The assisted dying bill could have “enhanced protections” added regarding assessments of mental capacity, the House of Lords heard during its final debate on the legislation this year. PA Media reports:

Labour peer Lord Falconer of Thornton, who is leading the terminally ill adults (end of life) bill through the House of Lords, told peers that those who are “particularly vulnerable” should have an “enhanced level of assessment”.

This came after it was suggested that anyone who has been deprived of their liberty under the Mental Capacity Act (2005) in the last year should be ineligible for an assisted death.

The former president of the British Medical Association, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, argued that an impairment of capacity serious enough to result in a Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DOLS) application should act as a “yellow flag” and an “indicator that risk may be elevated”.

Former Labour MP Luciana Berger added: “I hope we can all agree that people whose incapacity for basic decisions is so severe that they are deprived of their liberty or have an application made for the deprivation of their liberty are the most vulnerable members of society.

“And the protection of people who lack capacity is a solemn duty. The state looks after their interests because they cannot.”

Meanwhile, several peers urged colleagues to increase the pace at which amendments are debated to ensure the bill does not run out of time to be passed into law, given the more than 1,000 that have been tabled at committee stage in the upper chamber.

Former Lord Justice of Appeal Lady Butler-Sloss warned that there is “the perception that we are being unreasonable”, and urged colleagues to “exercise restraint, by dealing with the amendments relatively briefly”.

She said: “I don’t like the bill, but I am here like other noble lords to try and make it work. It needs scrutiny, it needs improvement, but we must get it to third reading.

“If we don’t, there is a very real danger that the reputation of this House, which not only I but all your lordships care about deeply, will be, or possibly will be, irreparably eroded.”

Supporters of the bill believe that peers opposed to assisted dying are deliberately dragging out the debates on the amendments to the bill so that it runs out of time and does not become law.

Keir Starmer has praised Belgium as an “incredible partner” on Ukraine.

Speaking at the start of his meeting in Downing Street with his Belgian counterpart, Bart De Wever in Downing Street, Starmer said:

Let me begin by welcoming you to Downing Street.

It’s very good to have you back here in Downing Street and it is an opportunity for us to discuss the very many challenges that we face, but particularly the issue of Ukraine, where you’ve been an incredible partner, like-minded in action, one of the first in the coalition of the willing to make really significant contributions in terms of what we were able to do, security guarantees, etc.

So, I look forward to that discussion.

The council byelection won by Reform UK in Scotland was one of nine taking place across the UK yesterday. As usual, the excellent Political Maps UK have the results.

Reform UK gained four seats – two from Labour, one from the Conservatives and one from an independent.

Commenting on the Darlington result, where Labour came fourth in a seat it was defending, Stephen Bush from the Financial Times says:

There’s more writing than wall at this point.

The Conservatives held two seats – but lost one to Reform UK, and one to the Lib Dems.

The Liberal Democrats gained two seats – one from the Tories, and one from the SNP. (As a reader points out, Fort William and Ardnamurchan is in fact in the Highland council area.)

Plaid Cymru held one seat (in Caerphilly, where they recently won an important Senedd byelection).

Election Maps UK have produced this chart showing what has happened in all byelections since the 2025 local elections. It shows that Reform UK are clearly doing best, followed by the Liberal Democrats. Labour and the Tories are getting hammered.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, gave evidence to the Treasury committee on Wednesday, and she got through it without too much difficulty. Previous chancellors have come along to these hearings knowing that that there will be at least one opposition party member determined to make them look stupid. (John Mann did that job for a while.) Members of the current committee, though, are a bit more restrained in their questioning.

But that does not mean Reeves made a good impression. Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the committee, has written an article for the i in which she says, while she admires Reeves for her resilience, she thinks she should be better at acknowledging her mistakes.

And there were lots of mistakes around the budget, Hillier suggests. She says:

We are all accustomed to the proverbial “rolling of the pitch”, which essentially means that the government indicates where it intends to make major tax or spending changes in a bid to prepare financial markets for what it’s going to announce …

I’m afraid what occurred this year, with the shadow of the mini-budget looming large, was less a rolling of the pitch and more akin to throwing several grenades on to the pitch.

In itself, this isn’t what the process for a budget should ever be, but what’s worse is the government then changed its mind, which left everyone either confused or annoyed. This was a glaring error and one from which all at the Treasury must learn.

