Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has said that the Labour government “won’t be compromising on nature” with its proposed planning changes, after criticism from wildlife charities and from the co-leader of the Green party of England and Wales. [See 11.36 BST]

Speaking to broadcasters, PA Media quotes Rayner saying:

We’re simplifying the process for houses if there’s under ten houses built, and between ten and 49. We’re going to simplify that process. We’re going to put more expert planners on that process as well, but we won’t be compromising on nature.

Rayner said the planning situation was very different with these types of small and medium sites, as opposed to large developments, adding “So this is pragmatism, but we’ll be able to protect nature at the same time. The Cabinet are all with me. Build, build, build, and we’ve been making that a priority of this government.”

The Liberal Democrats have added to criticism of the government over the lack of capacity in the prison system in England and Wales, and the early release of prisoners that has been a consequence.

Justice spokesperson Josh Babarinde was also responding to a letter in the Times from six police chiefs, in which they wrote that increased funding was necessary in order for the government to meet its pledges on crime. Babarinde said:

Across the country, people will be worried sick by what we’ve heard over the last 24 hours, wondering how real-terms policing cuts and early release schemes will impact them and their families.

Years of mismanagement and neglect under the Conservatives ran our policing and criminal justice systems into the ground – but this is proof that the Labour government has failed to step up and tackle the scale of the problem in response.

Our policing and criminal justice systems need to be working hand-in-hand, not in silos. It’s high time that the government shows some real leadership by bringing together police chiefs and criminal justice chiefs ahead of the spending review to ensure that both systems have the resources they need to keep our communities safe.

Co-leader of the Green party of England and Wales, Adrian Ramsay, has said that Labour’s plans to relax some planning regulations are “outrageous”.

Posting to social media, Ramsay said: “This is outrageous. The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries on Earth. The government should be increasing nature protections, not undermining them.

“The government needs to be tougher with developers on building affordable housing and not sitting on land where they already have planned permission.”

Housing minister Matthew Pennycook had earlier claimed during his media round that the plans to relax environmental regulations on building projects offered a “win-win for both nature and the economy”.

The government is consulting on plans to make it harder to stop building projects, including by reviewing “biodiversity net gain requirements” (BNG) which force developers to compensate for damages done to nature. Pennycook told listeners of the Radio 4 Today programme:

We think there is a case for reviewing whether very small sites, so sites with nine homes or less, should be exempt from BNG.

But when it comes to what we call medium-sized sites, so sites which are delivering between nine and 50 homes, what we actually want to do is to simplify the BNG rules to make it easier for smaller housebuilders to deliver habitats for wildlife on site.

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has challenged Nigel Farage to debate him face to face as the row between the two man over Reform UK’s racist byelection advert grows more ferocious.

Sarwar denounced Farage as “a pathetic, poisonous, little man” after the Reform UK leader accused Sarwar of “introducing sectarianism into Scottish politics” yesterday.

Farage was pushing back on the widespread condemnation of a Facebook video targeting voters in the crunch Holyrood byelection in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse which claims that Sarwar said in a 2022 speech that “he will prioritise the Pakistani community” – which it has no evidence to back up.

Sarwar told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland: “What I suggest to Nigel Farage is he should ask his chauffeur to put Hamilton into Google Maps. Come up here. I will challenge him anytime, anyplace in Hamilton, any town hall – and he can challenge me on his views. I will challenge him on his views.”

Asked whether he sought to prioritise Pakistanis, Sarwar replied: “It is utterly ridiculous to say that. As someone who has been in Scottish politics for 15 years, and served all communities of all faiths and backgrounds, to hear that is utterly ridiculous.”

It is worth offering a bit of context about Farage’s sectarianism claim too – it is an especially inflammatory term to use given the history of the constituency which is an area of deeply embedded sectarian division, with enclaves of strident support for Rangers football club, the Orange Order, of which the Conservative candidate Richard Nelson is a member, and the union. Businesses in Larkhall, including the sandwich chain Subway, infamously had to remove the colour green from their livery because of its association with Catholic-founded Celtic football club.

As I reported from the constituency yesterday, while that century-old fissure has healed considerably in recent years, some locals are “scared” of how Reform are creating new divisions.

Thousands of energy customers who had prepayment energy meters (PPMs) force-fitted are to receive compensation or have their debts written off, Ofgem has said.

The regulator announced that eight companies will hand out compensation and support after a review into consumers struggling with energy bills who were forced to have pay-as-you-go meters installed.

Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, Wera Hobhouse, who has campaigned on the issue, said:

It is high-time that the victims of this scandal are recognised and properly compensated after energy companies rode roughshod over them in this disgraceful way. Those affected have already waited too long for justice. Pay outs now need to be made in time for the winter months, when we know energy costs are higher.

The Conservative party neglected these victims and ignored Liberal Democrat attempts to prevent more people suffering forced installations. Today they should feel ashamed of their failures.

And to think that some may still not have all their debt written off is simply not right. These companies need to write off the debts they forced upon the people who bore the brunt of this scandal.

PA Media reports suppliers will pay £5.6m in compensation – using the guidelines set out by Ofgem – to 40,000 customers who had an involuntary PPM installed during the assessment period. Suppliers will also write off a further £13m of debt from customers.

Environment reporter Helena Horton has this exclusive:

The nature-friendly farming budget is set to be slashed in the UK spending review, with only small farms allowed to apply, it can be revealed.

Sources at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) confirmed the post-Brexit farming fund will be severely cut in the review on 11 June. It will be part of a swathe of cuts to departments, with police, social housing and nature funding expected to face the brunt.

