The Commons public accounts committee is set to launch an inquiry into the crown estate following questions over its lease of Royal Lodge to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.The PAC announced the inquiry as it published the unredacted lease given to Mountbatten-Windsor, and letters about the arrangement from the Crown Estate and from the Treasury.Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the PAC chair, said:We would like to thank The crown estate commissioners and HM Treasury for their considered responses to our questions.In publishing these responses, the public accounts committee fulfils one of its primary purposes – to aid transparency in public-interest information, as part of its overall mission to secure value for money for the taxpayer.Having reflected on what we have received, the information provided clearly forms the beginnings of a basis for an inquiry.

The National Audit Office supports the scrutiny function of this committee,We now await the conclusions the NAO will draw from this information, and plan to hold an inquiry based on the resulting evidence base in the new year,The PAC will consider what witnesses it wants to call to give evidence once it has considered all the written submissions,In theory it could summon Mountbatten-Windsor to appear,But there is no precedent for a member of the royal family giving evidence in person to a parliamentary committee in modern times and, if the committee were to invite Mountbatten-Windsor, given his approach to public scrutiny, he would probably refuse to appear.

The committee does not have the power to force him to attend.The Office for Budget Responsibility has refused to endorse the Conservative party claim that Rachel Reeves misled voters when she gave a pre-budget speech warning about the need for tax rises.(See 12.33pm.)David Lammy has been accused of making a “massive mistake” by Labour MPs and peers after announcing radical plans to cut thousands of jury trials across England and Wales.

The former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner will lay an amendment on Wednesday to speed up the workers rights’ bill, after “considerable anger” that unelected Lords forced the watering down of day-one rights.The public accounts committee is to launch an inquiry into the crown estate and its leases on properties to members of the royal family after questions over the lease of Royal Lodge to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.Ministers are working to ban political donations made with cryptocurrency but the crackdown is not likely to be ready for the elections bill in the new year, Whitehall sources have said.Rowena Mason has the story.

Planning ministers have delayed a decision on a new Chinese “super-embassy” in London until January, PA Media reports.PA says:In a letter to concerned parties, released by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), the Planning Inspectorate said the deadline had been pushed back to 20 January.The letter said the extension followed a letter from the home secretary and foreign secretary saying they had reached “an arrangement” with the Chinese government on “consolidating” Beijing’s diplomatic presence in one site.Housing Steve Reed had previously extended the deadline to 10 December.MPs from across the political spectrum have urged the government to reject China’s application for a new embassy on the site of the former Royal Mint, citing security concerns.

The decision has already been delayed at least twice.Steven Swinford from the Times says the government is now expected to approve the project in January, around the time Keir Starmer is due to visit China.In a post on social media Swinford says:The government is expected to formally approve a new super-sized Chinese embassy in the heart of London next month after being given the green light by MI5 and MI6.The Home Office and the Foreign Office, which represent the services, submitted their formal responses last week.They did not raise any objectionsI was told they were happy as long as all Chinese diplomats were relocated to the new embassy.

Someone said, only partly joking, that it was to ensure that ‘all the spies were in one place’However their late response means that Steve Reed, the housing and local government secretary, needs more time to consult other bodies as part of the planning processClaire Waxman, who will start as the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales in the new year, has issued a statement implying that she supports the plans to restrict access to jury trials,She says she will scrutinise the plans from the viewpoint of victims, and that the government must listen,But “the status quo is untenable”, she says,She says:Our courts system is currently failing victims on a scale that is unsustainable and unacceptable,With backlogs projected to reach over 105,000 cases and trials already being listed in 2030, we are asking the impossible of victims.

This distress compounds their trauma; to many, this is justice in name only,The sheer scale of the challenge before us means that ‘business as usual’ is no longer an option,As Sir Brian Leveson himself has rightly stated, tinkering around the edges will not suffice,No amount of efficiencies, funding, or extra sitting days alone can fix a system this broken,We are past the point of sticking plaster solutions.

This crisis demands bold decisions and radical reforms,Above all, we need action now,The longer we delay, the harder the road to recovery becomes,Every day the backlog grows, victims’ access to justice diminishes further,Here is an explainer by Haroon Siddique, our legal affairs correspondent, on the plan to curb the use of jury trials.

During his Commons statement David Lammy, the deputy PM and justice secretary, said that using juries to decide criminal cases was unusual in other common law jurisdictions.He went on: “And, let’s be honest, it’s a peculiar way to run a public service.”Jess Brown-Fuller, the Lib Dem justice spokesperson, said that she was troubled by this phrase.She explained:David Lammy’s description of jury trials as “a peculiar way to run a public service” is deeply concerning.Jury trial is a cornerstone of our justice system and a fundamental safeguard of liberty and fairness.

