James Cartlidge, the shadow defence secretary, is responding to Healey.

He starts by saying that what Keir Starmer said at his press conference about opponents of the deal being on the side of Russia and China was “beneath contempt”.

He says by opposing the Chagos Islands deal, the Tories would not be traitors, they would be patriots.

John Healey, the defence secretary, is making a statement to MPs about the Chagos Islands deal.

He claimed that anyone who abandoned the deal would be abandoning the Diego Garcia base. That provoked a lot of shouting from the opposition, with MPs shouting “rubbish”.

Proposals to protect the creative industries against artificial intelligence (AI) have been rejected by MPs, after parliament heard both sectors need to succeed to grow Britain’s economy.

As PA Media reports, Peter Kyle, the science secretary, pledged to set up a series of expert working groups to find a “workable way forward” for both industries, as he urged MPs to reject the Lords’ amendment.

Peers amended the data (use and access) bill by adding a commitment to introduce transparency requirements, aiming to ensure copyright holders are able to see when their work has been used and by who. Today MPs voted 195 to 124, majority 71 to disagree with the amendment, tabled by Beeban Kidron.

Speaking in the Commons, Kyle said:

Pitting one against the other is unnecessarily divisive and damages both.

The truth is that growing Britain’s economy needs both sectors to succeed and to prosper. Britain has to be the place where the creative industries, and every bit as much as AI companies, can invest, grow, are confident in their future prosperity, that is assured.

We have to become a country where our people can enjoy the benefits and the opportunities of both.

It is time to tone down the unnecessary rhetoric and, instead, recognise that the country needs to strike a balance between content and creativity, transparency and training, and recognition and reward.

That can’t be done by well-meaning, but ultimately imperfect, amendments to a bill that was never intended to do such a thing.

The issue of AI copyright needs properly considered and enforceable legislation, drafted with the inclusion, the involvement, and the experience of both creatives and technologists.

To that end, I can tell the house that I am now setting up a series of expert working groups to bring together people from both sectors, on transparency, on licensing and other technical standards to chart a workable way forward.

Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, has accused Keir Starmer of making “baseless and disgusting slurs”. Referring to what Starmer said at his press conference about Kemi Badenoch siding with China, Russia and Iran over the Chagos Islands deal (see 3.28pm), she said:

Keir Starmer is captured by the socialist mindset that anyone who disagrees with him or who cares about his appalling capitulation to Mauritius and abandonment of the Chagossian people, is in same league as Britain’s adversaries - the Ayatollahs of Iran, Vladimir Putin and President Xi.

Starmer has slandered the Chagossian community and he is so arrogant and out of touch with British values and the national interest that he has resorted to baseless and disgusting slurs - whilst he himself hands control of Chagos to a country that is actually cosying up with Russia and China.

Today is a day of shame for our country, and Keir Starmer and David Lammy are the chief architects of it.

Here are extracts from Keir Starmer’s opening statement at his press conference defending the Chagos Islands deal.

On US support for the deal

Almost everything we do from the base is in partnership with the US.

President Trump has welcomed the deal along with other allies, because they see the strategic importance of this base and that we cannot cede the ground to others who would seek to do us harm.

On the risk of the UK losing a legal case to Mauritius if it did not settle the sovereignty issue

If Mauritius took us to court again, which they certainly would have, the UK’s longstanding legal view is that we would not have a realistic prospect of success and would likely face provisional measures orders within a matter of weeks.

On why ignoring court defeats in international law would not be an option

This is not just about international law, it’s about the operation of the base, even if we choose to ignore judgments made against us, international organisations and other countries would act on them and that would undermine the operation of the base, causing us to lose this unique capability.

One example of this is the electromagnetic spectrum. Countries have the right to manage this spectrum as they wish within their borders, a right that’s recognised in regulations and overseen in the International Telecommunication Union.

The use of the spectrum is key to understand and anticipate those who seek to do us harm. If our right to control it is put into doubt, we would lose the first line of defence against other countries who wish to interfere and disrupt this capability, rendering it practically useless.

In addition, if we did not agree this deal the legal situation would mean that we would not be able to prevent China or any other nation setting up their own bases on the outer islands or carrying out joint exercises near our base, we would have to explain to you, the British people and to our allies, that we’d lost control of this vital asset.

No responsible government could let that happen. So, there’s no alternative but to act in Britain’s national interest.

