The spending review is now settled, Downing Street told reporters this afternoon. This morning the Home Office was the one government department still holding out. (See 9.32am.) But Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, now seems to have resolved her differences with Rachel Reeves, the chancellor.

A No 10 spokesperson said:

The spending review is settled, we will be focused on investing in Britain’s renewal so that all working people are better off.

The first job of the government was to stabilise the British economy and the public finances, and now we move into a new chapter to deliver the promise and change.

The spending review will be announced on Wednesday.

In the Commons Labour’s Rebecca Long-Bailey told Torsten Bell that, while she welcomed the winter fuel payments announcement, it was also important to lift children out of poverty. She asked if the government would do all it could to lift the two-child benefit cap as soon as possible.

In his reply, Bell implied the current rules would not continue for long. He said:

We’ve said clearly that all levers to reduce child poverty are on the table.

The child poverty strategy will be published in the autumn, but we’re not waiting for that. We’ve already seen action, as I said earlier on, free school meals. It’s another reason why we do need to see more support for energy bills, in particular for insulating homes, because if we look at who is struggling most, having to turn off their heating, it is actually younger families with children that are struggling with that.

So she’s absolutely right to raise this issue. It is one of the core purposes of this government. We cannot carry on with a situation where large families, huge percentages of them, are in poverty.

The National Pensioners Convention, which represents pensioners, has welcomed the U-turn on the winter fuel payment – but also called for compensation for those affected by the cut last year.

Jan Shortt, general secretary of the NPC, said:

We welcome the change in direction by the Chancellor over the winter fuel payment for the coming winter. It is a victory for common sense and proves the government have finally listened to our voices.

However, there is still no recognition of the devastating impact the withdrawal of the winter fuel payment had on older people over December 2024 to February 2025.

Statistics show that older people were switching off appliances, rationing the use of energy, cutting down on food and other household bills after losing the payment. Many will now be in debt to their energy provider, with some taking out loans to pay bills at enormous interest.

We believe it is only fair that the government pay compensation for older people who were living in freezing conditions whilst MPs were claiming their energy costs for their second homes.

The Welsh Conservatives have described Nigel Farage’s proposals for Wales today (see 3pm) as a “mirage”. They posted these on social media.

Nigel Farage’s empty and uncosted promises are nothing more than a mirage.

The people of Port Talbot won’t be taken for fools.

The previous UK Conservative Government saved thousands of jobs at Port Talbot with a £500m package...

... to help the plant transition to an electric arc furnace, Reform is now sabotaging that plan and putting jobs at risk.

The Welsh Conservatives are the only party that offers a credible alternative to the failing Labour Government in Wales.

Helen Whately, the shadow work and pensions secretary, is responding to Bell.

She says Bell has been sent to announce a humiliating U-turn. The government should apologise, she says.

She asks if it is fair for a pensioner married to a millionaire to get the money, while two pensioners on £36,000 each would not get it.

And she asks if the money will be recovered from the estates of pensioners who have died after claiming the WFP but not having it recouped through the tax system.

She ends by saying there are reports that the new policy could save just £50m.

In response, Bell says the policy will save £450m.

And he says HMRC will not try to recoup payments from pensioners after they die.

As for apologising, he says the Tories have still not apologise for the Liz Truss mini-budget.

UPDATE: Whately said:

I feel for [Bell] sent here today by his bosses to complete what must be the most humiliating climbdown a government has ever faced in its first year in office …

Today, he has been sent to end that courageous last stand and, unless it’s coming next, he has been sent without the one thing that pensioners up and down the country deserve – an apology.

In the Commons Torsten Bell, the pensions minister, is making a statement about the new arrangements for winter fuel payments.

He says the money will be automatically recovered from pensioners earning more than £35,000 either through PAYE (the pay as you earn system) or self-assessment. He says pensioners will not be drawn into the tax system or into self-assessment just as a result of this.

