Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary who is now Reform UK’s education and equalities spokesperson, has written to the Football Association urging it to abandon its diversity strategy. In an open letter, she claims that white working class boys are being disadvantaged because the FA has set a target for 25% of coaching staff to be black, Asian or from a minority background by 2028. She says this policy is “fundamentally flawed” and “inherently racist”.

She says:

The @FA Football Association wants to mandate that 1 in 4 football coaches come from a Black, Asian or other minority background.

As the saying in football goes, this is utter woke nonsense. The game’s gone.

Fans don’t care what the coach looks like. They just want the best person for the job, based on merit alone. That’s what gets results.

Not tokenism.

I’ve written to the FA urging a rethink. I’m happy to help them draw up a fairer policy.

Let’s kick racism out of football, including anti-white racism.

Chris Osuh is a community affairs correspondent for the Guardian.

The Professional Standards Authority (PSA) has welcomed plans that promise to make it easier to strike off doctors for racist and antisemitic behaviour.

Ministers say there have been too many recent examples of doctors using racist and antisemitic language, particularly on social media, without swift action.

The Department of Health and Social Care has now published a consultation on a draft order which would reform how the General Medical Council (GMC) regulates doctors, anaesthesia associates and physician associates across the UK.

The overhaul would give Professional Standards Authority, the body that oversees all health regulators, greater powers to scrutinise and challenge decisions.

Responding to the launch of the consultation on reforming the GMC’s legislative framework, Alan Clamp, PSA chief executive said:

We are pleased to see the launch of this consultation which is a significant step towards modernising the regulatory framework for the General Medical Council, with other healthcare professional regulators due to follow.

We support the direction of travel with these reforms which, by giving the regulators greater autonomy, can allow them to undertake their regulatory duties more effectively and efficiently.

Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.

Reform UK has confirmed that that it has suspended Chris Parry as its Hampshire mayoral candidate after he described members of a Jewish neighbourhood watch group as “cosplayers” and likened them to “Islamists on horseback”. (See 1.53pm.)

A Reform UK spokesperson said: “Chris Parry has been suspended by Reform UK pending investigation.” His candidacy has also been suspended by the party.

When contacted by the Guardian earlier after Hampshire Live quoted a Reform UK spokesman as saying he was no longer the party’s candidate, Parry said that he was “mid-Atlantic.”

The Liberal Democrats home affairs spokesperson Max Wilkinson had called on Farage earlier in the day to drop Parry. He later said : “This is a good start, but Farage has some way to go. There are serious questions to answer as to how this candidate got approved in the first place.”

Calvin Bailey, a Labour MP who wrote to Nigel Farage about previous comments attributed to Parry, including calling female MPs “harpies”, said: “It should not take repeated incidents for basic standards of decency to be upheld.”

Chris Bryant, the trade minister, has said that “complexities” in the paperwork explain why the government has not yet been able to publish the documents it has relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor being appointed a trade envoy.

A month ago the Commons approved without a division a Lib Dem humble address motion saying all papers relating to the then prince’s appointment as trade envoy in 2001 should be publishing, including documents relating to vetting and to his suitability.

Today, in a written ministerial statement, Bryant said that finding all the files was taking time. He said:

Mr Mountbatten‑Windsor took up his role as special representative for trade and investment in October 2001. At that time, government work on exports and investment was led by British Trade International, reporting jointly to the Department for Trade and Industry and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The records from this period are largely paper‑based. Subsequent machinery‑of‑government changes — including the formation of UK Trade & Investment in 2003, its merger into the Department for International Trade in 2016, and the creation of the Department for Business and Trade in 2023 — mean that relevant records span multiple legacy bodies and formats. We are working through these complexities in order to comply with the humble address.

I understand and share colleagues’ desire for relevant information to be provided to parliament as quickly as possible. I will continue to keep the house updated on progress.

In response, Lisa Smart, the Lib Dem Cabinet Office spokesperson, said:

The government’s refusal to come clean on what work they’re doing to compile the Andrew files is fooling no one. I’m worried ministers are rolling the pitch for a dog-ate-my-homework excuse for delivering far less than they promised.

