Ulez court challenge wasted taxpayers" money, says Khan Sadiq Khan has been speaking to the BBC about the high court’s judgment today on the Ulez expansion. The mayor of London told BBC News: I welcome the judgment today. I’ve been told more than £1m of council taxpayers’ money has been wasted on this case. I’m quite clear though, I made this decision to expand Ulez because it is really important we address the public health crisis. Asked about increased costs to Londoners, Khan says nine out of 10 cars in London were already compliant with Ulez and the scrappage scheme would offer support. End of day summary Here’s a roundup of the key developments from the day: Five Conservative-led councils have lost their high court challenge against the mayor of London Sadiq Khan’s plans to expand the capital’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez). The zone, which the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has said is a vital move to tackle toxic air, is due to be extended throughout the whole of Greater London at the end of August, making owners of the most polluting cars pay to drive. Sadiq Khan defended the Ulez expansion and said the high court challgenge wasted tax payer’s money. He said: I’ve been told more than £1m of council taxpayers’ money has been wasted on this case. I’m quite clear though, I made this decision to expand Ulez because it is really important we address the public health crisis.” The five councils who brought the Ulez legal challenge said they were “hugely disappointed” with the high court’s ruling, adding that the mayor and Transport for London (TfL) “do not realise the damage” the extension of the zone will have. The decision was, however, welcomed by charities and air pollution campaigners. Yvette Cooper has accused the government of “flailing around” in its approach to tackling backlogs in the UK asylum system after it emerged the Home Office has bought tents ready to house up to 2,000 people on disused military sites. The shadow home secretary attacked the government for failing to process asylum claims more quickly, although she refused to say whether Labour would also use tents to deal with the migrant housing crisis. The government is unable to say how many of the children who have come to the UK to seek safety it has placed in temporary hotel accommodation, or give the age of the youngest, because it has not kept a sufficiently accurate count, ministers have admitted. The Home Office was accused in January of a “dereliction of duty” after it emerged that hundreds of children had gone missing after being placed in hotels. Jeremy Hunt said he cannot ignore the economic situation when making decisions about compensation for infected blood scandal victims. Giving evidence to the official inquiry, the chancellor said: “It’s a very uncomfortable thing for me to say but I can’t ignore the economic and fiscal context, because in the end the country only has the money that it has. So, I can’t ignore it.” NatWest has launched an independent review into the handling of Nigel Farage’s account being shut down by high-net-worth bank Coutts, its chair has said. Howard Davies said it had appointed Travers Smith to lead the review into the account closure and how the information was handled, after NatWest’s boss Alison Rose and Coutts boss Peter Flavel both stepped down this week. The anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller has said “we don’t have a functioning democracy” if new political parties cannot access banking services, after she was told her own party’s account would be shut. The government and financial services watchdog must step in, she said, to ensure new parties and MPs can access banking to be able to operate. We’re closing this liveblog now. Thanks so much for joining us and for all the comments and emails. Sadiq Khan was interviewed on BBC News earlier. He was asked about comments by Rachel Reeves who said it was not the time to “clobber” Londoners with the Ulez charge and said it wasn’t a progressive tax. The mayor of London said: I’ve been quite clear from when we first launched this policy in 2017, but also when I announced the expansion of this scheme, that it’s a difficult decision. It’s not one I take lightly. But it’s essential that we take steps to address the air pollution crisis in London, the public health crisis. We have around 4,000 premature deaths in London. The vast majority of those deaths are in outer London. We’ve seen from the NHS, a reduction by a third, of those children admitted to hospital attributable to air pollution because of our policies in central London. Clean air is a human right not a privilege. We wouldn’t accept dirty water. Why dirty air? Nigel Farage is used to being thanked by true believers in Brexit, but the man who came to grasp his hand as he sat down for dinner in London’s Belgravia on Tuesday night was a surprise. “It was a chap who just said ‘Nigel, I’m a remainer, but please, stand up for us’. He was an Italian businessman in London who was having terrible trouble receiving foreign payments because banks thought he was a money launderer,” the former Ukip leader said. Hours later, the departure of Dame Alison Rose as NatWest’s chief executive over her role in the Farage “debanking” controversy would give the politician turned broadcaster one of his greatest coups since Brexit. It has also lifted him from the relative obscurity of his last reinvention, as the star anchor of GB News. Just like old times – when he was a near-omnipresent fixture across all channels – he has suddenly found himself back in the limelight with a soapbox issue that has ministers and the rightwing press following in his wake. He is now launching a website to collect details of tens of thousands of people he expects will back his campaign against a banking system he claims is “rotten to the core”. While he says it will be “non-political, non-party”, the future political potential of such a database is obvious. Jeremy Hunt said he recognised the need to avoid a “hiatus” after the government receives the inquiry’s final report, but claimed it was important that ministers had all the “context”. Pressed on the possibilities of delays caused by a general election next year and the pre-poll period of purdah, the chancellor said the work carried out so far was “because we want to be in a position to resolve this issue as soon as we possibly can upon the conclusion of the inquiry”. Hunt was also pressed on the government decision to wait for the conclusion of the inquiry before making a decision on compensation. He said that because the sums are “potentially very large”, it was right to make a decision with the “full context”. He added: What would not be acceptable would be for that moment to be another hiatus where there was another very long period of time. I think the fact that ahead of the final conclusions of the inquiry that we’ve paid compensation, we’ve paid interim quantum compensation, and we’ve accepted the case for compensation, and we are