And he says, to get the money, pensioners will not have to do anything, because it will be paid automatically.

During his Q&A in Wales earlier Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, rejected the suggestion that the spat with Zia Yusuf last week showed that he was incapable of leading a team. A journalist put it him that he kept falling out with colleagues. But Farage claimed this was not true. He replied:

I think the evidence actually is very different. You’ll find the teams that work with me – many of them have been with me for over a decade. One or two that I worked with I worked with for 25 years …

I am someone that maintains long-term friendships, and I’ll do that.

But if ever anybody talks behind my back, or if anybody betrays that trust, then I’ll never speak to them again. Quite simple, and they should expect the same level of trust back from me.

Farage also claimed that problem was caused by people thinking they would make a better leader.

Inevitably, what you get are people who think they’re bigger and better than me, the party will be better off run by somebody else than me. And that’s what leads to the public fallouts because they don’t like the result of it.

But Farage said the fallout with Zia Yusuf showed he could resolve disputes with colleagues

Was I annoyed with Zia on Thursday? I wasn’t exactly chuffed with what he had to say … But, you know what, people make mistakes. And he came back to me and honestly said, ‘Look, I’m really sorry.’ Have I forgiven him? It’s done, it’s behind us, and we move on.

Farage also defended Reform UK’s inability to say at this point who its candidate for first minister will be in next year’s Senedd elections. The party does not have a leader in Wales yet. Asked why not, he replied:

This party is evolving. It is a work in progress. We are building rapidly as we go. Figures will emerge over the course of the next few months, who, through merit, will no doubt be in a position where they can qualify to be our lead member. We are not at that point of evolution just yet.

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, says the US government and the Dutch parliament have both expressed concerns about sensitive cables running under the site of the proposed Chinese embassy at Royal Mint Court.

The Chinese have a record of cutting cables, he says.

Rerouting cables would cost millions, he says.

He asks why the government previously denied the presence of cables under the site.

And Chinese media claims the Chinese government has been told the application will be approved.

He says the embassy plan is becoming a “walk of shame” for the government.

In response, Pennycook repeats his point about not being able to comment on this application.

On cables specifically, he says he cannot comment on national security issues.

And he says the government does not “recognise” the account of this given in a Sunday Times report yesterday.

In its splash, the Sunday Times said President Trump is urging Keir Starmer to block the report on national security grounds.

In the Commons Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, is responding to the urgent question from Iain Duncan-Smith about the “the United States government’s national security concerns regarding the proposed Chinese embassy development at Royal Mint Court”.

He says the government respects the probity of the planning process. He says, because ministers have a role when applications are called in, he cannot comment in detail on any application.

But he says he will set out the process. This application will be decided by ministers, but the application is not yet with them.

An independent planning inspector looks at applications that come to ministers, and make indepedendent recommendations, he says.

He says an inquiry has already looked at this case.

He says the home and foreign secretaries made a joint submission to the inquiry.

Once the report from the inquiry is received, a planning minister will make a decision.

Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.

The Scottish government has complained that it still has little detail of how the substantial reversal of the winter fuel payment cut will affect its budgets, and asked for clarification.

Shirley-Anne Somerville, the Scottish social justice secretary, said:

I welcome any extension of eligibility by the UK government, but this is a U-turn the chancellor [Rachel Reeves] should have made a long time ago. But there is still no detail about how the chancellor intends to go about that. Unfortunately, it still sounds as if many pensioners will miss out.

We have once again not been consulted on the policy and its implications in Scotland and will scrutinise the proposals carefully when they are announced. I would therefore urge the UK government to ensure the Scottish government is fully apprised of the proposed changes as soon as possible.

Reeves’ decision only affects pensioners earning up to £35,000 in England and Wales. The payment has been devolved in Scotland for some time, but Scottish ministers had been slow to implement and award their first payments – despite its rhetoric about the UK government’s “betrayal” of pensioners.

