The government has announced that it is going to repeal the Vagrancy Act, a law passed more than 200 years ago banning rough sleeping. In a news release, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government says:

After 200 years, rough sleeping will no longer be a crime as the government confirms it will formally scrap the Vagrancy Act by spring next year.

The Act was introduced in 1824 – towards the end of the Georgian era - to deal with rising homelessness which increased after the Napoleonic Wars and Industrial Revolution.

While use of the Act against rough sleeping has significantly declined over the years in line with modern attitudes and greater understanding around the causes of homelessness, it remains enforceable in law.

The government will be repealing the Act to ensure rough sleeping is no longer a criminal offence, as it concentrates its efforts on getting to the root causes of homelessness, backed by major funding.

Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has expressed defiance to the UK government’s decision to impose sanctions on him and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich. In a statement, Ben-Gvir said:

We survived Pharaoh, we will also survive Keir Starmer. I will continue to work for Israel and the people of Israel without fear or intimidation!

He went on to compare the UK’s decision to the 1939 UK policy paper limiting Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine.

Smotrich also calls the decision “a white paper”. He said:

Britain has already tried once to prevent us from settling the cradle of our homeland, and we will not allow it to do so again. We are determined to continue building.

I’ve already covered some of what Nigel Farage said at his press conference this morning. (See 12.20pm, and 3.44pm.) Here are some of the other lines from the Q&A.

• Farage, the Reform UK leader, admitted that the party does not have a plan for implementing its policy on illegal immigrants, which is to deport all of them from the UK. Yesterday Zia Yusuf, the former Reform UK chair, told the Today programme:

I want to be crystal clear about what my position is, and Reform UK’s position is, which is we will deport everybody who is here in this country illegally, which is roughly about 1.2 million people.

Asked for details of how this would happen, Farage replied:

As President Trump is discovering in Los Angeles, this is not an easy thing to do, which is why, whilst it has to happen, I’ve always been cautious about about delving into specifics on it.

I will say this, there’ll be no deportations until we leave the ECHR [European convention on human rights]. There’ll be no deportations until British judges are freed to make their own decisions. Although, even when that comes, given our current crop of judges, then there may still be challenges, given the politicisation that has happened of the judiciary and the civil service and all the things in a post-Blair time.

• Farage defended Reform UK’s decision to call its council cost-cutting teams Doge, after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in the US, even though the Musk has fallen out with Donald Trump. Asked about this, Farage said:

We thought hard about this. We thought about we did have a name; there was a UK name that we thought we’d use. And then what polling showed us is one of the things that’s wildly popular in the UK that’s happening in America is the concept of Doge, and that Doge had seeped into public consciousness, and that to attempt to rebrand that would be a hell of a difficult effort. So that’s why we’ve stuck with it.

• He claimed almost the successful business people he knows are thinking of leaving the country because of Labour’s high taxes. He said:

Virtually everybody I know that has been successful in business is considering leaving this country. The last official figures were the 10,800 of the wealthy left Britain. The next set of figures - I don’t know what they’re going to be, 20,000, 25,000.

You’ve only got to look at property prices in Westminster, Chelsea, Kensington and see they’ve all fallen by over 20%. Now that doesn’t really matter, and nor does it benefit ordinary folk, because these are houses priced in millions.

But you don’t make those that are not doing so well in society better off by getting rid of your biggest taxpayers.

• He said he did not see the debate about whether or not the burqa should be banned as a priority issue. There were many more important issues, he said. But he went on:

Do I think, in cultural terms, the burqa fits in with the British way of life? Not really, no.

Asked about this a second time, he replied:

This is about priorities. I don’t like to see the burqa. I think it probably is anti British …

But is it absolutely front line and centre of what we’re going to campaign for? Not given the other major crises we face.

• He rejected claims that Reform UK was chaotic under his leadership. Asked if the number of senior Reform resignations undermined the party’s credibility, he replied:

Rows and resignations? Yes, that’s right. Seven Chairman since 2022, and four leaders. They’re called the Conservative party, and they’re like ferrets in a sack.

