their impact on officer numbers and the delivery of flagship pledges.
In a series of interventions in the last few weeks, police chiefs and associations representing officers have been publicly challenging Ms Reeves to go further on police pay.
In an article for The Telegraph on Monday, the heads of the Police Superintendents' Association and Police Federation of England and Wales warned that police forces were 'broken' and had been forced to shed officers because of cuts.
As an unprotected department, the Home Office has been in Treasury cross-hairs as spending is squeezed from an annual real-term increase of 2.5 per cent to 1.2 per cent.
Above-inflation rises for the NHS, extra money for schools and a marked increase in defence spending means other Whitehall budgets have been facing real-term cuts.
On Monday, Ms Reeves announced that nine million pensioners will now get the winter fuel payments – a major reversal in policy after all but the poorest lost them last summer.
Now pensioners in England and Wales with an income of £35,000 or less will get the annual payment of between £200 and £300 per household.
Around two million pensioners whose incomes are above that threshold will get the money but then have it clawed back through the tax system, meaning they will lose out.