The Conservative MP Natalie Elphicke has accused her own party of breaking a promise it made in its last election manifesto to ban no-fault evictions.

During this afternoon’s debate on the renters (reform) bill Elphicke echoed an argument made by Angela Rayner at PMQs (see 3.16pm), telling MPs:

This is a bill that the Conservative manifesto in 2019 promised would benefit tenants. Instead, this has become a bill where the balance too often is in favour of the landlords, particularly with the new clause 30 which could indefinitely delay the abolition of section 21 no-fault evictions.

If that were so, that would be nothing short of a betrayal for the Conservative manifesto that was promised in 2019 and, for that reason, I’m unable to support this today.

Referring to other features of the bill, which is being watered down by government amendments favourable to landlords, she said:

It is my view that this bill does not go far enough now in dealing with the fundamental challenges of the private rented sector. The private rented sector is no longer a flex or transitionary tenure. It is the main tenure for millions of people for much, if not all, of their lives.

Sadly, the original principle of the bill, which was to create a fair and responsible new rented sector, has been undermined by the government’s amendments.

Ben Habib, a deputy leader of Reform UK, has proposed not rescuing people in the Channel if they scupper their small boats and refuse new dinghies as they should “suffer the consequences of their actions”. Rowena Mason has the story.

A reader has asked for a fuller version of the exchange at PMQs between Mhairi Black, the SNP’s deputy leader at Westminster, and Oliver Dowden, the deputy PM, about mass graves in Gaza. (See 12.23pm.)

Black started:

Two years ago, when mass graves were discovered in Ukraine, this House united in condemnation and rightly treated those graves as evidence of war crimes, which Russia must be made to answer for. Yesterday, Palestinian officials uncovered two mass graves outside the bombed hospitals in Gaza. Those graves also constitute a war crime, do they not?

Dowden replied:

Of course, we would expect the democratic Government of Israel to investigate any allegations of misconduct. That is exactly what they are doing, and it is exactly what the foreign secretary and the prime minister urge them to do. However, I find it quite extraordinary that the hon. Lady seeks to draw parallels between the legitimate war of self-defence of Israel and the conduct of Russia.

Then Black responded:

Three hundred bodies, including of the elderly and the injured, some of which had been stripped naked and mutilated, with their hands tied behind their backs. The UK’s own arms policy states that if there is even a risk that war crimes may be taking place, that is reason enough to halt the sale of arms. Given all that we know, why is the prime minister yet to do so?

And Dowden replied:

We continue to urge the Israeli government to investigate any allegations of misconduct. The difference though is that we can trust the Israeli Government – a democratically elected Government – to properly investigate those things. Of course, we keep the advice under review. The foreign secretary has recently made it clear that he has conducted a determination and has not changed his advice regarding export licences, and I think that is the correct decision.

MPs are now debating the final stages of the renters (reform) bill. It is supposed to implement a commitment in the Conservative party’s 2019 manifesto to abolish no-fault evictions but amendments tabled by the government have watered this down.

At PMQs Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, challenged Oliver Dowden, the deputy PM, to say when the ban on no-fault evictions would come into force. In an interview with the BBC this morning Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, said he hoped the bill would become law before the election, and at PMQs Rayner asked Dowden:

This week the housing minister said there is no solid date for banning no-fault evictions, the housing secretary [Gove] now says it won’t happen before an election, so if he can give us a date, can he name it now?

Dowden replied:

I can name the date for [Rayner], today. It’s today that this house will be voting on it. And I’m confident that in line with our manifesto we will deliver on that commitment.

In response, the Renters’ Reform Coalition said Dowden was being “disingenuous”. Tom Darling, campaign manager at the coalition, said:

Michael Gove U-turned this morning to say he couldn’t guarantee the end of no-fault evictions. The deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden knows that no-fault evictions won’t be abolished today, so it’s disingenuous for him to say the practice will end today.

Renters facing these evictions up and down the country tomorrow, who have already been so badly let down by endless delays caused by Conservative landlord MPs, don’t deserve to have their hopes artificially raised yet again.

Downing Street has now come up with an explanation for the discrepancy between the £1bn the government said it would save from civil service job cuts last autumn and the £2.9bn it now says those cuts will save. (See 2.15pm.)

No 10 says the £1bn figure was the amount that would be saved from capping headcount numbers at current levels. By March 2025 that would save £1bn, the Treasury said at the time.

But the figure quoted yesterday relates to how much would be saved by starting to reduce the civil service headcount from 2025-26 onwards. Those savings would get you to £2.9bn by 2028-28, No 10 says.

Labour has described the government’s claim that it has a plan to raise defence spending by £75bn by 2030 as based on a “fake figure”. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has described this figure as misleading. (See 10.35am.)

Speaking in the Commons, in response to a statement from Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, his Labour shadow John Healey said:

If this 2030 plan had been in a budget, it would have been independently checked, openly costed, and fully funded. So where is the additional money coming from? How much from which other R&D (research and development) budgets? How much from cutting how many civil servants in which departments?