He also insisted that he was good at retaining the loyalty of colleagues, using language much the same as when he addressed this during his press conference yesterday.

• He rejected claims that today’s figures showing donations to political parties in the first quarter of the year were a disappointment. The figures show the party received £1.5m. Asked if the party was over-reliant on big donors, Farage said the donations were up ten-fold on the previous quarter. “The trend is in the right direction,” he said. He also said that, unlike the bigger parties, he was not able to attract donations by offering people peerages. (This was a joke, because selling peerages is illegal, but no one at Westminster thinks there is no link between donations and honours.) Farage said the honours system was “corrupted beyond belief”.

• He suggested it did not matter what Kemi Badenoch said because “no one’s listening”.

Labour has attacked the new Reform UK chair, David Bull, over his previous comments about the NHS. (See 2.31pm.) But, at his press conference this morning, Nigel Farage said that the fact that Bull worked as a hospital doctor before transferring to a career in TV would help the party. Farage said:

Who knows? Having somebody inside that’s been a hospital doctor might actually be a very useful thing when it comes to answering questions about the National Health Service and the deficiencies within it, without people screaming that we want to make people pay £150,000 pounds for a hip operation, which appears to be what the Labour lie machine is roughly saying at the moment.

This morning Keir Starmer said that he wanted to take action against Israel alongside other allies. (See 2.12pm.) It is now clear what he was talking about, because David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has issued a joint statement with his counterparts from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway explaining why the two ministers should be sanctioned.

In their statement the five foreign ministers say:

Today, the foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom have announced sanctions and other measures targeting Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Settler violence is incited by extremist rhetoric which calls for Palestinians to be driven from their homes, encourages violence and human rights abuses and fundamentally rejects the two-state solution. Settler violence has led to the deaths of Palestinian civilians and the displacement of whole communities.

We are steadfastly committed to the two-state solution which is the only way to guarantee security and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians and ensure long term stability in the region, but it is imperilled by extremist settler violence and settlement expansion.

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights. Extremist rhetoric advocating the forced displacement of Palestinians and the creation of new Israeli settlements is appalling and dangerous. These actions are not acceptable. We have engaged the Israeli government on this issue extensively, yet violent perpetrators continue to act with encouragement and impunity. This is why we have taken this action now – to hold those responsible to account. The Israeli government must uphold its obligations under international law and we call on it to take meaningful action to end extremist, violent and expansionist rhetoric.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, has welcomed the government’s decision the two far-right Israeli ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.

Davey said:

I’m relieved to see the government finally sanction the extremist ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Their calls for the forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians are utterly abhorrent, and it’s right that they will now face consequences.

Liberal Democrats have been calling for these sanctions since last February. It’s disappointing that the Conservative government refused and Labour took so long to act.

The antidote to the extremism of ministers like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich must be to officially recognise the independent state of Palestine. The Government should take this vital step at next week’s summit - rejecting extremism, demonstrating the UK’s commitment to self-determination, and giving both Israelis and Palestinians hope of a lasting peace.

Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, has also issued a statement about the government’s move. With Kemi Badenoch as leader, and Patel doing foreign affairs, the Conservatives have been almost unequivocally pro-Israel, and this statement is non-committal. It could be read as either supporting the sanctioning decision or opposing it.

We have been clear that the British government must leverage its influence at every opportunity to ensure the remaining hostages are released, that aid continues to reach those who need it, and a sustainable end to the conflict is achieved.

The Conservative party has always been committed to supporting a two-state solution – delivered in the right way, and at the right time – and will work with the government to support efforts to achieve this, where those efforts are effective.

Labour says the new Reform UK chair, David Bull, favours replacing the NHS with an insurance-based healthcare system.

In a statement issued after Bull was announced as the replacedment for Zia Yusuf, a Labour spokesperson said:

While the faces change at the top of Reform UK, the commitment to end the NHS as we know it stays the same.

David Bull has parroted Nigel Farage’s plan for an insurance-based healthcare model which would leave working people paying thousands for routine healthcare treatment.