On how the last Conservative government conceded the sovereignty issue

Other approaches to secure the base have been tried over the years and they have failed. Boris Johnson failed in his efforts to endlessly delay. Liz Truss then started the negotiation. We inherited a negotiation in which the principle of giving up UK sovereignty had already been conceded by the previous Tory government.

On why the cost is justified

Our deal has concluded those negotiations in the national interest. Now, there’s obviously a cost to maintaining such a valuable asset, we pay for other military bases, allies like the US and France do the same.

This cost is part and parcel of using Britain’s global reach to keep us safe at home and it will be less than the cost of running one aircraft carrier for a year.

Today’s agreement is the only way to maintain the base in the long term. There is no alternative. We will never gamble with national security. So, we have acted to secure our national interest, to strengthen our national security.

Starmer says deal protects the future of Diego Garcia 100 years. And there is an option too add another 40 years, he says.

The treaty covers not just Diego Garcia, but the outer islands of the Chagos Islands, he says. And it will allow the UK “to control what happens up to 100 nautical miles from the base”, he says.

Q: Will the US be contributing to the cost?

Starmer says Diego Garcia is vital to both the US and the UK.

Both countries make “huge use” of the base.

He says the US is paying the running costs of the base, which are “far greater” than the costs the UK is paying.

Q: Why do you say the deal will cost £3.4bn over 99 years when the £101m annual cost implies it would cost a lot more?

Starmer says £3.4bn is the net cost.

That is how the government accounts for it, he says.

He suggests, over time, with inflation, a different figure would apply.

But he says the net cost is the one used by government for public sector projects like this, and this is the figure used by the OBR too.

Starmer says no responsible PM would have put Diego Garcia at risk. Any person who would have done that (ie, any person who would not support this deal, he implies), “is not fit to be prime minister”.

Repeating the point made by John Healey earlier, Starmer says all the UK’s allies back this deal.

In favour are all of our allies, the US, Nato, five eyes, India. Against it – Russia, China, Iran and surprisingly, the leader of the opposition and Nigel Farage are in that column, alongside Russia, China and Iran, rather than in the column that has the UK and its allies.

At the press conference Starmer is now taking questions.

Q: How much will the deal cost?

Starmer says the average annual cost of the deal is £101m.

And, he says the net overall cost, over 99 years, amounts to £3.4bn.

(Quite how those figure add up is not clear. The PM does not explain.)

He says this is slightly less than the average annual cost of running an aircraft carrier – without the aircraft.

And he says the cost is similar to what allies like the US and France pay to hire bases.

Keir Starmer is speaking at a news conference about the Chagos Islands deal which he says he has now signed.

He says the government had to strike a deal over sovereignty because the UK was likely to lose cases in international courts if it continued resisting Mauritius’s claim of sovereignty.

And, even if the UK ignored those court rulings, other organistions would act on them. And that would make it harder for the UK to continue to operate the Diego Garcia military base, he says.

The National Education Union, the largest teachers’ union in the UK, has threatened the government with industrial action over its decision to require schools in England to part-fund the teachers’ pay award from their own budgets. (See 2.02pm.)

In a statement, Daniel Kebede, the NEU’s general secretary, said:

Whilst we acknowledge and welcome additional funding to that initially offered by government, it is still the case that the pay award is not fully funded.

In many schools this will mean cuts in service provision to children and young people, job losses, and additional workloads for an already overstretched profession.

Unless the government commit to fully funding the pay rise then it is likely that the NEU will register a dispute with the government on the issue of funding, and campaign to ensure every parent understands the impact of a cut in the money available to schools, and that every politician understands this too.

Registering a dispute is the opening stage in the process a trade union has to follow if it wants to engate in industrial action. It does not mean a strike is inevitable.

The NAHT, which represents school leaders, was slightly more positive, but it also expressed concern about the pay award not being fully funded. Paul Whiteman, its general secretary, said:

While there remains some way to go to achieve full pay restoration, this uplift is another step in the right direction.

Further investment is critical to recruiting and retaining the high-quality professionals that the nation’s children need.

However, school leaders are rightly concerned about the affordability of this year’s pay uplift.

The news that the schools will be receiving additional funding to help cover some of the costs is welcome, but they will remain concerned that they will still need to find a proportion from within their existing budget allocations.