They’ve tried this trick before, in the 2015 defence review ministers pledged to cut 30% of the MoD civil servants to make their defence spending plans add up. Civil servant numbers didn’t go down, they went up. Not down to 41,000 but up to 63,000.

Now he’s mentioned an additional £75bn five times in his statement, over the next six years the government’s official spending plan are based on a 0.5% real annual growth in chore defence spending. Why has he invented his own zero growth baseline to produce this fake figure claiming an extra £75bn for defence. The public will judge ministers by what they do, not what they say.

In response, Shapps said:

He says judge us by our action, not our words. You know what, we will, because 11 members of that side’s frontbench voted against Trident. So it’s no good for him and the leader of the opposition to go up to Barrow and claim that they’re all in favour now of the nuclear weapons, of the nuclear defence.

This is what Rishi Sunak said in response to the second question about the funding of the plan to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by the end of the decade. (See 1.04pm.)

We have made a choice and I am not shying away from that choice. All governing is about prioritising. I have decided to prioritise defence because I think that is the right thing to do for our country.

I am not going to get into writing the next manifesto here and now, but what I am confident about is that, if you have a strong plan for the economy, as we have, and that plan is working, we stick to that plan, we will be able to continue increasing defence spending.

It is a completely funded plan. We have got a very clear idea of how to reduce civil service headcount, which has grown considerably over the last few years, and we can bring that back and use that to fund what I announced yesterday, and alongside that, continue to invest in public services and cut people’s taxes.

At the press conference the opening statements are over, and Rishi Sunak and Olaf Scholz are now taking questions.

Q: [To Sunak] Are you really being honest with people about the funding of your defence spending plan?

Sunak does not accept he is misleading people.

He says the government will reduce the size of the civil service.

The government is making a choice, he says.

He thinks it is important for Britain to stand up for its values.

He says this announcement is consistent with the government’s ability to “keep cutting taxes”.

He mentions tax cuts already announced, but he seems to be hinting that the defence spending announcement does not mean that further tax cuts won’t be included in the Tory election manifesto.

UPDATE: Sunak said:

The plan that I announced yesterday, it’s fully funded.

It’s funded, rightly with a reduction in civil service headcount back to 2019 levels. Snce then we’ve seen a very significant rise that isn’t sustainable or needed. The chancellor has conducted a detailed exercise, he announced this at the end of last year, that exercise is completed, and that’s what gives us the confidence that we can release the savings needed to fund our defence plan, combined with an uplift in R&S spending, which we have already budgeted for …

It is the biggest strengthening of our national defence in a generation. It is fully funded. And it is based on the fact that we have a strong economy and an economic plan that is working …

And it’s because our economic plan is working that I’m able to make these announcements and they are entirely consistent with our ability to keep cutting people’s taxes.

PMQs is has finished, and the press conference in Berlin is just starting.

We should have a live feed at the top of the blog soon.

As for PMQs? Very snap verdict – Angela Rayner has not been taken down by “housegate”, and she is still functioning effectively as an attack machine. It wasn’t her best performance, and if the best line she can come up with about Rishi Sunak is that he is a “pint-sized loser”, she really needs to try harder. Surely it’s time to abandon jibes about height. But she dealt with the attacks on her housing arrangements fairly effectively. She raised the issue before he did, and used it as a pivot into a question about the renters (reform) bill, where Dowden ended up giving a thin defence of legislation that does not do what it is meant to do. Rayner said:

I know this party opposite is desperate to talk about my living arrangements, but the public want to know what this government is going to do about theirs.

And she was right.

Mhairi Black, the deputy leader of the SNP, says when mass graves were discovered in Ukraine, the Commons was united in condemndation. Yesterday Palestinian officials uncovered two mass graves outside the bombed hosptials in Gaza. This is also a war crime, isn’t it?

Dowden says the government expects Israel to investigate allegations of misconduct, and that is what it is doing. But he says he is surprised Black is comparing Israel to Russia.

Black says the mere suspicion of war crimes should be enough for arms sales to be suspended.

Dowden says Israel is investigating these deaths. And he says the government recently considered the case for arms sales to Israel, and decided they could continue.

UPDATE: I’ve posted a fuller version of the exchange, with the direct quotes, at 3.31pm.

Angela Rayner says Frank Field was a good friend and colleague. She pays tribute.

Tories are obsessed with her living arrangements, she says. But she says people are interested in what the government will do about theirs. She mentions the case of someone facing eviction, and asks what the Tories are doing to get rid of no-fault evictions.

Dowden says it is a pleasure to be facing Rayner again at PMQs. Any more sessions like this and she will be claiming this is her primary residence.

He says MPs are voting on no-fault evictions today.

Nigel Farage will be allowed to present his nightly GB News programme throughout the general election campaign, Ofcom has confirmed, after the media regulator said there was no clear desire among the British public to stop politicians presenting shows on news channels. Jim Waterson has the story here.