Another part of me laments the impact of confused and excessive speculation in the lead up to the budget. The Institute for Fiscal Studies chief Helen Miller told us last week that she’d seen that “firms and individuals are holding back their decision-making” due to out-of-control briefing and counter-briefing.

Westminster psychodrama has a real-world impact, and the government must choose its words extremely carefully. It’s regrettable that it doesn’t appear to have done so in recent months.

Hillier ends saying Reeves must “identify and accept the mistakes made within the process she leads and make sure they do not happen again”.

Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

Reform UK has won its first seat in Scotland in an election, following dozens of attempts, after Labour was trounced in a council byelection in its former stronghold of West Lothian.

After previously holding the seat, Scottish Labour’s vote in the Whitburn and Blackburn ward collapsed, giving Reform UK’s candidate a win in the first round of counting. The turnout was low, however, at 22% – well below the 42% turnout in the 2022 full council elections or the 62% turnout in the last Holyrood election.

Reform’s new councillor David McLennan said:

[This is] a clear signal from local residents that they want their community to take a new, positive direction. This is a vote of faith in Reform in Scotland. We have all the momentum in Scottish politics.

Until now Reform UK’s 20 other council seats were gained through defections. While the 21 seats it now holds is a fraction of the 1,223 council seats overall in Scotland, defeat at Reform’s hands will cause alarm in Scottish Labour headquarters.

A poll on Wednesday by Ipsos for STV confirmed Reform is now effectively neck and neck with Labour before next May’s Scottish parliament election, and is becoming the main vehicle for rising public discontent over Labour’s performance at Westminster.

Ipsos found that Reform UK support had risen four points to 18% for a Holyrood constituency vote, while Scottish Labour’s had dropped seven to 16%; on the regional list vote, Labour was one point ahead of Reform at 18%, but down four.

With the poll placing the Scottish National party 19 points ahead on the constituency vote, Labour faces the competing tasks of proving to voters before next May’s election they are the best vehicle to express anger at SNP failures in government, while also challenging Reform head on, and regaining the hundreds of thousands of voters now favouring Reform.

There was a strong signal during BBC Question Time on Thursday, filmed in Paisley near Glasgow, that Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, plans to confront Reform aggressively when he personally attacked the Reform UK panellist Lord Offord.

He described Offord, a former Scottish Conservative minister and until recently Scottish party treasurer, as an “poisonous, odious man hiding behind the badge of Reform, looking to divide our communities.” Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, recently claimed Glasgow was now being “culturally smashed” by migrants who could not speak English.

Cutting benefits paid to healthy people leads to more people claiming disability benefits, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has found.

It has published a report showing a direct link between cuts in one part of the benefits system, and rising claims in another part of the system, and it says that more than 10% of the rise in disability benefit spending between 2010 and 2019 (the period covered by the research) can be explained by cuts to other benefits.

The IFS focused on this period because there were big cuts to non-health benefits during this period, while health and disability benefits were less affected.

Explaining the study, the IFS says:

We study four reforms: the 2011 cuts to housing benefit for private renters; the increase in the female state pension age between 2010 and 2018; the lowering of the benefit cap in 2016; and the introduction of the ‘lone parent obligation’ between 2008 and 2012, which required more single parents on out-of-work benefits to look for paid work. In each case, we find the reform increased the number of people receiving disability benefits, and we also find that two of the reforms increased the number of people receiving incapacity benefits.

Explaining the link, the IFS says it “could be because the cuts to non-health-related benefits worsened the health of those affected or because take-up of health-related benefits may have increased”.

The IFS concluded:

Overall, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that all changes to non-health-related benefits and direct taxes from 2010 to 2019 increased disability benefit spending by £900m. This represents 13% of the £7bn increase in disability benefit spending during the 2010s.

As for other reasons why spending on disability benefits has risen since 2010, the IFS says the increase in the size of the working age population, health declines since Covid, and the sharp rise in the cost of living between 2021 and 2023 are all factors.

Commenting on the findings, Eduin Latimer, a senior economist at the IFS and one of the authors of the report, said:

Across four different reforms, we find an unintended consequence of benefit cuts – that they lead to more people claiming disability benefits …

One result of these spillover effects is that the fiscal savings from cutting non-health-related benefits are slightly smaller than previously thought. These effects will likely also have a long-term legacy, as people often stay on disability benefits for many years. The big-picture lesson for policymakers is that changes to one part of the benefit system can shift pressures elsewhere, rather than remove them entirely.