The British Medical Association has called for talks with Wes Streeting, the health secretary, over the 4% pay award for doctors (see 1.49pm), which it says does not do enough to restore relative pay to what it used to be.

Prof Philip Banfield, chairman of council at the BMA, said:

The health secretary can avert strike action by negotiating with us and agreeing a route to full pay restoration.

Doctors’ pay is still around a quarter less than it was in real-terms 16 years ago and today’s ‘award’ delays pay restoration even more, without a government plan or reassurance to correct this erosion of what a doctor is worth.

The DDRB (Doctors and Dentists Remuneration Body) has failed doctors.

No-one wants a return to scenes of doctors on picket lines – we’d rather be in hospitals, in GP practices or in the community seeing patients, improving the health of the public – but today’s actions from the government have sadly made this look far more likely.

But Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has said she will not accept the recommendation from the pay review body covering judges (the Senior Salaries Review Body). It recommended a 4.75% pay rise for them in 2025-26. But, in her written ministerial statement, Mahmood says they will get 4%. She says this “strikes a balance between addressing SSRB’s advice and managing the overall affordability to my department”.

Mahmood says she accepts that the judiciary has a recruitment and retention problem, which is why the SSRB recommended 4.75%. But she says she has already launched a major review of the judicial salary structure to look at this. She says:

The major review is the right place to address these areas through targeted reform, and presents better value than the flat rate pay uplift of the annual pay review. I look forward to working closely with the SSRB over the course of the major review.

Prison officers in England and Wales will get a pay rise of 4% in 2025-26, Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, has announced. This will cover managers and governors too. In a written ministerial statement she says she is accepting in full the recommendations from the Prison Service Pay Review Body. She says:

This government values the vital contribution the almost 6 million public sector workers make across the UK, delivering the public services we all rely upon. The acceptance of the PSPRB’s recommendations is expected to further stabilise the recruitment and retention position in the Prison Service. This is key to ensuring prisons have the staff they need to deal with ongoing capacity pressures.

And teachers in England will also get a 4% pay rise, Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has announced. In her ministerial statement, she says:

Today I am … accepting in full the independent STRB [School Teachers’ Review Body] recommendations for 2025/26, implementing a pay award for school teachers and leaders of 4% from September. This means school teachers will see an increase in their pay of almost 10% since this government took power and over 22% over the last four years. This will provide a competitive starting salary of almost £33,000, attracting talented graduates into the teaching profession, and we estimate the average teacher can now expect a salary of over £51,000 from September, helping retain talented existing teachers to deliver high standards for children.

Phillipson accepts that schools won’t have budgeted for this, and she says she is making £615m available to help them to fund these pay rises.

We recognise that this is beyond the costs for which many schools will have budgeted for. Therefore, we are providing additional funding of £615m this financial year to schools to support them with the costs of staff pay awards, on top of the funding already provided in their existing budgets. This funding has come from existing DfE budgets.

But schools will still have to fund some of this from their own budgets, she says.

Schools will be expected to find approximately the first 1% of pay awards through improved productivity and smarter spending to make every pound count. There will be those who say this cannot be done, but I believe schools have a responsibility, like the rest of the public sector, to ensure that their funding is spent as efficiently as possible.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, says that he is accepting a recommendation for doctors to get a 4% pay rise, and other NHS staff, including nurses, to get a 3.6% – even though these figures are above the 2.8% deemed affordable by the government in its own recommendation to pay review bodies.

But he says costs will have to be cut in other areas of NHS spending to pay for these salary increases, covering 2025-26.

In his written ministerial statement, which covers health workers in England, he says:

Today I am formally accepting the headline pay recommendations for NHS staff from the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB), the Review Body on Doctors and Dentists Remuneration (DDRB), and the Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB). We are working closely with payroll systems to ensure staff receive their backdated pay uplifts from August.

I hugely appreciate the work of so many talented staff across the NHS. Accepting these recommendations gives them the pay rise they deserve. These awards are above forecast inflation over the 2025/26 pay year, meaning that the government is delivering a real-terms pay rise, on top of the one provided last year, underlining the extent to which we value our nurses, doctors, and other NHS staff ….

Through their deliberations, [the pay review bodies] have made recommendations above the level we stated as affordable in our evidence. I am however accepting their headline pay recommendations as fair and well-evidenced uplifts for public servants. To maintain financial prudence, I have had to make difficult decisions on other areas of spend to afford these uplifts.