It is unclear why Scottish ministers need to be consulted over a payment decision affecting England and Wales, about a policy which is devolved. The Scottish government also had a record Treasury grant this year, partly funded by cuts to this benefit - cash which enabled ministers in Edinburgh to restore the payment in full in Scotland.

However, the Treasury has not yet said how much money this change in England and Wales will generate for the Scottish and Northern Irish governments (devolved governments receive a proportional share of any increase in spending in England under the Barnett formula). That uplift will allow ministers in Edinburgh to spend more in politically advantageous policy areas.

UPDATE: The Scottish government will get about £120m extra from the UK government as a result of the winter fuel payments U-turn for England and Wales, sources have indicated.

Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, was speaking about winter fuel payments at his event in Port Talbot (see 12.28pm), but the main point of his speech was to call for the reindustralisation of south Wales. In comments that had been well trailed in advance, he said that he wanted to reopen mines and reopen the blast furnaces at the Port Talbot steelworks.

In his speech he said:

Our ambition is to reindustrialise Wales.

We are going to be using more steel over the next few years than we probably ever used as we increase military spending and as we attempt a house building programme in Wales, and even more so in England, of massive proportionsj just to catch up with the population explosion over the last 20 years. We are going to need a lot of steel.

Our belief is we should be producing our own steel. Our belief is, for what use coal still has, we should produce our own coal …

I’m not saying let’s open up all the pits. What I am saying is there’s coal, specific types of coal, for certain uses that we still need in this country, and we certainly will need for the blast furnaces here, that we should produce ourselves rather than importing.

But, during the Q&A, a BBC reporter put it to Farage that industry sources saying reopening the blast furnaces at Port Talbot would be impossible. Asked about this, Farage conceded that reopening a blast furnace would be very difficult. A new one might be needed, he said.

He replied:

Once a blast furnace has been closed down, to actually reopen that particular blast furnace is very, very difficult. Nothing’s impossible, but it might be difficult. It might be easier to build a new one.

Could a Welsh government, Welsh devolved government, do it on its own? It would need some help from national government too, which is why I phrased all of this this morning very, very carefully into saying, not ‘we will do this once we’re in control in Cardiff’, [but] ‘this will be our ambition, we’d need a Westminster government to approve this as well’. Who knows, that might be us in time. And we’d need to work with companies as well. But, as an ambition, it’s the right one.

And, on mining, asked if there was any evidence that Welsh people want their children to go down mines again, given so many miners wanted their sons not to have to do these dangerous jobs, Farage replied:

If you offer people well-paid jobs, you would be surprised, many will take them, even though we’d all accept that mining is dangerous.

As WalesOnline reports, Welsh Labour have dismissed this as fantasy politics. A Welsh Labour spokesperson said:

Nigel Farage has no plans for steel - just a camera crew. You can’t restart a blast furnace with a press conference.

Nigel Farage says that hopefully they mightthey’ll bring back mining. The people of Wales will see through the false hope and false promises of a public-school boy from England who does not understand them and does not understand Wales.

His answer is to bring back the mines. The only thing Nigel Farage is trying to mine is votes from communities that have already gone through tough times. Nigel Farage has today brought his fantasy politics and magic money tree to Port Talbot. He’s gambling with real people’s livelihoods.

The Resolution Foundation, a thinktank focusing on the interests of low and middle earners, says the new winter fuel payments (WFPs) policy is “only marginally progressive”. In a briefing note it says:

According to DWP caseload data, in 2023-24 around 11.6 million pensioners received WFPs at a cost of around £2.2bn. Last winter (2024-25), around 1.3 million pensioners received WFPs at a cost of around £300 million. Next winter (2025-26), under these plans, around 9 million pensioners will receive WFPs at a cost of around £1.6bn.

The new scheme is only marginally progressive, with 57% pensioners gaining from the new policy in the bottom half of the income distribution, and the remaining 43% in the top half.