Ruth Curtice, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, a thinktank focusing on the cost of living and the needs of low-income families, has welcomed the chancellor’s declaration that any energy support package will be targeted. She said:

The chancellor is right to say that the government will look to target support with energy bills at families that need it the most, rather than repeat the blank cheque approach of the last crisis. It’s essential we avoid schemes with uncapped costs that can lead to a doom loop of higher interest rates and higher borrowing.

The government should use the coming months to develop the ability to target both on income and energy need, so that support is ready for when temperatures start to drop.

The thinktank recently published a paper suggesting the best option for a support package would be a social tariff. It said that, for £3.75bn, the government could pay for a 21% discount for electricity and gas unit prices to those with households with gross incomes below £38,000. That would help 42% of households.

This chart from the RF report shows how this might work. The RF says a social tariff approach would be fairer than cutting costs for all users (blue line in the chart, ‘policy costs”) because it would be targeted, and that it would also be fairer to poorer people with high energy costs unlike increasing the warm homes discount (purple line in the chart) or increasing univeral credit (red line in the chart).

A Labour-run council has been warned its claim to have frozen council tax for four years in a row has “the potential to mislead” taxpayers, by the nation’s statistics authority, the Press Association reports. PA says:

The UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) has written to Wandsworth council about the claim, made in promotional materials released over the last few months.

In videos, leaflets and press releases, the Labour-run south London council said it is freezing council tax for the fourth consecutive year.

But in a letter to the council, the UKSA’s interim chairwoman Penny Young warned that the claim did not meet with the Standard For The Public Use of Statistics, Data And Wider Analysis, which is part of a wider code of practice maintained by the authority.

Since Labour won power in the London borough in 2022, Wandsworth has frozen council tax rates for general services.

But in the latest financial year it has increased a precept to fund social care by 2%, while the Greater London Authority (GLA) has also increased tax intake in the borough.

Two senior Conservative politicians, Lord Udny-Lister and Paul Beresford, the former MP for Mole Valley, argued in a letter to the UKSA that the borough could not make the claim to have frozen tax for four years running because of these tax increases.

Young said in her letter: “We find it is likely that people would understand the term ‘frozen’ to relate to an increase in their total council tax bill.

“While some of Wandsworth council’s communications do refer to ‘the main element’ of council tax being frozen, they are unclear that residents’ council tax bills will still rise by a significant amount due to other local authority charges.”

Plaid Cymru has warned that, even if Rachel Reeves makes a future energy support scheme targeted to help the poor, Wales could still lose out because of the nature of its housing stock. It says 26% of Welsh homes were built before 1919 – which is higher than the equivalent figures for England, Scotland and Wales.

In a response to the chancellor’s statement earlier, Liz Saville Roberts, the Plaid leader at Westminster, said:

Any targeted scheme designed around UK averages risks missing the reality of Welsh households, where incomes are lower, homes are older, and energy efficiency is poorer. If support is restricted without recognising Wales’ specific circumstances, households will lose out.

Too many UK schemes are designed with the gas grid in mind, yet large parts of rural Wales rely on oil or alternative fuels. Without proper recognition of this, many families will be overlooked entirely. The support already announced for off-grid homes will simply not meet the level of need.

You cannot design a fair system without accounting for the fact that many Welsh homes are harder and more expensive to heat. A one-size-fits-all approach will not deliver fairness.

It is also worth noting that residents in North Wales and Mersey are subject to the highest standing charges across the entire UK. My constituents [in Dwyfor Meirionnydd] are having to pay almost £100 more a year than those living in London so I would urge the chancellor, once again, to look at and address unfair standing charges. People shouldn’t be paying more for their energy bills simply because of where they live.

Saville Roberts also called for a four-nations summit to agree a policy on energy support, so that conditions in all four nations of the UK are taken into account.

Rachel Reeves has asked officials to examine whether some import tariffs could be cut to reduce the cost of food.

In her statement to MPs, Reeves listed a series of measures already taken by the government to help people with the cost of living, including raising the national living wage and the state pension, and freezing prescription charges, train fares and fuel duty. She said the government’s decision to renegotiate a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement with the EU on agriproducts regulations could also lower food costs.