The 4% will cover GPs, dentists, consultants and resident doctors (previously called junior doctors).

And the 3.6% will cover NHS staff covered by Agenda for Change – which means most NHS workers who are not doctors.

Senior managers will get a 3.25% pay rise.

In his written statement Streeting also says he wants to speed up the payments of pay rises. He says the pay increases for 2025-26 will arrive in pay packets two months sooner than they did last year, but he says he wants NHS staff in future to get their pay rises at the start of the financial year in April.

Normally they are announced later, which means pay has to be backdated.

And members of the armed forces are getting a 4.5% pay rise in 2025-26, John Healey, the defence secretary, has announced. In his written ministerial statement, he says the government is acccepting the pay review body’s recommendations in full. He says:

Along with subsidised accommodation, health and childcare, a generous pension scheme, and world class training, education and skills development, pay plays a key role in rewarding service personnel for the extraordinary sacrifices they make. To recognise that commitment I am announcing today that we will be accepting in full the 2025 pay award recommendations for armed forces remuneration made by the independent Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body (AFPRB) and Senior Salaries Review Body (SSRB).

Senior officers will get a pay rise of 3.75%, he says.

The government is starting to publish its public sector pay announcements for 2025-26. The news is coming out in the form of written statements giving the government responses to public pay review body recommentations.

Georgia Gould, the Cabinet Office minister, has published the figures for senior civil servants.

She says the government is accepting that “all members of the senior civil service [SCS] should receive a 3.25% consolidated increase to base pay from 1 April 2025”.

But the government is also going to “fundamental review and ‘reset’ of SCS pay and reward frameworks”, she says.

Richard Adams is the Guardian’s education editor.

The number of international students coming to the UK plummeted last year, with universities warning of the threat to their financial stability if the trend continues.

The Office for National Statistics said that 266,000 non-EU nationals came to the UK for “study-related” reasons in the year to December, with the bulk aiming for higher education institutions.

That was a 37% decrease compared with December 2023, when 423,000 arrived, and December 2022 when 422,000 did so.

Much of the decrease was the result of a 83% fall in the number of family members accompanying students following new visa restrictions but there was also a 17% fall in the number of student visas alone.

The sudden fall has led many UK universities to miss out on lucrative international tuition fee income, sparking budget cuts and concerns throughout the sector. The government is now proposing further restrictions including a possible international student levy on universities.

Joe Marshall, chief executive of the National Centre for Universities and Business, said:

The current trajectory threatens to undermine one of our most powerful assets: our standing as a global leader in knowledge and innovation. A retreat in international enrolment will not only have significant financial repercussions but could also diminish the UK’s influence and capacity for world-changing research and discoveries.

PA Media has snapped this.

An injunction temporarily blocking the government from concluding its negotiations over the Chagos Islands should be discharged, a high court judge has said.

In the Commons Mahmood has just restated her belief that these plans will lead to a huge reduction in the number of female prisoners.

This is what the independent sentencing review report says on this topic.

In the year ending June 2024, 77% of women sentenced to custody received a sentence of 12 months or less. Third sector organisations informed the Review through engagement that for many women, custody is not the right place due to their vulnerabilities (such as being victims of crime themselves) or because they pose low-level of risk to the public. The rate of self-harm incidents in the female estate is stark: from December 2023 to December 2024, the rate of self-harm was nine times higher in women’s prisons (6,056 incidents per 1,000 prisoners) than men’s prisons (687 incidents per 1,000 prisoners). The Farmer Review (2019) also established that relationships are women’s most prevalent criminogenic need. Family relationships can be damaged when women are given short custodial sentences, particularly as women are often housed far away from home, making it difficult and costly to maintain relationships.

The Review’s recommendations in chapter three promote the use of custody as a last resort. Recommendation 3.1, to legislate to ensure the use of short custodial sentences are only used in exceptional circumstances, will encourage women to be diverted from custody to more effective sanction and support. In encouraging a reduction in the use of short sentences, the Review aims to reduce the harm that female offenders may experience.

The government says it is going to introduce “a presumption against custodial sentences of less than a year – in favour of tough community sentences that better punish offenders and stop them reoffending”.

The Gauke report says women comprise only 4% of the prison population. But it also says 60% of women in jail, or under supervision, say they have been victims of domestic abuse.

Charlotte Nichols (Lab) asked Mahmood how many future offences could be prevented by chemical castration. She said this would only apply to people who have already offended, implying that the impact might be limited.

