Nigel Farage said deporting women and children was not part of Reform UK’s plans “for the next five years”, a day after he announced proposals to remove up to 600,000 people from the UK.

He told a press conference in Scotland on Wednesday:

I was very, very clear yesterday in what I said, that deportation of illegal immigrants – we are not even discussing women and children at this stage – there are so many illegal males in Britain, and the news reports that said that after my conference yesterday were wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Asked whether women and children would be “exempt” from deportation, the Reform UK leader added:

I didn’t say exempt forever, but at this stage it’s not part of our plan for the next five years.

On Tuesday, senior Reform figure Zia Yusuf said “phase one” of the party’s plans would focus on adults, with unaccompanied children being removed “towards the latter half of that five years”.

Refugee charities warn that thousands of people in the UK could find themselves homeless on the streets this winter after the Home Office quietly reverse its asylum accommodation policy.

The Guardian has learned that ministers are planning to halve the period asylum seekers are given to find new accommodation after getting a decision on their case, from 56 to 28 days. Refugee organisations say this is not enough time to find work and a home to rent and will lead to many people pitching tents in the streets.

The British Red Cross is among those raising concerns about an increase in rough sleeping among refugees and, along with other refugee NGOs, is calling on the government to rethink.

Alex Fraser, the British Red Cross director of refugee services, said:

Reducing the ‘move-on’ period will increase levels of homelessness and destitution for people granted protection and put additional pressure on local authorities.

The numbers don’t add up. It takes around 35 days to receive universal credit. Local authorities need 56 days to work with households at risk of homelessness. Giving people only 28 days to find work, housing or support isn’t enough time.

Making people destitute ends up costing the taxpayer more money and causing distress and hardship. We urge the government to review this decision.

The government is grappling with a crisis over the use of hotels for asylum seekers, with dozens of protests staged by anti-migrant groups and individuals in recent weeks.

Ministers are under pressure to expedite hotel closures and have committed to speeding up asylum decision-making, a decision welcomed by refugee organisations and by asylum seekers. But if there is not sufficient time for refugees to find work and accommodation, this could increase street homelessness.

Political parties in Northern Ireland have condemned Nigel Farage’s proposal to renegotiate the Good Friday agreement, calling it reckless and irresponsible.

The Alliance party and the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) echoed Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland secretary, in saying that any attempt to unpick the 1998 peace agreement could destabilise the region.

Claire Hanna, the SDLP leader, on Wednesday that Farage’s plan to withdraw the UK from the European convention on human rights would remove a pillar of the Good Friday agreement. Hanna said:

The agreement belongs to the people of this island. It is not Nigel Farage’s to tear up, nor any other British politician’s. Farage has never had any interest in Northern Ireland and when things get difficult, he will drop Northern Ireland in a heartbeat rather than spend years painstakingly negotiating with Dublin.

However, Sammy Wilson, a Democratic Unionist party (DUP) MP, endorsed Farage’s proposal as a way to stem immigration and said Reform, with a big enough majority after the next election, could renegotiate the Good Friday agreement without much difficulty.

The cost of UK government borrowing has jumped to near a 27-year high, piling pressure on Rachel Reeves to reveal how she will tackle the deficit in the public finances before the autumn budget.

The yield, or interest rate, on the UK’s 30-year bond rose by eight basis points (0.08 of a percentage point) on Tuesday to 5.62%.

That pushed the UK’s long-term borrowing costs close to a spike in April of 5.66%, when 30-year bond yields reached their highest since 1998.

UK borrowing costs have risen sharply in recent months, increasing the cost of financing UK government debt to more than £100bn a year – almost 10% of the annual budget.

Economists have said the UK faces a unique strain on its financial position at a time when higher welfare and healthcare costs and rapid ageing are driving up the level of borrowing across most industrialised nations.

Reeves is expected to be faced with a deficit of between £20bn and £40bn when she delivers the autumn budget.

To maintain her fiscal rules and maintain the £10bn buffer in place under current plans, the chancellor will need to find between £30bn and £50bn in either extra taxes, reduced spending or higher borrowing.

Higher borrowing bills and U-turns on proposed welfare cuts have heightened the expectation of increases in taxes later this year.

Investors also fear the UK is suffering from high inflation that will persist for several years, devaluing their UK funds.

Catherine Mann, a member of the Bank of England’s interest rate-setting committee, said UK policymakers were underestimating “inflation persistence”. She said:

There is an increasing tension between inflation persistence and weak growth, the trade-off that we currently face in the United Kingdom.