In tax/benefit policy terms, “progressive” means benefiting poorer people more than richer people.

Alex Clegg, an economist at the thinktank, said:

The new scheme for means-testing winter fuel payments means that that the number of pensioners receiving support will rise from 1.3 million last winter to around 9 million this winter, and not far off the 11.6 million who received winter fuel payments two winters ago when they were universal.

But this U-turn doesn’t represent a return to the status quo. The new means-test will create new complexity in the tax system, including a cliff-edge for those with around £35,000 of income. The reported savings of £450m will be reduced further by the cost of increased pension credit take-up as a result of the original policy, and the cost of administering the new means-test.

The real question is why it is now a priority to pay winter fuel payments to over three quarters of pensioners, with almost half of the new beneficiaries in the richest half of the population, when previously it was judged that only one-in-ten needed support.

Nigel Farage has claimed credit for the government’s winter fuel payments U-turn. But the government has not resinsted the payments for everyone, which is what Reform UK was asking for.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the PM’s press secretary said there was a big difference between the two policies, because Reform UK’s was unfunded. She said:

We set out the policy detail now to ensure the change can be delivered ahead of winter and give pensioners certainty.

Everything this government does is fully funded.

Reform has floated tens of billions of pounds of unfunded tax cuts, they’ve suggested slashing government spending to 35% of GDP, which is equivalent to scrapping the entire NHS, defence, policing and criminal justice budgets combined.

Their fantasy economics would see the exact same consequence as working people suffered under Liz Truss and the Conservatives, and is why this government has totally rejected that approach and put fiscal responsibility at the forefront of every decision that we take.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has rejected calls (see 12.18pm) to apologise for removing winter fuel payments from most pensioners last winter.

Asked in an interview with ITV News if she would apologise for causing “unnecessary anxiety and hardship”, Reeves replied:

The irresponsible thing to have done last year was to allow the public finances to carry on on an unsustainable footing.

That would have resulted in interest rates going up, costing families and pensioners more in mortgages and rents.

I’m always going to put stability in our economy first.

Here is the clip.

At one point the Treasury was concerned that, using the tax system to claw back winter fuel payments from wealthy pensioners could lead to the government trying to recoup the money from the estates of pensioners who died over the winter.

But today Downing Street has said this will not happen. At the morning lobby briefing the PM’s spokesperson said:

HMRC will not ask for repayment from a deceased PAYE (pay as you earn) customer if the only money owed was from a winter fuel payment.

The Treasury says restoring the winter fuel payments for most pensioners will cost around £1.25bn in England and Wales. It says:

The costs will be accounted for at the budget and incorporated into the next OBR forecast. The chancellor will take decisions on funding in the round at that forecast to ensure the government’s non-negotiable fiscal rules are met. This will not lead to permanent additional borrowing.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says ‘no extra borrowing’ means ‘higher taxes, or welfare cuts’.

The corollary of “this will not lead to permanent additional borrowing” is that it will lead to permanent additional taxes (or just possibly permanent cuts to other bits of welfare).

In his speech in Port Talbot Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, accused the government of timing its winter fuel payments to overshadow his speech. And, like the Tories and the Liberal Democrats (see 12.18pm), he also claimed that he had forced the U-turn.

I kept on saying all but the very wealthiest pensioners should get the winter fuel allowance, particularly as we have the most expensive energy costs in the world directly as a result, of course, of the fanatical embrace by both Conservative and Labour governments of net zero.

To illustrate his point, Farage waved a copy of the Daily Express which splashed on Farage’s views on this.

Farage said there was “no doubt” in his mind that his campaigning “made the political weather on this one”.

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are both trying to take credit for the winter fuel payments U-turn by the government.

This is from Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader.

Keir Starmer has scrambled to clear up a mess of his own making. I repeatedly challenged him to reverse his callous decision to withdraw winter fuel payments, and every time Starmer arrogantly dismissed my criticisms.