The threat for patients is crystal clear given Farage said he would stop taxation paying for the NHS and Reform MPs voted in parliament to scrap the means of paying for Labour’s additional investment in the NHS, which is bringing down waiting lists.

Labour said that in May 2025, on the BBC’s local election results programme, Bull said:

Nigel [Farage] has talked about looking at insurance-based systems, he’s talked about looking at countries like Australia, for example, Canada, for example.

Labour says Bull was referring to Farage telling Sky News earlier in the week that he did not want the NHS to be paid for out of general taxation.

Keir Starmer has said that he is strongly in favour of acting with other countries in tightening pressure on Israel to change its policy in Gaza.

This morning he recorded an interview with Beth Rigby from Sky News, and Rigby said that, although he kept saying the situation in Gaza was “intolerable”, the government was refusing to act. She asked why the government was not taking action, like sanctioning ministers or suspending further arms sales.

Starmer replied:

Well, it is intolerable and it’s getting worse. And I think anybody looking at what’s going on in Gaza, would be shocked, and that’s why we do need to get back to a ceasefire, urgently. It’s why we need to get the remaining hostages out, they’ve been there a very long time. And of course, humanitarian aid needs to get in at volume and at speed.

We are, in answer to your question, talking to other partners about what more we could do, including questions of sanctions.

My strong belief is, when we make a move, if we’re able to do that in company of other countries, that’s a stronger move than doing it on our own. So that’s the basic approach that we’re taking.

But we are working on what more we could do in a pretty short term now.

It is not clear whether Starmer’s reference to action coming soon was just a reference to the sanctions announcement (see 2pm), which was made public about two hours later, or whether further action, with allies, is planned.

Two Israeli government ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have been sanctioned by the UK, PA Media reports. PA says:

Ben-Gvir, the security minister, and Smotrich, the finance minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government will both face a travel ban and see their assets frozen.

The move comes as the UK and other Western nations seek to ramp up pressure on Israel’s government amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

Israel’s foreign affairs minister Gideon Sa’ar said it was “outrageous that elected representatives and members of the government are subjected to these kind of measures”.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir both belong to right wing parties which help to prop up Mr Netanyahu’s fragile coalition government.

Both have been criticised for their hardline stance on the war in Gaza.

Smotrich has campaigned against allowing aid into Gaza, while Ben-Gvir has called for Gaza’s people to be resettled from the territory.

In the Commons Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker, told MPs that a minister will make a statement on this in the chamber later today.

Keir Starmer has rejected claims that the settlement for the police in the spending review being announced tomorrow will make people less safe.

This is a claim that senior police officers have been making. Last week it was reported that Sir Mark Rowley, the Met police commissioner, and other senior officers sent a letter to Starmer saying the spending offer being planned would have “far-reaching consequences” for the police (negative ones, obviously). And in an article in the Telegraph yesterday, the Police Superintendents’s Association and the Police Federation of England and Wales delivered a similar warning.

But, asked if people would be “less safe” after the spending review, Starmer told GB News:

No, we will be more safe. There’s money going into policing, into security, and that is really important, particularly coming from my background.

I was chief prosecutor for five years, prosecuting cases across England and Wales. So this is a core belief of mine. Those extra police officers will be neighbourhood police officers. And I think that will give people the reassurance in their communities that they are safe and security as individuals, as families, as communities.

Keir Starmer has accused Reform UK of “looking backwards” on energy policy.

In a speech yesterday Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, floated the idea of opening new mines in south Wales if Reform were to take power in Cardiff after the Senedd elections next year.

In an interview with GB News, asked if he would block a Reform-led Welsh government from opening new coal mines, Starmer replied:

I want to go forward, not backwards. And Nigel Farage is going backwards.

The future is in renewables, in clean power, where we have complete control over our energy.

Starmer went on to say he was “really pleased” about today’s Sizewell C nuclear power station announcement.

Asked again if he would block a Reform-led administration reviving the coal industry in south Wales, Starmer replied:

[Farage is] looking backwards and we look forward.