Labour promised a fund of £5bn over two years, from 2024 to 2026, at the budget, which is being honoured, but in the years following that it will be slashed for all but a few farms.

The nature-friendly farming fund is a package of payments that replaced the EU’s common agricultural policy and paid land managers for the amount of land in their care, with the aim of paying farmers to look after nature, soil and other public goods, rather than simply for farming and owning land. Many farms rely on these payments to make ends meet.

Read more from Helena Horton here: UK fund for nature-friendly farming to be slashed in spending review

The government is seeking to give a boost to smaller developers with faster planning decisions and financial backing to speed up building new homes.

It will set out the detail of proposals to cut red tape and for planning decisions to be shifted away from councillors and towards expert officers as part of efforts to meet Labour’s pledge to build 1.5m homes by 2029-30.

Speaking on Sky News, housing minister Matthew Pennycook said:

We’ve inherited, as you know, a housing system that’s not building enough homes … part of the reason it is broken is that we’re overly reliant on a small number of large volume housebuilders. So we’ve got to diversify the housing market and get smaller housebuilders back in the game.

In the 1980s they used to produce about 40% of all homes. Today it’s less than 10%, and so the package we’re announcing today allocating land specifically to SME housebuilders, providing them with more financial support, and, yes, easing the burden of regulation in a number of areas, so that we can level the playing field between smaller housebuilders and their larger counterparts. Get them back in the game.

Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner is expected to visit a construction site in Oxfordshire today to promote the initiative.

Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has said police are “carrying the scar tissue of years of austerity cuts” and added there are “big challenges” and “new threats around”.

Discussing a call for more funding that appeared in a letter in the Times this morning, PA Media report he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

This government has made three big pledges that policing will have to contribute massively to – one, about strengthening neighbourhood policing so that we can be better at fighting crime in communities and protecting people from antisocial behaviour; secondly, they want to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, it’s a crime that’s at epidemic levels and growing every year; and thirdly, they want to halve knife crime.

We think that’s a balanced and sensible ambition, but it is very, very ambitious. We’re carrying the scar tissue of years of austerity cuts, and the effects of that. Forces are much smaller when you compare the population they’re policing than they were a decade or 15 years ago.

So we’ve got big challenges, we’ve got new threats around. There’s global threats from states, we’ve got the growing online threats that’s changing demand … we’re not just asking for more money, we want radical reform in policing as well.

We think there should be fewer police organisations across the country that can be more efficient, more capable. We need a proper national police agency that helps coordinate things. So we’re up for change, we’re up for doing things differently, we’re up for radically reforming. But it also needs more money, because policing is a people game.

Thames Water has been hit with a record £104m fine over environmental breaches involving sewage spills, after failing to operate and manage its treatment works and wastewater networks effectively.

The water regulator for England and Wales, Ofwat, confirmed on Wednesday that – on top of penalties for breaches related to dividend payouts – it was issuing the beleaguered water company with £123m worth of fines that would be “paid by the company and its investors, and not by customers”.

Read more from Kalyeena Makortoff here: Thames Water hit with record fine over sewage breaches

Sadiq Khan has backed calls for the partial decriminalisation of cannabis possession, as a wide-ranging study suggests the way the drug is policed causes greater harm to society than its usage.

“I’ve long been clear that we need fresh thinking on how to reduce the substantial harms associated with drug-related crime in our communities,” the London mayor said on Wednesday.

Read more from Kevin Rawlinson here: Sadiq Khan calls for partial decriminalisation of cannabis possession

Shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately has accused the government of doing “a terrible job on keeping the country safe.”

She told listeners of Times Radio “We’ve already seen that they accidentally released a load of prisoners that they shouldn’t have done, including violent domestic abuses, which are clearly terrifying for the victims of that abuse. And they just don’t have the prison situation under control. They need to take responsibility. They’re now in government.”

Put to her that the Conservatives had just added 455 spaces to the prison estate in England and Wales in 14 years, she said “Labour are in government, they have to take responsibility for the decisions that they are making.”

Pressed on what the Conservatives would do differently in the present circumstances, Whately said “we’re no longer in government.”

Housing minister Matthew Pennycook has defended the government’s record on prisons and sentencing in England and Wales after criticism from senior security officials, but said “we can’t build our way out of” prison capacity pressures in the short term.

Earlier today the Times newspaper reported that the heads of the Metropolitan police, MI5 and the National Crime Agency have told the government that plans to release prisoners early could be of “net detriment to public safety.”

Speaking on Times Radio the minister said “The risk to public safety I’d highlight is the prospect of our prison system collapsing, which is what we face and why we’ve had to act.”

He continued by saying:

What we were handed by the previous government in terms of the state of our prison system was nothing short of criminal neglect. They added just 500 places to the prison estate in their time in office, while at the same time, sentence lengths rose, and as a result, we got the prison population rising by approximately 3,000 people each year.

And we’re heading back to zero capacity. If we run out of capacity, courts will be forced to suspend trials, the police will have to halt arrests, crimes will go unpunished.

We’ll essentially be in a breakdown of law and order, so while we’re trying to add prison places as fast as we can as a Government – and we’ve already created 2,400 since taking office, allocated an additional £4.7bn to prison building, putting us on track to hit 14,000 places by 2031, we can’t build our way out of this particular crisis we’ve inherited because demand for places will outstrip supply. So sentencing reform is necessary.

In a letter to the Times, six police chiefs have warned that without “serious investment” they will be unable to deliver on the prime minister’s flagship pledges. The warning comes ahead of the government spending review, and they cautioned that cuts will lead to the “retrenchment we saw under austerity”.