This humiliating U-turn will come as scant comfort to the pensioners forced to choose between heating and eating last winter. The prime minister should now apologise for his terrible judgement.

And this is from Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader.

Finally the chancellor has listened to the Liberal Democrats and the tireless campaigners in realising how disastrous this policy was, but the misery it has caused cannot be overstated.

Countless pensioners were forced to choose between heating and eating all whilst the government buried its head in the sand for months on end, ignoring those who were really suffering.

We will now study the detail of this proposal closely to make sure those who need support actually get that support. The pain they went through this winter cannot be for nothing.

The Treasury has announced that the “vast majority” of pensioners will get their winter fuel payments back this winter. It has confirmed this in a news release issued at noon.

To be more accurate, all pensioners in England and Wales are getting the benefit back – but pensioners with an income of more than £35,000 will have the money clawed back through their tax return (unless they chose to opt out of gettting the payment in the first place.

The Scottish government and Northern Ireland executive will receive money from Whitehall to fund their own equivalent policies.

The Treasury says this means nine million pensioners in England and Wales will get the payments again. But this figure includes the 1.3 million people who received it this winter, because they were poor enough to qualify, and so it would be more accurate to say that about 7.5 million pensioners will gain.

In a news release it says:

Nine million pensioners to receive winter fuel payments this winter as all pensioners in England and Wales with an income of, or below, £35,000 a year will benefit from a winter fuel payment. This extends eligibility to the vast majority of pensioners, with around 9 million, or over three quarters, benefitting. This threshold is well above the income level of pensioners in poverty and is broadly in line with average earnings, balancing support for lower income pensioners with fairness to the taxpayer

This change will cost around £1.25 billion in England and Wales and see means-testing of the winter fuel payment save around £450 million, subject to certification by the Office for Budget Responsibility compared to the system of universal winter fuel payments. The costs will be accounted for at the budget and incorporated into the next OBR forecast. The chancellor will take decisions on funding in the round at that forecast to ensure the government’s non-negotiable fiscal rules are met. This will not lead to permanent additional borrowing.

No pensioner will need to take any action as they will automatically receive the payment this winter, and for those with incomes above the threshold it will be automatically recovered via HMRC. The payment of £200 per household, or £300 per household where there is someone over 80, will be made automatically this winter. Over 12 million pensioners across the United Kingdom will also benefit from the triple lock, with their state pension set to increase by up to £1,900 this parliament.

Here is Pippa Crerar’s story about the news.

More than £1bn has now been paid out to post office operators who were victims of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, the government has announced.

In a news release the Department for Business and Trade said:

More than £1bn has been paid out to over 7,300 postmasters affected by the Horizon IT scandal – one of the biggest miscarriages of justice of our time.

This figure is a total across the Horizon-related redress schemes, with data published by the government today.

This milestone marks the government’s ongoing commitment to deliver redress and justice to postmasters as swiftly as possible.

Details of the payments are here. This chart shows how much has been paid through the various compensation schemes: the Horizon Shortfall Scheme (HSS), the Overturned Convictions (OC) scheme, the Group Litigation Order (GLO) scheme and the Horizon Convictions Redress Scheme (HCRS).

Zia Yusuf, the former Reform UK chair, has defended one of the party’s MPs against allegations that a mug she was photographed holding during her byelection campaign was Islamphobic.

As LBC revealed last week, Sarah Pochin posed for a picture when she was campaigning holding a mug with a picture of Keir Starmer wearing a hijab with the caption “Two-Teir Keir”. Campaigners have described this as Islamphobic.

Last week Pochin asked Starmer at PMQs if he would ban the burqa. Yusuf, who is Muslim, posed a message on X describing that as a “dumb” question, because banning the burqa is not party policy, and a few hours later he resigned, saying he had concluded that he now longer believed “working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time”.

On Saturday Yusuf announced that he had made a mistake, that he had reconciled with Nigel Farage and that he was returning to a party role – although not as chair.