In the Commons Adrian Ramsay, the Green party’s co-leader, asked for an assurance that energy customers would not have to pay more through their bills to fund the construction of Sizewell C. He said it would take at least a decade, and could be almost two decades, before it produced any new electricity.

In reponse, Miliband said that under the RAB funding model for nuclear power bill payers would play a role.

He went on to say that Ramsay seemed to be opposing many forms of clean power.

He opposes transmission infrastructure for offshore wind and solar. He opposes solar farms. He opposes CCS (carbon capture and storage). I guess he opposes nuclear. I have an all of the above on clean energy. He has a none of the above position.

In the Commons Kirsty Blackman (SNP) complained that the government was spending £14bn on a nuclear power station in England, as well as £22bn on carbon capture and storage projects in England, but without investing in Scotland’s Acorn carbon capture and storage scheme.

In response, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said he was in favour of Acorn. And he said he hoped, from the tone of Blackman’s question, that there was “an SNP change of position” coming.

The SNP should rethink their opposition to building new nuclear power stations, he said. The SNP were “absolutely sticking their heads in the sand” on this issue, he said, because nuclear was a means of delivering clean energy, he said.

In the Commons Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has delivered his opening statement setting out the three related nuclear energy announcments from the government today. (See 12.40pm.)

Nick Timothy was responding from the front bench on behalf of the Conservative party. He said the Tories were pro-nuclear power. But he said the coalition government was not able to make progress commissioning new nuclear power stations because the Liberal Democrats ruled this out in the coalition agreement.

He also claimed that the last Conservative government had paved the way for the announcement today with decisions it had taken.

UPDATE: Timothy said:

This statement is a downgrade on what the last government put in motion. Today, the energy secretary has announced only one small modular reactor (SMR). There is no clear target to increase nuclear power generation, and no news on Wylfa.

The nuclear industry is expecting news of a third gigawatt-scale reactor. The last government purchased the land and committed to build but on this today, the energy secretary said nothing.

So can he commit to the planning inherited for a third gigawatt-scale plant at Wylfa? And will he recommit to the Conservative policy of 24 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2050?

And Miliband replied:

I do sort of slightly scratch my head, because he sort of says it’s a downgrade, I mean, we’ve announced the largest nuclear building programme in 50 years.

It might have sort of looked good in the mirror this morning, but I think it … sort of doesn’t really bear much resemblance to reality.

The Liberal Democrats have criticised Nigel Farage for appointing someone they describe as a Trump sycophant as Reform UK chair.

In a statement about the appointment of David Bull (see 11.55am), Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem deputy leader, said:

The conveyor belt of Trump sycophants appointed by Nigel Farage rolls on.

Reform is more interested in advancing Donald Trump’s agenda over here, not standing up for the communities that they are supposed to represent.

This elevation of yet another Trump lapdog is just further evidence of this.

To justify their comment, the Lib Dems highlighted this tweet from Bull celebrating Trump’s election victory last year, and another showing that, as a Talk TV presenter, Bull once went on air with a bandage over his ear show he could show “solidarity” with Trump after the assassination attempt.

With Labour reluctant to criticise President Trump because they have to negotiate with him, and the Tories reluctant to criticise him because they admire him, the Liberal Democrats are the biggest party in the Commons with ample scope for Trump-bashing, and they rarely miss a chance indulge.

In the Commons Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, will shortly be making the nuclear investment announcement.

Although the focus has mostly been on Sizewell C, there are in fact three components to the nuclear energy strategy announced today. The Treasury has set out them all in a news release. This is how it summarises the three linked announcements.

Sizewell C

Sizewell C will provide 10,000 people with employment at peak construction and support thousands more jobs across the UK, including 1,500 apprenticeships …

Despite the UK’s strong nuclear legacy, opening the world’s first commercial nuclear power station in the 1950s, no new nuclear plant has opened in the UK since 1995, with all of the existing fleet except Sizewell B likely to be phased out by the early 2030s.

Sizewell C was one of eight sites identified in 2009 by then-energy secretary Ed Miliband as a potential site for new nuclear. However, the project was not fully funded in the 14 years that followed under subsequent governments.

