Sunday shows round-up: Oliver Dowden urges nurses to call off strikes

Oliver Dowden: public sector pay rises would cost ‘£1,000 per household’

This morning, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Oliver Dowden asked the unions representing nurses and ambulance workers to call off their planned strikes in an interview with Laura Kuenssberg. Dowden, whose role sees him in charge of co-ordinating the government’s response to the planned industrial action, told Kuenssberg that the collective amount being asked for by unions would take the government’s total bill to £28 billion. Kuenssberg challenged him on how the government had reached its conclusions:

The government is giving out ‘highest pay settlements for 20 years’

Dowden stressed that the government would seek to follow the recommendations of the NHS Pay Review Body. Kuenssberg asked why the government had previously made exceptions to following the advice of other pay review bodies, and if NHS staff should not also be a special case:

Yvette Cooper: we oppose making a crime of ‘illegal entry’ to UK

Kuenssberg also interviewed shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper and asked whether a Labour government would scrap a new offence the government has introduced, of making an ‘illegal entry’ to the UK:

Justin Welby: Russian withdrawal from Ukraine ‘is the way forward’

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke about his recent visit to Ukraine and the importance of continuing to stand in solidarity with the country for the duration of the war:

We’ve seen a ‘400% increase’ in numbers using food banks

Welby also said that the hike in food prices resulting from the Ukraine war had seen an exponential rise in requests from the Church’s food banks over the past 18 months:

Victoria Newton: it is ‘simply not true’ that we favoured William and Kate

And finally, Sun editor Victoria Newton rejected claims made by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex that her paper harboured an immutable bias against them in...