Senior leaders of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been sanctioned by the UK over “heinous crimes” committed during the country’s civil war, the Foreign Office has announced. It says the four sanctioned commanders are “suspected of heinous violence in El Fasher, Sudan, including mass killings, systematic sexual violence and deliberate attacks on civilians”.

Wes Streeting was not the only person doing an LBC phone-in this morning. Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan police commissioner, was on too, and he used his interview to accuse President Trump of talking “complete nonsense” about London.

Trump has regularly complained about the level of crime in London, apparently inspired by alarmist reports he has seen on TV or social media, and he criticised the city again in a recent interview with Politico. He said he hated to see what is happening there, and he blamed the mayor, Sadiq Khan.

In an interview last month with GB News, he claimed that there were areas in the capital that were no-go areas for the police, and he claimed sharia law applied there too. He even said the same thing in a speech to the UN in September.

Rowley told LBC this morning that these sorts of comments from Trump were “complete nonsense”.

Rowley said:

There’s no no-go areas, that’s completely false.

How anybody in America can suggest the UK is violent is completely ridiculous. The homicide rate in London is lower than every single US state. It’s lower than all their big cities. The murder rate in New York last time I looked is three or four times higher than London per capita.

The homicide rate in London is lower than it is in Toronto, it’s lower than Paris, it’s lower than Brussels, it’s lower than Berlin.

This is a safe city. I’m not going to pretend it’s perfect.

This trend of trying to rubbish London, some of which is driven by politics, we who are proud Londoners need to fight back about it.

Rowley did not specifically talk about Khan, saying he did not want to intervene in a dispute between two politicians.

Members of the House of Lords have proposed “totally unnecessary” and “very cruel” amendments to the assisted dying bill in a bid to scupper it, Kim Leadbeater, the MP leading the campaign for the legislation, has said. Kiran Stacey has the story.

In his LBC phone-in, when asked about his New Statesman interview (see 9.43am), Wes Streeting, the health secretary, also insisted that his comments about the government’s “technocratic approach” were not a criticism of Keir Starmer. He said:

No, it’s not criticism of the prime minister.

I think it is a challenge to all of us, because all of us in government and in the cabinet in particular, have a responsibility to get the government’s message across, and sometimes, I think what we’re guilty of is coming on and listing a whole load of stuff we’ve done.

Now that’s a good thing, because we’ve done loads of stuff since the elections to deliver our manifesto.

The problem with a big, long shopping list is you can’t always remember what’s on it, and people walk away thinking, ‘I kind of heard some stuff they’re doing, but can’t quite remember what it’s about’.

We’ve got to be much better at putting an account of what this government is about and who it is for.

And this is what Streeting compared child deaths in temporary accommodation linked to poverty to the actions of a child killer (see 9.43am) as an example of how to explain policy vividly.

Q: Can you rule out challenging Keir Starmer on a joint ticket with Angela Rayner?

Yes, says Streeting.

Q: You are allowing a trial of puberty blockers for children questioning their gender. Some children involved will be as young as 10. Why are you allowing this?

Streeting says in her report Hilary Cass uncovered a shocking lack of evidence about the effectiveness of these treatments.

As a result, the government stopped the use of puberty blockers, and Streeting says he extended this.

But Cass also recommended a trial, he says.

He admits he is “not comfortable” about this going ahead.

But he says, in allowing it to go ahead, he is following the clinical advice.

He says he is uncomfortable about the idea of stopping puberty.

But he says other countries use these drugs. There is some evidence that it is better than leaving trans people without treatment, and all the distress that comes with that.

This does not sit comfortably with him, he says.

But, as a politician, he does not want to interfer with clinicians who know far more about this topic than he does.

UPDATE: Streeting said:

The Pathway study involves a whole range of treatments and care, including therapeutics or mental health support, but it also included a trial on this puberty blockers thing.

I’m not comfortable, candidly, about it …

I’ve had my constituency office windows put through three times by trans activists, and received all sorts of threats. Since this trial has been announced, I’ve been called all the names under the sun online and received some pretty nasty stuff.

To be honest, the extreme stuff I don’t care about anyway, the political noise I kind of put to one side. I’m following clinical advice …

Now, the clinical advice is to go ahead with the trial. And those who advocate this medication – and lots of other countries are using medication in these cases – suggest that for trans people, this is a better course of treatment than leaving them without, and with all of the distress and harm that that can cause.