The government’s nuclear programme is now the most ambitious for a generation - once small modular reactors and Sizewell C come online in the 2030s, combined with Hinkley Point C, this will deliver more new nuclear to grid than over the previous half century combined.

Small modular reactors

The government’s nuclear resurgence will support the UK’s long-term energy security, with small modular reactors expected to power millions of homes with clean energy and help fuel power-hungry industries like AI data centres.

This follows reforms to planning rules announced by the prime minister in February 2025 to make it easier to build nuclear across the country - changing the rules to back the builders of this nation, and saying no to the blockers who have strangled our chances of cheaper energy, growth and jobs for far too long.

The government is also looking to provide a route for private sector-led advanced nuclear projects to be deployed in the UK, alongside investing £300m in developing the world’s first non-Russian supply of the advanced fuels needed to run them.

Fusion energy

The government is also making a record investment in R&D for fusion energy, investing over £2.5 billion over 5 years. This includes progressing the STEP programme (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production), the world-leading fusion plant in Nottinghamshire, creating thousands of new jobs and with the potential to unlock limitless clean power.

This builds on the UK’s global leadership to turbocharge economic growth in the Oxford-Cambridge corridor, while helping deliver the UK’s flagship programme to design and build a prototype fusion power station on the site of a former coal-fired plant.

Nigel Farage has just finished his press conference. It was his second in two days, and he took a large number of questions. Tim Montgomerie, the journalist who set up ConservativeHome and who is now a Reform UK supporter, says he thinks Farage has taken almost 100 questions from reporters at press events in the last fortnight, far more than any other party leader.

The Q&A covered a lot of topics but what was most interesting was Farage’s repeatedly willingness to float hard right or extreme propositions – while at the same time not quite fully adopting them.

A good example came when he was asked about Reform UK’s position on the death penalty. Farage said that he expected calls for the restoration of the death penalty to become a major political issue over the next decade – while stressing that he was personally opposed. The result was that a hardline GB News viewer keen to see murders hang may have concluded that, under Farage, this would all be getting more likely – while a liberal-minded, Reform-curious former Tory voter watching may have concluded that Farage was reliably moderate on this issue after all.

Asked by a reporter from the Sun what the party’s position on the death penalty was, Farage replied:

These are issues of conscience, just as the assisted dying debate will be when it comes up on Friday, just as the abortion limit. These are all issues of conscience. Nothing on the death penalty will be part of party policy.

I have to say, personally, given there have been 500 quite serious miscarriages of justice in this country since the early 1970s, I don’t think I could ever support it. But I understand why others take a different point of view.

Although I do think it’s quite interesting there’s a younger generation coming through who seem to increasingly support the death penalty. And I suspect it will be back within the next decade as an issue of major national debate. Not quite yut, but it’s coming.

But, certainly, these things will not be party policy, far, far from it.

Farage was referring to this polling from More in Common UK released in January. In a report on what it shows, the Evening Standard said:

A majority of Britons support reinstating the death penalty in the UK, with Millennials showing the strongest support, a poll has found.

Three in five, (58 per cent) of Millennials born between 1981 and 1986, believe capital punishment should be reintroduced.

David Bull has been confirmed as Reform UK’s new chair, PA Media reports. PA says:

The former television presenter and medical doctor was announced as the party’s chairman at a press conference in Westminster this morning.

His appointment comes after businessman Zia Yusuf resigned from the position last week.

Speaking at the press conference, Yusuf said that he is “hugely excited” that Bull was taking the role.

“I wholeheartedly congratulate him and I know he’s going to do an incredible job for us,” he added.

Nigel Farage said Bull would come to the chairman’s role with “terrific verve, energy, enthusiasm”, adding: “It’s going to be great fun”.

Yusuf returned to Reform over the weekend, just 48 hours after he quit, saying he had made an “error”.

