David Blunkett the Home Secretary will today unveil plans to strip thousands of asylum seekers of the right to work while their claim

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, will today unveil plans to strip thousands of asylum seekers of the right to work while their claim to stay in Britain is being assessed. Let’s not forget that the reason asylum seekers are allowed to work after six months is because successive governments have failed repeatedly to make asylum decisions within their own targets of six months.”But the Home Office is believed to regard the concession, introduced during the Eighties during a backlog, as “increasingly irrelevant” because 80 per cent of applicants are given an initial decision within six months.. Ken Livingstone’s application to rejoin the Labour Party, which will be decided by the ruling national executive committee today, is said to be “on a knife-edge”. Mr Walker said: “Not to readmit him at the NEC would be to deny the London Labour Party the right to choose a candidate with clear majority support.”.

Downing Street and other government departments are guilty of providing “substandard answers” to parliamentary questions and of withholding information from MPs, a House of Commons report concluded yesterday. In its report, the Public Administration Committee called for more openness after The Independent revealed that that the Department of Work and Pensions had instructed civil servants to check whether an MP was “friendly” before answering.Ministers were guilty of “a cavalier and unprofessional attitude” to MPs and “serious delays” in answering their questions, the committee said. It accused the Government of failing to heed previous criticisms from the committee and said that its “performance continues to disappoint”.”Parliamentary questions are a crucial instrument of democratic accountability,” said Tony Wright, the Labour MP who chairs the committee. “We are determined to hold to account any department, and any ministers, with the wrong sort of approach to questions.”The report singled out a number of departments that refused to answer questions satisfactorily, including Downing Street and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which had declined to provide information to MPs on the Millennium Dome. The report found that the Prime Minister refused to answer 2.15 per cent of questions, compared with 0.41 per cent at the Department of Social Security and 0.75 per cent at the Treasury. Some departments, such as Culture, failed to give valid reasons for refusing to answer questions.It recommended that MPs should have a better appeals procedure and suggested that ministers who refused to answer questions could be summoned before the committee to explain their conduct. If this sanction does not succeed, an independent appeals body should be introduced..

The future of David Davis as Conservative Party chairman was in doubt last night, amid speculation that he may be moved from his post in a reshuffle of the party’s frontbench team today. The Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, was said to have spoken to Mr Davis, who is on holiday in Florida, about his role last night.Speculation at Westminster last night was that, if Mr Davis is moved, possibly to another post, then a female candidate, such as Gillian Shephard, could become chairwoman. Last night, the Tories described the reshuffle as a “modest restructuring” before the Commons rises for summer recess on Thursday.In the first sign of serious internal feuding since Mr Duncan Smith became leader, senior frontbenchers have accused Mr Davis of blocking reforms to select more women and ethnic-minority candidates and even of plotting to become leader himself.His critics claim he has failed to boost the morale of grassroots members, fallen out with staff and ignored telephone calls from important donors to the party. Colleagues had also criticised him for taking an early summer holiday that meant he was out of the country for Gordon Brown’s setpiece spending review last week. And yet, accompanying Mr Foot to the Durham Miners’ Gala, Old Labour’s annual festival of banners and brass bands, you might be forgiven for thinking he had led the party to its most famous victory.Ironically, the man who arguably achieved that feat, or at least secured for the party its largest parliamentary majority, Tony Blair, has never visited the gala as Labour leader.