It’s not a peculiar inconvenience; it’s a fundamental right,The answer to fixing the justice system does not lie in taking a sledgehammer to jury trials,Any solution worth its salt must first tackle the myriad of shocking inefficiencies that plague our justice system and waste countless hours of sitting time,The Law Society of England and Wales, like the former lord chief justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd (see 3,27pm), has said that the government should have stuck to the Leveson plan to restrict the use of jury trials.

In a statement, Brett Dixon, the society’s vice president, said:Sir Brian Leveson’s recommendations, including two magistrates sitting alongside a judge in the new court, retained an element of lay participation in determining a person’s guilt or innocence.The government’s proposals remove this.Allowing a single judge, operating in an under resourced system, to decide guilt in a serious and potentially life changing case is a dramatic departure from our shared values.The government cannot justify stripping away this fundamental right without publishing clear evidence that putting more cases in the hands of a single judge will tackle the horrendous backlogs in our courts.The Leveson proposals, while an uncomfortable compromise, were understandable given the extensive challenges the criminal justice system faces including unacceptable delays for victims, witnesses and defendants.

Going beyond them is not,Liz Saville Roberts, the Plaid Cymru leader at Westminster, has also criticised the plans to curb the use of jury trials, saying juries are not the cause of the problems in the court system,She said:Juries are not the problem – chronic underinvestment is,Victims will continue to see justice delayed unless the UK government gets the basics right after years of deliberate underfunding,Rotten buildings and overloaded staff are a fundamental barrier to the provision of justice.

Even in watered-down form, any attempt to restrict jury trials sets a dangerous precedent.When she raised this point in the Commons during David Lammy’s statement, Saville Roberts cited Caernarfon justice centre as an example.She said, even though it was only 16 years old, the roof leaked and the heating did not work.Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, a former lord chief justice of England and Wales, told Radio 4’s the World at One that it might have been better for David Lammy to stick to the Brian Leveson proposal, which was for some jury trials to be replaced by a judge sitting with two magistrates.Instead, Lammy is replacing some jury trials with judge-only trials.

Thomas said:We ought to pause long and hard before we remove the lay element from trying the more serious casesMy experience has been that when I’ve sat on appeals – which a judge sits with two magistrates – or I’ve sat in arbitrations and other cases where one has lay people with one, it’s very good.It produces balance, it brings to a court what a jury brings, which is some experience of people with everyday knowledge of life.The Green party has criticised the plan to restrict jury trials.In a statement the Green MP Siân Berry said:The focus on victims’ rights is appreciated, but this Labour government is taking the wrong steps to try to serve us better, and laying the groundwork for further crackdowns on dissent, whistleblowing and protest if it removes juries from so many charges that have state or corporate victims.Juries are also a safeguard against creeping bias and discrimination.

Judges are not currently representative of our wider communities and, under these plans, individual decisions will be at risk of damaging politicisation, while individual judges who are women or from minoritised communities risk attacks from the far right.Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is unlikely to receive any compensation for giving up his Royal Lodge home because of the repairs that will be needed to the 30-room mansion, PA Media reports.PA says;In a briefing to MPs on the public accounts committee, the crown estate said:Our initial assessment is that while the extent of end of tenancy dilapidations and repairs required are not out of keeping with a tenancy of this duration, they will mean in all likelihood that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor will not be owed any compensation for early surrender of the lease … once dilapidations are taken into account.The crown estate said “before this position can be fully validated however, a full and thorough assessment must be undertaken post-occupation by an expert in dilapidation”.Mountbatten-Windsor gave the minimum 12 month’s notice that he would surrender the property on 30 October.

If no end-of-tenancy repairs were required, Andrew would have been entitled to £488,342.21 for ending his tenancy on 30 October 2026.The Commons public accounts committee is set to launch an inquiry into the crown estate following questions over its lease of Royal Lodge to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.The PAC announced the inquiry as it published the unredacted lease given to Mountbatten-Windsor, and letters about the arrangement from the Crown Estate and from the Treasury.Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the PAC chair, said:We would like to thank The crown estate commissioners and HM Treasury for their considered responses to our questions.

In publishing these responses, the public accounts committee fulfils one of its primary purposes – to aid transparency in public-interest information, as part of its overall mission to secure value for money for the taxpayer,Having reflected on what we have received, the information provided clearly forms the beginnings of a basis for an inquiry,The National Audit Office supports the scrutiny function of this committee,We now await the conclusions the NAO will draw from this information, and plan to hold an inquiry based on the resulting evidence base in the new year,The PAC will consider what witnesses it wants to call to give evidence once it has considered all the written submissions.

In theory it could summon Mountbatten-Windsor to appear,But there is no precedent for a member of the royal family giving evidence in person to a parliamentary committee in modern times and, if the committee were to invite Mountbatten-Windsor, given his approach to public scrutiny, he would probably refuse to appear,The committee does not have the power to force him to attend,