He will lead the party’s plans to cut public spending – the so-called “UK Doge”, based on the US Department of Government Efficiency which was led by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

Yusuf quit as chairman after an internal row in which he described a question asked to the prime minister by the party’s newest MP, Sarah Pochin, about banning the burka as “dumb”.

At his Q&A at a college in Ipswich, Keir Starmer said today’s announcement about Sizewell C going ahead was a “statement of intent”. It meant “no more dithering”, he said.

The last reactor was 1995, 30 years ago, and I think that was Sizewell B.

So here, to put this down today, is really important. It’s not just an important decision for the future, it’s a change of mindset.

No more dithering, no more delay, no more being unclear about what we’re going to do, a real statement of intent as we go forward.

Having our own energy in this country that we control, gives us security, gives us independence, so Putin can’t put his boot on our throat.

And it means that we can control the prices in a way that we haven’t been able to in recent years, which has meant very high prices for businesses, for households and for families.

Unemployment in the UK rose in April to the highest level in almost four years, official figures showed, as tax increases introduced by Rachel Reeves added to a broader slowdown in the jobs market. Richard Partington has the story.

More than 300 Foreign Office staff have been told to consider resigning after they wrote a letter complaining they feared it had become complicit in Israel’s alleged war crimes in Gaza, Patrick Wintour reports.

Q: What advice would you give to students?

Starmer says he is slightly nervous when a slightly older person – he corrects himself, '“perhaps a much older person” – gives advice to young people. He says older people tend to think they know what younger people are thinking.

But he goes on:

There’s a tendency to think that’s that looks like an exciting, interesting job, but it’s probably not. For me, it’s the sort of little voice in the head.

And if I had one piece of advice, it would be to knock that voice on the head, knock it out of the head.

Because actually, as we’ve seen in the course we had this morning, we had people who had done different things come in, doing electrical apprenticeships now, hadn’t necessarily thought that’s what they wanted to do, but absolutely loving it and thriving on it.

So don’t allow your head to tell you this isn’t for me. It’s for somebody else.

If it excites you, if it’s interesting, it probably is for you.

(Starmer’s career advice may reflect, in part, his own experience as a teenager, growing up in a working-class family and choosing to study law.)

Reeves is now taking questions.

The first comes from a delegate who says the proposed welfare cuts are wrong. Will the government think again?

Reeves says the last government did not do nearly enough to support people back into work. The government is going to invest £1bn in this, she says. She says it wants to get people off sickness and disability benefits into work.

The current system is “not sustainable”, she says.

People who cannot work will always be protected, she says.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is speaking at the GMB conference.

There is a live feed here.

In his Times Radio interview Ed Miliband was asked how Rachel Reeves would fund the winter fuel payments U-turn announced yesterday. He replied:

I’ll let the chancellor set that out in the budget ... I’m really confident that Rachel Reeves will find a fair way of ensuring that we pay for this. I don’t think anyone looking at Rachel Reeves’s record over the last 11 months would say she has been fiscally irresponsible.

Yesterday Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said Reeves would probably have to raise taxes, or cut welfare, to fund the WFPs decision.

Ed Miliband was on radio and TV this morning to talk about nuclear energy, but he spent much of the time in interviews talking about winter fuel payments (WFPs). In particular, he was asked if the government would apologise for cutting WFPs last year, given that it has now decided to restore them for most pensioners.

No, was the answer. Miliband told Times Radio:

We’re not going to apologise for the actions we took to stabilise the economy. That’s what happened last year. The chancellor came into office, saw a massive black hole in the nation’s finances. She took a whole series of measures.

Now, what’s happened since then is two things. One, we have stabilised the public finances and secondly, we’ve listened to people. Now, we haven’t changed the principle that the winter fuel allowance should be means tested but we have listened to people on the threshold of how high the threshold should be for qualification. Personally, I think it’s the right thing that the chancellor has done.

While being asked continually to apologise for the original WFP cut may have been irritating for Miliband, and will be for Keir Starmer when he inevitably gets asked the same question today, paradoxically it is a sign that the U-turn announcement yesterday has been relatively successful. That is because if the opposition, and the oppositon media, are focusing on calls for an apology in relation to a policy issue, that generally means they have run out of other, more important, things to complain about.