In his first broadcast interview this morning, Nick Robinson, the presenter, asked Yusuf about claims that his resignation was partly motivated by his concern about the dominance of anti-Islam thinking in the party. Yusuf brushed aside these suggestions.

He said that he resigned because he was exhausted and that, although he described Pochin’s question as “dumb”, that was a mistake and that Pochin was a “brilliant” MP. The word just referred to the question, not her, he stressed.

Asked if he was comfortable about the picture of her holding the anti-Stamer mug, he replied:

I think Sarah is an incredible MP question …

Look, what I will say is, if we’re going to talk about Islam in the UK, to the degree that there is resentment building up about some of these issues, it is in no small part because it is my view that certain communities in this country are subject to two-tier policing.

Asked again if he was comfortable with Pochin using a picture of a Muslim head covering to attack Starmer, Yusuf said he was comfortable with this because he knows Pochin well. She was laughing in the picture, he said.

Asked if it suggested “a pretty unpleasant” attitude to Muslims, Yusuf said he did not accept that. He said that Pochin had been a magistrate for two decades, that he know who she was and “what’s in her heart”, and that some of the things said about the picture were “complete mischaracterisations”.

Yusuf also said that, although he was “uneasy” about the idea of banning the burqa, he thought that, if he were an MP he “probably would be in favour” of the idea.

Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, is unhappy about what is on offer to the capital in the spending review, my colleague Jessica Elgot reports. She has posted these on Bluesky.

Some anger over at City Hall over the spending review- London expected to miss out on some key asks

DLR extension to Thamesmead, Bakerloo Line extension Mayoral powers to introduce a touristlev Extra funding for Met Police

Source says none of these are in SR and mayor thinks this is unacceptable

There is an argument to be made of course that London has had billions of extra investment over past decades but the policing settlement will be a big issue. And very little proper argument against a tourist levy (though could be revisited at Budget)

Source “it will simply not be possible to achieve national growth ambitions without the right investment and growth in our capital. We must not return to the damaging, anti-London approach of the last government.”

The police are not the only group engaged in last-minute lobbying ahead of the spending review. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is today urging the government to rule out cuts to social care. He says he wants the government to fund a Lib Dem proposals for all families with caring needs to be assigned a named carer and social worker. In a statement he says:

Any further cuts to social care at the spending review would be devastating for the countless people in desperate need of care. Years of Conservative neglect broke the system, with massive consequences for our health service, but now the Labour government is moving at a snail’s pace in addressing this crisis.

Without fixing social care, we cannot fix the NHS so it beggars belief that ministers seem willing to let the rot continue. We simply cannot wait more than a decade for reforms to be put in place, whilst the number of people suffering grows.

The government needs to get serious and that starts by completing their [social care] review by the end of the year with the reforms to follow as quickly as possible alongside introducing a named carer for each family who needs support.

Keir Starmer has been speaking at a London Tech Week event this morning, and he has announced that by next spring the government will roll out a new AI tool for councils allowing them to digitise planning documents within minutes. The government says this tool, developed using Google DeepMind’s Gemini model, will free up thousands of hours of officers’ time.

In a news release, Downing Street explains:

For the first time, this cutting-edge technology will help councils convert decades-old, handwritten planning documents and maps into data in minutes – and will power new types of planning software to slash the 250,000 estimated hours spent by planning officers each year manually checking these documents. This will dramatically reduce delays that have long plagued the system.

Around 350,000 planning applications are submitted a year in England, yet the system remains heavily reliant on paper documents – some hundreds of pages long. Once submitted, each of these documents needs to be manually validated and approved by a planning officer.

In test trials across Hillingdon, Nuneaton & Bedworth, and Exeter councils, Extract digitised planning records, including maps, in just three minutes each – compared to the 1–2 hours it typically takes manually. This means Extract could process around 100 planning records a day – significantly speeding up the process.