doing the work now to understand what the final amounts should be, indicates that we want to make the process as quick as we possibly can. The government is unable to say how many of the children who have come to the UK to seek safety it has placed in temporary hotel accommodation, or give the age of the youngest, because it has not kept a sufficiently accurate count, ministers have admitted. The Home Office was accused in January of a “dereliction of duty” after it emerged that hundreds of children had gone missing after being placed in hotels, with a whistleblower saying that some had been abducted on the streets outside. The high court ruled this week that the government’s “routine” housing of unaccompanied child asylum seekers in hotels was unlawful. The paucity of the government’s record-keeping was revealed by written answers to parliamentary questions posed by the Liberal Democrat peer Paul Scriven. In one question, he asked how many unaccompanied children seeking asylum have been housed in Home Office temporary hotels in the past 18 months. The Home Office answered: “The data requested cannot be provided as it comes from live operational databases that have not been quality assured.” In another question, Scriven asked the age of the youngest unaccompanied child seeking asylum who has been housed in a Home Office temporary hotel and how long the child was housed for. He received the same answer. Lord Scriven said: This is a national scandal and beneath us as a country. The Home Office’s careless practice in asylum seeker hotels is totally unacceptable and unlawful, too, as the courts have now confirmed. It’s shameful that the Conservatives are falling so far short of their legal obligations and that they’ve let the backlog balloon so much that hotel accommodation is required in the first place. The Home Office has got to do better. Fizza Qureshi, the chief executive of the Migrants’ Rights Network, said: The fact that the Home Office does not have data on the ages of these children or how many are housed in temporary hotels is concerning. This raises questions about how the Home Office and local authorities are able to provide adequate safeguarding and care for those it should be protecting. Furthermore, it also calls into question how they know if – and where – children are going missing from Home Office accommodation, like in Brighton and Hove earlier this year. She said the Home Office’s record-keeping showed a “total disregard” for the safety of unaccompanied children seeking asylum. Jeremy Hunt said he appreciated “that from the outside it feels like the government is working painfully slowly”. Asked if it would be fair to say that had successive governments acted sooner the cost might have been substantially less than it might now, the chancellor said: It wouldn’t just have cost less, it would have been more just. It would have meant that many hundreds, if not thousands, of people would have died knowing justice had been done, even despite the incredible agony that they and their families have been through. So, I think that goes without saying. Hunt also told the inquiry: I happen to have a lot of personal interaction with people who have been affected by this scandal. So, I do understand why there is a very, very high degree of suspicion. He added: I appreciate that from the outside it feels like the government is working painfully slowly and I appreciate the moral urgency given that people are dying. But I am satisfied, as chancellor, that the government is working very fast to try and resolve this as quickly as possible. Jeremy Hunt says he "cannot ignore the economic context" when deciding about compensation for infected blood scandal victims Jeremy Hunt said he cannot ignore the economic situation when making decisions about compensation for infected blood scandal victims. Giving evidence to the official inquiry, the chancellor said: It’s a very uncomfortable thing for me to say but I can’t ignore the economic and fiscal context, because in the end the country only has the money that it has. So, I can’t ignore it. I think everyone here should take some comfort from the fact that the government has decided there is a moral case for compensation and justice should be done, and that is a very big change. We now have to work through the fact that ... this is a much more challenging time to find the sorts of sums of money that this could potentially involve. The foreign secretary, James Cleverly, has said London mayor Sadiq Khan is “not on [people’s] side”, claiming the Ulez expansion will disproportionately affect those who already have the cleanest air as well as those who cannot afford a new vehicle. Cleverly also said people living in areas with the fewest public transport options would be some of the hardest hit by the planned changes. Here is more from the Conservative party’s London mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, who opposed the expansion, saying it will have a “devastating” impact on families and businesses across the capital. Hall told BBC Radio 4’s World at One programme that while net zero is a good ambition, Londoners don’t want the Ulez to be expanded. She said: Net zero is a good ambition. How we get there is debatable. We’d all have different ideas but I have to tell you, Londoners do not want the expanded Ulez zone. Earlier, she said if she was elected mayor, she plans to stop the Ulez expansion and will set up a “pollution hotspots fund” to tackle pollution “where it is” in the capital, rather than “taxing people where it isn’t”. Edit: We previously quoted Hall as saying: “It’s a good ambition, but I don’t actually think it will be possible.” This was actually from a separate question in the interview, where she was referring to the 2030 target of banning the sale of petrol and diesel cars, not the net zero by 2050 target. Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, whose nine-year-old daughter died after an asthma attack due to air pollution in 2013, said it was a relief Ulez would be expanded in London. Her daughter Ella had 25 emergency hospital admissions in the previous three years before she died. The family’s home was near a major road in Lewisham. In 2020, a landmark coroner’s report made Ella the first person in the world to have air pollution cited as a cause of death. Following today’s ruling, Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, who is now a World Health Organization (WHO) air quality ambassador, told BBC News: I would like to take this opportunity to thank the mayor of London for listening to me and [prioritising] the lives of children, especially in London. Up to 12 die every year from asthma, and I am relieved really. I think I’m slightly overwhelmed and quite shocked. Adoo-Kissi-Debrah told reporters that air pollution should be seen as a “health issue” by politicians. She called on Rishi Sunak to contribute more to the Ulez scrappage scheme. She added: This isn’t a party political issue. This is about lives and about the nation’s health.