She said the Bank needed to maintain high interest rates to bring down inflation and then cut aggressively to revive the economy.

Nigel Farage is speaking to reporters at a hotel near Edinburgh the day after he was accused of “ugly” and “destructive” rhetoric after his announcement of plans to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from the UK.

He has just announced the defection of Scottish Conservative MSP for central Scotland Graham Simpson to Reform. Simpson will be Reform’s sole MSP at Holyrood: Farage said he would be able to “show colleagues the ropes” at Holyrood at next May’s elections.

Previously, Michelle Ballantyne sat as a Reform member at the Scottish parliament from January to May 2021, having left the Conservatives the previous year and sitting for a short spell as an independent. She lost her seat at the May 2021 election.

Farage said that his press conference yesterday had “sparked the beginning of a national debate”, before introducing Simpson who said Reform represented “an opportunity to create something fresh” for voters.

This is the third MSP to leave the Scottish Tories in recent months, the other two quitting for the Lib Dems and another to sit as an independent.

UK companies spent up to £65m last year on licences to export food and agricultural products to the EU – costs that the government is promising to eliminate as part of a new deal to be agreed by 2027.

Government figures released on Tuesday showed it issued 328,727 such licences last year, at a cost of between £113 and £200 each. That would put the total cost to business at somewhere between £37m and £65m.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of European negotiations, will on Wednesday pledge to eliminate such costs as he promises a new agreement with the EU in the next 18 months.

In an event at the Spectator offices in London to be hosted by the leading Brexiter Michael Gove, Thomas-Symonds will make a vocally political argument for becoming closer to the EU.

Ministers have decided in recent months their attempts to realign with Brussels enjoy more support than the approach of the Conservatives or Reform UK, which have promised to rip up Labour’s renegotiated deal.

Thomas-Symonds will take specific aim at Farage, arguing:

Nigel Farage’s manifesto at the next election will say in writing he wants to take Britain backwards, cutting at least £9bn from the economy, bringing with it a risk to jobs and a risk of food prices going up.

A day after the Reform leader gave a speech warning that Britain was under threat from an “invasion” of asylum seekers, Thomas-Symonds will add:

Nigel Farage wants Britain to fail. His model of politics feeds on it, offering the easy answers, dividing communities and stoking anger.

Keir Starmer announced a new agreement with the EU in May, as part of which ministers agreed to pursue a series of specific deals, including one on food and agricultural products.

The Tories and Reform UK only offer “easy answers and snake oil” when it comes to the UK’s relationship with the European Union, Nick Thomas-Symonds has said.

In a speech hosted by the Spectator magazine, the EU relations minister said:

Some will hysterically cry even treason. Some will say we’re surrendering sovereignty or freedoms, but that is nonsense.

He added:

Now, we know we are going to have a political fight on this, especially when we legislate for it in parliament. But the prime minister was very direct in his instructions to me on taking office – national interests first, build on what’s best about Britain.

We are determined to plug the gaps, to rebuild Britain, protect our borders, bring down bills in every part of the country and secure good jobs, a new relationship of mutual benefit, one that brings freedom back to our businesses and exercises our sovereignty.

And it needs pragmatism. When you’re tough, decisive and collaborative. That cannot rest on easy answers and snake oil. The Tories [are] completely 2D, stuck with a ghost of Brexit past. And then Nigel Farage, who has pledged to reverse our progress.

Thomas-Symonds also accused Farage of “dividing communities and stoking anger”. He also dismissed Reform UK’s proposal to negotiate returns agreements with states such as Iran and renegotiate the Good Friday agreement, saying Farage was struggling to control his own parliamentary party.

The Cabinet Office minister told an event in Westminster hosted by the Spectator magazine:

I think that a careful, considered approach in Northern Ireland is absolutely critical. I think the Good Friday agreement is one of the great achievements of any peacetime UK government since 1945 and a comment like that just simply shows that Nigel Farage produces outlandish, unrealistic promises for solving problems and that, I’m afraid, is another one of them.

He was talking as well, as far as I can make out, of negotiating with hostile regimes around the world. He’s struggling at the moment to negotiate the politics of a parliamentary party that fits in the back of a taxi. I don’t put too much confidence in them.

Talks on a food and drink deal with the EU will begin in the autumn, with MPs having the final say on any agreement, the minister in charge of negotiations with the bloc has said.

Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds told an event hosted by the Spectator magazine on Wednesday:

This autumn, we will start the detailed negotiations on the SPS (sanitary and phytosanitary standards) deal, as well as other commitments from our summit last May.

We will then bring the legislation to parliament to implement the deal. We will get that done by 2027, so businesses and consumers see the tangible impacts as soon as possible – money saved at the borders, profits freed up to invest, pounds kept in the pocket of working people.

Earlier, Thomas-Symonds had insisted that the government’s approach would deliver “practical” benefits including lower prices, easier food exports for farmers and less time spent by truck drivers sitting in queues.

Nigel Farage has been called “one of the most disastrous politicians” and “extraordinarily damaging” by the SNP after the Reform UK leader outlined his plans to curb migration.

SNP MP Stephen Gethins, the SNP foreign affairs spokesperson at Westminster, questioned parts of the policy – which could see a future UK government potentially work with the Taliban to send people back to Afghanistan, with the UK also leaving the European convention on human rights.

He argued that Brexit – which Farage campaigned for – had “pushed up the small boats crisis” in the UK, as it means those seeking asylum are forced to do so in the first country they arrive in.

Hitting out at the Reform UK leader, Gethins told BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme:

He is the architect, along with people like Boris Johnson, and others of the small boats crisis.

Now he wants to remove us from the European convention on human rights, which was the convention introduced at the end of the second world war to give us some of the most basic rights, like prohibition of torture and right to life and all these other basic things we take for granted.

Reform on Tuesday said they would scale up detention capacity for asylum seekers to 24,000 and secure deals with countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea and Iran to return migrants. However Farage failed to answer when asked how much he would be prepared to pay Iran and the Taliban to take deportees back. Gethins insisted such policies show Farage “is an extraordinarily damaging politician”.

The PA news agency reports that the Arbroath and Broughty Ferry MP continued:

On Afghanistan, he now wants to do deals with the Taliban. Will that mean people who were abandoned in Kabul, who served alongside the British army … are they now going to be sent back to the Taliban, and are we going to be paying for the Taliban for the privilege of sending these people back?

I think most people can see that doing a deal with the Taliban to send back women, human rights advocates and others who have campaigned against that brutal regime is unrealistic.

I don’t think it is realistic, and I think any basic reading of this is unrealistic. That is why Nigel Farage is one of the most disastrous politicians. He is one of the most consequential, but not in a good way.

But Reform councillor Ross Lambie defended the party’s immigration policy, saying:

My view on it and Reform’s view on it is that largely, if not all, of those people crossing the Channel are bogus asylum seekers who are, at best they’re here to gain the benefits system of this country. At worst, they could be here to do us harm.

He told BBC Radio Scotland that those coming to the UK in small boats are “not people fleeing” oppressive regimes and are “obscuring their identity”. Lambie said this involves either “hiding their past” or “actually hiding their true country of origin”.

According to the PA news agency, his comments came after a poll, by the David Hume Institute and Diffley Partnership, found 21% of Scots think immigration is one of the top three issues in the country, up from 16% in May and just 4% in May 2023. It suggests that immigration is now seen as the third biggest priority for the country, with only health and the cost-of-living crisis regarded as more important by voters.

Energy costs will rise for millions of British households this autumn after the price cap for a typical annual dual-fuel bill increased by 2% to £1,755.

The energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, will raise the cap on gas and electricity charges from October by the equivalent of just over £35 a year for the average home, following a rise in European gas prices.

The modest increase follows a brief reprieve from rising energy bills over the summer when the energy price cap fell by 7% to £1,720 from July because of lower market prices.

Energy bills will also increase because of an expansion of the government’s warm home discount scheme, which is expected to add about £15 to a typical bill, according to analysts at Cornwall Insight, an energy consultancy.

About 9 million households who buy their energy through variable tariffs will see an immediate impact on their bills when the cap takes effect in October. Households could face even higher bills if they use more than the typical amount of energy.

This is because the cap, which is recalculated every three months, limits the rate energy suppliers can charge customers for each unit of gas and electricity – not the total bill.

The return to rising energy bills means the typical household will pay about £600 a year more on its annual bill than before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 caused gas market prices to soar.

The rising price cap is likely to reignite the debate over the affordability of the UK’s energy as households look ahead to winter.

The UK has had reassurance from France that the deal between the two countries to allow small boat interceptions in the English Channel “will go ahead”, Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said, reports the PA news agency.

He told Times Radio:

The Home Office have already set out that they’ve had reassurance from the French interior ministry that this change in maritime law will go ahead.