We’re following that evidence. As I say, it doesn’t sit comfortably with me. I’m trying really hard as a politician not to interfere or block clinical advice by people who are, frankly, far more qualified than me. And, you know, there will be debate on this.

Q: Is the BMA more of a political organisation than a health organisation?

Streeting says it feels like that, but he says he does not want to go over that again today.

Q: Do you regret calling the BMA “moaning minnies” and accusing them of “juvenile delinquency”?

Not really, says Streeting.

He says he was angry because figures show that patient satisfaction with access to GPs has gone up by 60% to 75%.

But, instead of welcoming this, the BMA was still opposing measures to extend online consultations.

But Streeting says he wants to turn over a new leaf in terms of relations with the BMA in the new year.

He says the BMA chair recently apologised for some intemperate language,.

In that spirit, Streeting says, he want to reciprocate. “I regret some of the things I have said too,” he says.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is being interviewed on on LBC. The presenter is Nick Ferrari.

Streeting said the flu was putting the NHS under the worst pressure since Covid.

There is a particularly aggressive strain of flu around, he said.

He said he would be “extremely worried” about this if there were no strikes.

But, with the “double whammy” of flu and strikes, he thinks the situation is “dangerous”.

Streeting said he was so worried about this he told the BMA that he would extend their strike mandate, allowing them to strike in January, because that would be preferable to a strike before Christmas.

But they refused the offer, Streeting said. He said he could not understand that, given the risk it poses for patients.

Q: If midnight is the collapse of the NHS, how close to midnight are we? One minute?

Streeting says he would say that.

There are only a finite number of doctors and staff. With strikes and flu and trolleys on corridor and demand going up, “I don’t think there is a lever I can pull ... [to] guarantee patient safety,” he said.

UPDATE: Streeting said:

The thing I’m genuinely fearful of is that, even if I throw more money at this situation now, at this time, to get through the next week on strikes, there’s only a finite number of doctors and staff.

There’s only a finite number of care home beds and community based care. So if you’ve got strikes and you’ve got flu and you’ve got all of these trolleys on corridors, and you’ve got demand going up rather than down, I just don’t think there is a lever I can pull, I don’t think there’s an amount of money I can throw, that means I can sit on your programme and guarantee patient safety over the next week.

That’s a pretty terrifying position, not just for me to be in, but for the doctors and NHS staff who are confronting that challenge to be in, because they are the ones that are going to be bearing it on the on the front line.

Good morning. Growth figures out today show the economy shrinking in October. This is worse than economists were expecting.

Richard Partington has the story here.

Here is the start of his story.

Britain’s economy shrank unexpectedly in October as consumers held back on spending before Rachel Reeves’s budget and car manufacturing struggled to recover from the cyber-attack on Jaguar Land Rover.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed gross domestic product fell by 0.1%, after a 0.1% drop in output in September. City economists had predicted a 0.1% rise in October.

After a fourth consecutive month without growth, economists said the latest snapshot would probably cement a Bank of England interest rate cut next week amid fading inflationary pressures, fears over the sluggish outlook, and rising unemployment.

“The UK economy has faltered more dramatically than we expected,” said Andrew Wishart, senior UK economist at Berenberg. “This loss of momentum will bring inflation down more swiftly than we previously anticipated, allowing the BoE to act.”

And Graeme Wearden has more on his business live blog.

Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, issued this statement about the news.

This morning’s news that the economy unexpectedly shrank in the three months to October is extremely concerning but it’s as a direct result of Labour’s economic mismanagement.

Rachel Reeves promised growth but Labour has no plan for the economy - just their own survival, that’s why Reeves presented a Benefits Budget that rewards welfare not work.

For months, Rachel Reeves has misled the British public. She said she wouldn’t raise taxes on working people - she broke that promise again. She insisted there was a black hole in the public finances - but there wasn’t.

But within 20 minutes Stride was contradicted by his own leader, who said the fall in GDP was not unexpected. In her ‘I told you so’ message on social media, Kemi Badenoch said:

It wasn’t unexpected.

As I said at the time, the chancellor’s shambolic dishonesty in the run-up to the budget, slowed down economic activity and killed growth.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9am: Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has a phone-in on LBC.

10am: Peers resume their committee stage debate on the assisted dying bill.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Afternoon: Keir Starmer meets the Belgian PM, Bart De Wever, in Downing Street.

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