With Rishi Sunak in Berlin, it is deputies’ day at PMQs, and Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister, will be facing questions from Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader. It will be her first time at the despatch box since it was announced that Greater Manchester is fully investigating various allegations relating to the council house she bought and sold before she became an MP, and where she was living during that period. It has been reported that at least a dozen officers are on the case.

Rayner does not have to firm up her position with Labour MPs. She insists that she has done nothing wrong, and most people in the party believe that that the allegtions being made against her are little more than a smear (as Keir Starmer put it at PMQs last week).

But the Conservatives believe that the controversy – confected or otherwise – is working to their advantage. It has put Labour on the defensive, and it is filling a lot of print media space that might otherwise be taken up by stories more advantageous to Starmer.

In the past Rayner has been very effective as a critic of the Tories at PMQs. Today we may not learn anything new in relation to the substance of the allegations against her, but we may get a sense of whether or not her firepower has been diminished as a result of the row.

The government says it will fund its proposed increase in defence spending (see 10.38am) partly by getting rid of 72,000 civil service jobs. Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, told Times Radio this morning:

That actually will take the civil service back to where it was before Covid, so I think that is a very reasonable thing to do.

Fran Heathcote, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents civil servants, said the PCS would fight these plans “tooth and nail”. He said:

Yet again ministers shamefully see fit to scapegoat their own workforce.

It’s not right for our members to pay for a rise in defence spending with their jobs, so we’ll fight these proposals tooth and nail, just as we fought them under Boris Johnson.

All Nato countries should boost their defence spending to 2.5% of their GDP to meet the demands of a “more dangerous world”, Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, has said. Aletha Adu has the story here.

The UK has been accused by Amnesty International of “deliberately destabilising” human rights on the global stage for its own political ends. As Karen McVeigh reports, in its annual global report, released today, Amnesty said Britain was weakening human rights protections nationally and globally, amid a near-breakdown of international law. Here is Karen’s full story.

Good morning. Tony Blair, the former Labour figure, has been among the many figures this morning paying tribute to Frank Field, the former Labour MP and campaigner against poverty, who has died at the age of 81, after a long illness.

Field was appointed minister for welfare reform when Blair became prime minister in 1997. It was a surprise appointment, because Field had not been a frontbencher and his proposals for welfare (often hard to place on a conventional left/right spectrum) were generally assumed to be too radical for his party. And so it proved; he clashed with Gordon Brown, the chancellor, and was out of office within about a year.

But Field is a good example of how politicians don’t have to be in government to make a difference. As director of the Child Poverty Action Group before he became an MP and as a backbencher, particularly as chair of the social security select committtee before Labour took power in 1997 and as a chair of the work and pensions select committee during the Brexit years, he had a huge influence on debates on welfare policy for decades.

And at a time when members of the public despair at the quality of MPs, he was a model of integrity and commitment to public: a person of deep faith, passionate and tireless when it came working on behalf of those, much liked, and capable of working with colleagues from all parties.

Blair said of him this morning.

Frank had integrity, intelligence and deep commitment to the causes he believed in.

He was an independent thinker, never constrained by conventional wisdom, but always pushing at the frontier of new ideas.

Even when we disagreed, I had the utmost respect for him as a colleague and a character.

Whether in his work on child poverty, or in his time devoted to the reform of our welfare system, he stood up and stood out for the passion and insight he brought to any subject.

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons speaker, has also released this tribute.

As a former colleague, I watched in admiration as Frank Field navigated a career as a formidable MP, and as a minister, tasked with ‘thinking the unthinkable’ on social care.

He was neither cowed by the establishment or whips - which made his campaigns against hunger and food poverty, for climate change and the church, even more effective.

He was the driving force behind Parliament’s commitment to prevent slavery and human trafficking within our supply chains. Having worked with him on the modern slavery advisory group, and made him its chair, I am in no doubt his efforts saved many lives nationwide from this shameful criminal activity.

Suffice to say, he was one of a kind and he will be sorely missed.

I will post more tributes soon.

Here is the agenda for the day.

12pm: Oliver Dowden, deputy prime minister, faces Angela Rayner, deputy Labour leader, at PMQs.

12.45pm: Rishi Sunak holds a press conference in Berlin with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

After 12.45pm: MPs resume their debate on the renters (reform) bill.

And David Cameron, the foreign secretary, is flying to Kazakhstan as he continues his tour of Central Asia.

If you want to contact me, do use the “send us a message” feature. You’ll see it just below the byline – on the left of the screen, if you are reading on a laptop or a desktop. This is for people who want to message me directly. I find it very useful when people message to point out errors (even typos – no mistake is too small to correct). Often I find your questions very interesting, too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either in the comments below the line; privately (if you leave an email address and that seems more appropriate); or in the main blog, if I think it is a topic of wide interest.