Thomas-Symonds added:

We’ve had that reassurance it will go ahead. And it is important, because what that particular change is talking about is the ability for French police to intercept the boats within 300 metres of the shore in shallow water. That was not the case before.

Nigel Farage has been accused of “ugly” and “destructive” rhetoric after announcing plans to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and pledging to pay despotic regimes such as the Taliban to take them back.

Unveiling Reform UK’s “Operation Restoring Justice” at a combative press conference in Oxford, Farage said he would rip up the UK’s postwar human rights commitments, contained in a range of international conventions, to deport “absolutely anyone” – including women and children – arriving by small boat.

Calling asylum seekers a threat to national security and to British women, he claimed his plans would stop Channel crossings “within days” and “save tens and possibly hundreds of billions of pounds”.

Downing Street accused Farage of not being serious about his plans, but in a sign of how Reform has set the tone for public debate, the prime minister’s spokesperson refused to criticise his references to irregular migration as an “invasion” and a “scourge” or his prediction that Britain is “not far away from major civil disorder”.

Pushed on whether it would be a good idea to sign a returns deal with Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, as Farage proposed, the spokesperson said the government was “not going to take anything off the table”.

The Conservatives merely accused Reform UK of “reheating and recycling” Tory plans.

The Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, said:

We really are through the looking-glass now. Nigel Farage pretending to be patriotic while pledging to rip up Britain’s proud record of leading the world on human rights.

As we’ve seen across history, his populist playbook is ugly, powerful and incredibly destructive. We know where it will lead if we don’t stop it.

Laura Smith, a co-head of legal at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), said:

If today feels like a Rubicon moment, it’s because it is. We are hearing proposals that would tear through centuries of British legal tradition – from the Magna Carta to the Human Rights Act – with barely any resistance from those who should be defending those values.

The ban on torture is absolute and fundamental; it cannot be bargained away. That mainstream parties have failed to push back is deeply alarming. This isn’t about migration policy any more, it’s about whether we still value the basic human rights and freedoms that define a democratic society. Now more than ever, we must fight against the normalisation of this rhetoric.

The Conservatives could “potentially” strike a deal with Afghanistan over migration, the party’s chair has said.

Asked directly if the Tories would set up a returns agreement with the Taliban-run country, Kevin Hollinrake told Times Radio: “Well, potentially, yes.”

The former minister added that his party’s deportation plan, which was published in May, is “far more comprehensive than the one we’ve seen from Reform, in that it dealt with both legal migration and illegal migration”.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch had refused to say whether she would consider seeking such an agreement when pressed on the issue on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage has been accused of “ugly” and “destructive” rhetoric after announcing plans to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and pledging to pay despotic regimes such as the Taliban to take them back.

Unveiling Reform UK’s “Operation Restoring Justice” at a combative press conference in Oxford, Farage said he would rip up the UK’s postwar human rights commitments, contained in a range of international conventions, to deport “absolutely anyone” – including women and children – arriving by small boat.

Elsewhere, the Government has said it wants to get a permanent deal with the EU on food and drink agreed in the next 18 months, as it sets out its stall ahead of talks later this year. Cabinet Office minister Nick Thomas-Symonds and Conservative party chair Kevin Hollinrake are on today’s morning media round. I’ll bring you any interesting lines from them as they come in.

But first, here are some other developments:

• UK companies spent up to £65m last year on licences to export food and agricultural products to the EU – costs that the government is promising to eliminate as part of a new deal to be agreed by 2027. Government figures released on Tuesday showed it issued 328,727 such licences last year, at a cost of between £113 and £200 each. That would put the total cost to business at somewhere between £37m and £65m.

• The cost of UK government borrowing has jumped to near a 27-year high, piling pressure on Rachel Reeves to reveal how she will tackle the deficit in the public finances before the autumn budget. The yield, or interest rate, on the UK’s 30-year bond rose by eight basis points (0.08 of a percentage point) on Tuesday to 5.62%.

• Ministers have approved plans to help a further 30 students leave Gaza to take up places at UK universities next month but their evacuation remains uncertain and dependent on Israel’s approval. It takes the total to 39, after a government commitment last week to work to secure the evacuation from Gaza of nine Chevening scholars with places at some of the UK’s leading universities.

• Energy costs will rise for millions of British households this autumn after the price cap for a typical annual dual-fuel bill increased by 2% to £1,755. The energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, will raise the cap on gas and electricity charges from October by the equivalent of just over £35 a year for the average home, following a rise in European gas prices.