While the media (see the Sun’s splash), and MPs, seem to care a lot about apologies, members of the public may be more interested in the substance of what the government is doing. That is the case Miliband made to Times Radio. He said:

I’ve talked to lots of people on doorsteps about the winter fuel allowance. I can’t remember anyone who said, you should apologise. People wanted us to change the policy and that’s what we’ve done.

Opposition MPs say the government should apologise because cutting the WFP was a bad decision in the first place. Privately, many ministers probably agree. But the government is arguing that the cut was needed because of the state of the government finances last year and ministers are not going to abandon that position.

Good morning. As you will probably have heard already, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, has announced plans to build a new nuclear power station in Suffolk, Sizewell C. Here is the Guardian story.

Oops. That is our story from 2009, when Gordon Brown was prime minister, Miliband was energy secretary for the first time, and Sizewell C was first getting the go-ahead from government.

Often reading about British politics (and writing about it) can feel like being trapped in a circular doom loop of stasis, particularly when the government is talking about infrastructure policy. But this time it is different, Miliband claimed in interviews this morning. In an interview with Today, when Justin Webb, the presenter, pointed out that the last Conservative government also said that it was committed to Sizewell C and asked what was different this time, Miliband had a simple answer.

We’re funding it. And that’s the big difference.

We’re actually putting put forward the money to make it happen.

Miliband went on:

This is the biggest investment in nuclear, new nuclear, in more than half a century in Britain. Sizewell C. Small modular reactors, Rolls-Royce, it was announced at 7am this morning, have won that competition. Nuclear fusion.

We’re doing this because we want energy security for the country, long-term energy security. Good jobs, 10,000 jobs, at Sizewell alone. And, frankly, something I care a lot about, to tackle the climate crisis, because we’ve got to get off insecure, volatile fossil fuels, both for security and for climate reasons.

Here is our overnight story, by Jessica Elgot.

Miliband was doing an interview round this morning, and he will be in the Commons making a statement about this later. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is also giving a speech this morning that will cover nuclear power.

At Westminster, opposition to the Sizewell C announcement is likely to be limited. The last Conservative government was in theory in favour. In the past the Liberal Democrats were sceptical about nuclear power, but that has changed under Ed Davey. Judging by Nigel Farage’s speech yesterday, you might conclude that Reform UK back opening coalmines as their preferred answer to the energy crisis, but they have not spoken out against nuclear power stations.

So, on this issue, the Green party have the opposition side of the pitch all to themselves. This morning Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader and MP for Waveney Valley, which covers parts of Suffolk and is not far from Sizewell, issued this statement. He said the money could be “far better spent” on green energy and better insulation.

Nuclear power is hugely expensive and far too slow to come on line. The only thing delivered by EDF so far at Hinkley Point in Somerset is overspend and delay. Electricity was promised by 2017 with a price tag of £22bn but this has mushroomed to 40bn and Hinkley is still producing no power.

The money being spent on this nuclear gamble would be far better spent on insulating and retrofitting millions of homes, bringing down energy bills and keeping people warmer and more comfortable.

We should also be investing in genuinely green power such as fitting millions of solar panels to roofs and in innovative technologies like tidal power. All this would create many more jobs than nuclear ever will.

Morning: Keir Starmer is on a visit in Suffolk.

10.30am: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, is speaking at the GMB conference.

11am: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, holds a press conference to announce the party’s new chair. According to the Daily Mail, the new chair is the TV presenter and former Brexit party MEP David Bull.

11.30am: Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 12.30pm: Miliband is expected to make a statement to MPs about the plan to go ahead with the Sizewell C nuclear power station.

3pm: Angela Eagle, minister for border security and asylum, gives evidence to the Commons home affairs committee on asylum accommodation.

3pm: Adm Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff, gives evidence to the Commons defence committee.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line when comments are open (normally between 10am and 3pm at the moment), or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.

If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn.bsky.social. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X, but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.

I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And 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 BTL or sometimes in the blog.