Mahmood said studies show that chemical castration can lead to a 60% reduction in offending.

She accepted that this might not help with sexual offenders whose offending is motivated primarly by power. But for other offenders, primarly motivated by sexual compulsion, it could have a “big and positive impact”, she said.

Mahmood said studies looking chemical castration have been taking place for years, but she said her Tory predecessors were not very interested. She was different, she suggested. “I’m not squeamish about taking these further measures,” she said.

Back in the Commons Desmond Swayne (Con) complained that that current sentences are a “fiction” because the amount of time spent in jail is much less than the sentence read out in court. He said these reforms would make this worse.

Mahmood said that Swayne was wrong, and that David Gauke, who wrote the report, agrees with Swayne about the importance of transparency in sentencing.

One of the recommendations in the Gauke report says:

Government should consider how to make sentencing outcomes as explicit and unambiguous as possible, perhaps through a combination of guidance, national and tailored communications and engagement.

Mahmood tells MPs that the Gauke proposals will lead to “a huge reduction in the number of women going to prison”. She goes on:

Approximately two thirds go in for sentences of less than one year. Many of those women are victims of domestic abuse. In future, we expect the numbers to drop very, very significantly, and I know we will make progress in that regard.

Much of what is in the sentencing review has been well trailed in advance, but it also contained a plan to extend the use of chemical castration. This made the Sun splash today. This is a useful piece of news management because the Sun has devoted far more space to the chemical castration plan, which is likely to affect a small number of offenders, and far less space to the main thrust of the plan, offenders spending less time in jail, which is likely to affect far more people and which runs counter to the Sun’s default ‘lock ‘em all up’ approach to penal policy.

This is what Mahmood said about the plan in her statement.

The review has recommended we continue a pilot of so-called medication to manage problematic sexual arousal. I will go further with a national roll out, beginning in two regions covering 20 prisons, and I am exploring whether mandating the approach is possible. Of course, it is vital that this approach is taken alongside psychological interventions that target other causes of offending, power and control.

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is making a statement to MPs now about the findings of the sentencing review, and the government’s response to it. (See 9.24am.)

She started by pointing out that a year ago today Rishi Sunak called the general election. She said that Sunak called the election then because the prisons were full, and he was about to have to implement an early release scheme.

The Home Office report on asylum figures also reveals that the proportion of claims being granted at initial decison has fallen below 50%. The rate was 61% in the year ending March 2024, but fell to 49% in the year ending March 2025.

Commenting on these figures, Louise Calvey, executive director at Asylum Matters, a charity, said this means refusal rates are “extremely high”. She went on:

The problem becomes extremely clear once you dig into the figures: for example, we’ve seen over 4,000 refusals of Afghan nationals in the last six months under this government, up from just over 700 in the last six months. People fleeing from a country that is quite clearly unsafe, with obvious protection needs, are being refused at huge rates.

The government appears to be trying to clear the backlog with fast refusals, but when almost half of refused claims are granted on appeal, it seems shoddy and rushed decision making is leaving people who could be getting on with rebuilding their lives trapped in limbo, banned from working, often trapped in hotels, while simply shifting the backlog figures into a different column on a spreadsheet.

Asylum claims were at a record level in the year ending March 2025, reaching 109,000, according to Home Office figures published today.

The Home Office says:

-109,000 people claimed asylum in the year ending March 2025, relating to 85,000 cases, 17% more than in the year ending March 2024 and higher than the previous recorded peak of 103,000 in 2002

-the number of people claiming asylum has almost doubled since 2021

-in 2024, just under a third of asylum seekers had arrived in the UK on a small boat and slightly more than a third had travelled to the UK on a visa

-in 2024 the UK received the fifth largest number of asylum seekers in the EU+, after Germany, Spain, Italy and France

Catherine McKinnell, an education minister, has told MPs that the government will announce the pay award for teachers in England this afternoon. It will be announced in the form of a written statement. McKinnell said:

This afternoon we will announce the teachers pay award, which will be the earliest announcement for a decade, because we understand the importance of giving schools certainty, giving them time to plan their budgets and ensuring they can recruit and retain the expert teachers our children need. The secretary of state’s written ministerial statement will be coming out this afternoon.