This represents a step-change in productivity, freeing up thousands of hours for planning officers to focus on decision-making to speed up housebuilding. It will also accelerate the delivery of much-needed housing, improve reliability in the planning process and reduce costs and save time for councils and developers.

Extract is expected to be made available to all councils by spring 2026. The government’s ambition is to fully digitise the planning system - making it faster, more transparent, and easier to navigate for working people, councils, businesses and developers.

For Starmer, this is familiar territory. As director of public prosecutions, one of his achivements he talks about most was digitalising court records.

Starmer also confirmed a £187m programme to extend AI teaching in schools.

Good morning. In theory spending review negotiations can go up to the wire, with the final talks to resolve sticking points taking place late at night, only hours before the decisions, and documents, are presented to MPs. In practice, it does not really happen like that now, last-minute haggling is no longer routine, and, with two days to go before the spending review that will settle government spending until 2029, only one cabinet minister has not yet settled.

Here are the key developments this morning on the issue that will dominate the week.

• Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, settled with the Treasury late last night. The news was broken by Arj Singh from the i, who reports:

The i Paper understands that Rayner and Reeves agreed a deal just after 7.30pm after marathon talks on Sunday.

But Home Office and Treasury sources were tight lipped on Sunday, in an indication that negotiations over police funding are also going to the wire.

• That means Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is the only minister yet to agree a spending settlement with the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. In the Times Chris Smyth says police budgets are expected to rise by more than inflation, but other parts of the Home Office budget may face cuts. He reports:

It is understood that Reeves has insisted that policing budgets will rise in each year of the spending review, which sets funding up to 2028-29. However, it remains unclear if the boost will match the more than £1 billion extra officers say is needed to cover existing shortfalls.

Cooper is also expected to have to find deeper cuts elsewhere to boost police budgets. The Border Force has warned of longer queues at airports as it faces cuts to its £1.2 billion budget, saying there would be a “threat to national security” if it lost frontline staff.

• Two police unions have launched a last-minute bid for extra money. In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Nick Smart, president of the Police Superintendents’s Association, and Tiff Lynch, acting chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, say:

Police are being asked to do more with less – again – as pressure mounts on already overstretched budgets.

Why? Policing faces a £1.2 billion shortfall. This is before it is asked to deliver the ambitious pledges of the new government.

Police forces across the country are being forced to shed officers and staff to deliver savings.

These are not administrative cuts. They go to the core of policing’s ability to deliver a quality service: fewer officers on the beat, longer wait times for victims, and less available officers when a crisis hits.

As a practical lobbying exercise, this is fairly pointless, because it comes too late, but the two unions are making their case to the public.

• Chris Bryant, the culture minister, has said that the spending review will mark “an end to austerity”. He told Times Radio:

We know from running the government that spending money of itself isn’t an achievement. Spending money and getting results is an achievement and that’s why we are saying now with this spending review on Wednesday it’s an end to austerity …

That period of austerity where I think previous governments simply cut all public service budgets just because they believed that was what you had to do is over.

But he also said some budgets would be “stretched”. He said health and defence spending would rise, but added:

There are going to be other parts of the budget that are going to be much more stretched and be difficult.

Ministers have been promising the end of austerity at least since Theresa May was in office. Labour defends using this phrase on the grounds that overall government spending is going up in real terms. But there is no agreed definition of “austerity” and, if spending is falling in certain areas, that may feel like austerity, and so using the term does not contribute a lot to public debate. What it does mean, though, is that governments saying they are ending austerity definitely don’t want to be associated with George Osborne.

Here is our overnight story about the spending review.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Keir Starmer gives a speech at a London Tech Week event.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Noon: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, gives a speech at Port Talbot in south Wales.

2.30pm: Angela Rayner, the deputy PM and housing secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

Also, Starmer is meeting Mark Rutte, the Nato general secretary, in Downing Street today.

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