She was responding to an urgent question tabled by the shadow education secretary, Laura Trott, who said it was “outrageous” that ministers were not willing to reveal the pay award figure in the chamber this morning. She said:

This is absolutely outrageous. It is astonishing that we’ve had to summon the government to the benches today and they can’t even tell us what pay rise they’re going to get and whether it’s going to be funded. That is not allowing us to scrutinise this in this house.

All of this in the final two weeks that headteachers up and down the country have to decide whether to make teachers redundant in time for September. In fact, sadly, many schools will have already made a difficult decision to let good teachers go. These are job losses on her watch due to her inability to provide schools with the clarity that they need.

A high court hearing over a last-minute block on the government from concluding its deal on the Chagos Islands has begun, PA Media reports. PA says the hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in central London, before Mr Justice Chamberlain, began shortly after 10.35am. The hearing comes after an injunction was granted by a different judge at 2.25am.

The Conservative party needs to “get moving” with new policies or risk being cut adrift in a social media-informed world where people make up their minds quickly, Robert Jenrick has said. Peter Walker has the story.

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.

Keir Starmer as yet unspecified U-turn on winter fuel payment (WFP) came on the same day at the Scottish Labour candidate for the crucial Hamilton byelection admitted that the issue was coming up regularly on the doorstep and two days after first minister and SNP leader John Swinney confirmed that a universal pension age winter heating payment of at least £100 will be introduced for Scottish pensioners from St Andrew’s day, 30 November.

In Scotland, the winter fuel payment was replaced with the pension age winter heating payment (PAWHP) last year, as part of the devolution of welfare powers, and the Scottish government announced it would reintroduce universal payments last November, in a bid to outstrip Labour ahead of the Holyrood elections.

Under the Scottish government’s plans for the winter, every pensioner household will receive £100, and some will receive £200 or £300 depending on their age and means, with around one million pensioners are expected to benefit.

Labour canvassers in Hamilton – where there is panic that the party might be pushed into third place by Reform – says that winter fuel is coming up constantly with voters angry at Starmer and Rachel Reeves as they struggle to get traction on more local issues.

This morning on BBC Radio Scotland, the Scottish government’s social justice secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said:

Pensioners elsewhere in the UK are still worrying about whether they’re going to get this winter fuel payment or not, while Scotland’s pensioners don’t have to.”

Your payments will arrive because the Scottish government already stepped in and we didn’t wait for Labour to flip-flop and finally change its mind.

She added that her government was still waiting to see the details of the announcement and who it will apply to before confirming where the Barnet consequentials from it will go.

The Conservatives are taking the credit for the near-50% fall in net migration. They say it is the changes to visa rules that they introduced that brought the numbers down.

This is from Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary.

Net migration has halved - dropped by 430,000 - in 2024 compared to 2023

This is thanks to measures put in place by the last Conservative Government

But it is still far too high and needs to go down further.

That is why we need a binding annual immigration cap, set by Parliament - at much, much lower levels

But when we Conservatives tabled that plan, Labour voted against it last week and again yesterday

The ONS says confirms that changes to visa rules introduced by the last government have been a key factor. (See 9.40am.)

James Cleverly, the home secretary who introduced those visa changes, has posted this on social media.

This drop is because of the visa rule changes that I put in place.

Labour will try to claim credit for these figures but they criticised me at the time, and have failed to fully implement the changes.

British Future, a thinktank that covers race, identity and migration, commissioned polling carried out at the start of May that asked people, among other things, if they expected net migration to go up or down when the next ONS figures came out. Most people thought the headline rate would rise, and only 10% said they expected it to fall.

Sunder Katwala, director of the thinktank, says that, even though this reducation is largely a result of the measures introduced by the last Conservative government, the fact that people will be surprised may give Keir Starmer the chance to be more pragmatic. In a statement he says:

This significant fall in net migration will surprise 90% of the public, who expected numbers to keep going up.

So Keir Starmer is in the unusual position for a PM of having exceeded expectations on immigration – though largely by not cancelling measures introduced by his predecessors.

That gives him an opportunity to take a more pragmatic approach, managing the pressures and keeping the gains of immigration – rather than competing in a political auction over which party can pretend to eliminate it.

Net migration fell by almost 50% in 2024, compared to the previous year, the Office for National Statistics has said.

In a report out this morning, it says:

Long-term net migration is down by almost 50%. The number of people immigrating minus the number of people emigrating is provisionally estimated to be 431,000 in year ending (YE) December 2024, compared with 860,000 a year earlier.

This change is driven by a decrease in immigration from non-EU+ nationals, where we are seeing reductions in people arriving on work- and study-related visas, and an increase in emigration over the 12 months to December 2024, especially people leaving who originally came on study visas once pandemic travel restrictions to the UK were eased.

The provisional estimate for total long-term immigration for YE December 2024 is 948,000, a decrease of almost a third from the revised YE December 2023 estimate of 1,326,000 and the first time it has been below 1 million since YE March 2022.

The provisional estimate for total long-term emigration for YE December 2024 is 517,000, an increase of around 11% compared with the previous year (466,000). Emigration is now at a similar level to YE June 2017.

A high court judge has blocked the UK government from concluding its deal to hand over the Chagos Islands with an injunction granted in the early hours of this morning, Eleni Courea reports.

Good morning. Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is today announcing plans intended to reduce the amount of time offenders spend in jail. It is not a surprise – the main proposals have been on the table for some time – but it is still a big change from the way governments of all parties have run penal policy over the past few decades. Britain jails more people than most other countries in western Europe and recently sentences have been getting longer.

Mahmood appointed David Gauke, the liberal-minded former Tory justice secretary, to carry out a review of sentencing policy and his final report is out this morning. He has also published a report on history and trends in sentencing. Later Mahmood will give a statement to MPs where she will say which of the recommendations she is accepting. As Rajeev Syal reports in his overnight preview story, the answer is most of them.

Government sources said [Mahmood] is expected to accept the review’s key measures including that well-behaved prisoners should be released on tag after serving a third of their sentences.

She has also accepted that those who have committed serious sexual or violent crimes could be freed to serve their sentence in the community after they have served half of their sentence.

One of Gauke’s suggestions – that the most dangerous offenders should be allowed to apply for parole earlier if they earn “credits” – has been dismissed by sources close to the justice secretary.

And here is Rajeev’s summary of the main points from the report.

Among the main recommendations, Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary, said the government should:

-Ensure custodial sentences under 12 months are only used in exceptional circumstances.

-Extend suspended sentences to up to three years and encourage greater use of deferred sentences for low-risk offenders.

-Give courts greater flexibility to use fines and ancillary orders like travel, driving and football bans.

-Allow probation officers to adjust the level of supervision based on risk and compliance with licence conditions.

-Expand specialist domestic abuse courts to improve support for victims.

-Expand tagging for all perpetrators of violence against women and girls.

-Improve training for practitioners and the judiciary on violence against women and girls.

-Change the statutory purposes of sentencing so judges and magistrates must consider protecting victims as much as they consider punishment and rehabilitation when passing sentences.

Gauke has called for the need to increase funding and resources for the probation service, including expanding the availability of electronic monitoring equipment like tags, and warned that there will be a “public backlash” if money is not found.

The Conservatives are opposed to the plans. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said:

By scrapping short prison sentences Starmer is effectively decriminalising crimes like burglary, theft and assault. This is a gift to criminals who will be free to offend with impunity.

But Gauke has defended his plans, saying they are needed because otherwise the government will run out of space in prisons, and the criminal justice system will break down. He told the Today programme:

Nobody, I think, wants to see a repeat of [the prisoner early release scheme – an alternative means of dealing with prison overcrowding] because that is rushed, it’s unplanned, it’s unstrategic, and so on, and it’s much better to face up to the realities, recognise where we are with the prison population and set out a plan that is strategic, that is properly prepared and gives due notice to everybody, so that we do not find ourselves in that situation.

Because if you run out of prison places, then really you are putting the whole criminal justice system at risk.

Gauke also said more community sentences could provide better value for money for the taxpayer.

I think there is a point from the perspective of the taxpayer that can be missed here. Prisons are expensive. They cost £54,000-a-year for a prison place. That money can be spent very effectively in the community, both punishing offenders and helping with rehabilitation.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

9.30am: The Office for National Statistics publishes immigration figures for the year ending December 2024. The Home Office is also publishing its own quarterly figures on asylum seekers, visas and resettlement.

10am: Kent county council meets for the first time since it came under Reform UK control.

10am: Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry as part of its test, trace and isolate module.

10.30am: Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, takes questions on future Commons business.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Around 11.30am: Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is expected to make a Commons statement about the Gauke review of sentencing.

Noon: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions from MSPs.

Here is the agenda for the day.

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