In this context, she also said she had asked officials to consider tariffs on some food imports could be cut.

In a news release, the Treasury says:

Targeted cuts to agri-food tariffs will be explored to help bring down food prices, focusing on the areas where consumers would benefit most.

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.

Some fascinating opinion research about what Scottish voters think of the SNP government is out today. It’s from More in Common and it’s rare to get such granular polling in Scotland and really useful ahead of the Scottish parliament elections in May.

I’m most struck by the range of issues that have landed badly with the public, as well as how popular policies haven’t the public awareness you’d expect.

Perhaps inevitably, the Police Scotland investigation into the SNP – which will see former chief exec Peter Murrell in court charged with embezzlement later this spring - is the single most widely-heard-of incident: 81% of Scottish people say they have heard a great deal or a bit about it and, by a margin of 57% to 20%, they say it reflects badly on the Scottish government.

Seven in ten Scots have heard about Scotland having the highest rate of drug deaths in Europe, with 70% saying this reflects badly on the government.

I’m also interested that “iPad-gate” - the controversy over a £11,000 roaming data bill on former health secretary Michael Matheson’s iPad that was later linked to family use - stands out as a key scandal, combining high awareness (63%) with a strongly negative public reaction: 68% of Scots say it reflects negatively.

Meanwhile, popular policies seem to have failed to cut through to the public - free personal and nursing care is the best-rated item on the list, with 70% saying it reflects well on the government, but only 41% say they have heard a great deal or a bit about it.

Similarly, free NHS dental care for under-26s and rent reforms are popular but not widely known.

The SNP’s more progressive income tax policy, which sees higher earners pay more than elsewhere in the UK, is relatively well-known, but divides public opinion. Around 59% have heard about the new advanced rate between £75,000 and £125,000, but Scots are only narrowly more likely to say it reflects well on the government than badly (34% to 24%).

Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, has dismissed Rachel Reeves’s Commons statement about the government’s response to energy prices rises as “unbelievably weak”.

In a statement he said:

This is an unbelievably weak response from the chancellor to the enormous bill hikes facing households in the UK. Monitoring the situation? Considering new powers? Reeves’s lukewarm words show that she and her government simply do not understand the scale of the cost of living crisis about to hit this country.

We need a guarantee that energy bills will not rise past June, funded by a strengthened windfall tax and higher taxes on extreme wealth. And the government should follow the example set by Spain in taking immediate action to reduce the burden on households by freezing rents.

Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.

Reform UK has reportedly dropped Chris Parry as its Hampshire mayoral candidate after his comments describing a volunteer group providing security to the Jewish community as “cosplayers”. (See 10.50am.)

A Reform UK spokesperson told the Hampshire Chronicle: “He has been suspended pending an investigation and is no longer our mayoral candidate.”

Nigel Farage had already expended political capital on Parry, a former rear admiral, after he had initially refused to apologise last year for saying London-born David Lammy should “go home” to the Carribbean.

However, the party has now been tipped over the edge after parry made comments on x about Shomrim, a respected group which helps to protect the orthodox Jewish community and others, in the wake of an arson attack on a Jewish ambulance charity in London

Jeremy Hunt, who was chancellor when the Rishi Sunak energy support package was implemented, urged Reeves to be less partisan in her comments. He said MPs were more likely to support her if he adopted a more neutral tone.

But he he also said he supported her decision to favour a targeted approach over a universal approach.

He asked for confirmation that any plan would be fully funded, and not paid for out of more borrowing.

In response, Reeves did pay a compliment to her predecessor.

She said that, when Hunt became chancellor, he had to adopt a universal energy support package because the work had not been done to make a targeted scheme an option. She went on:

So the choice was a binary choice between blanket support or no support.

And the right honourable gentleman took the right approach then in ensuring that people’s energy bills didn’t go through the roof.

But a targeted approach would be more appropriate because the top third of families, under the previous approach, got more than a third of the benefit. That’s not right. It’s not sensible. And all it does is drive up inflation, interest rates and taxes in the future.

Meg Hillier, the Labour chair of the Treasury committee, asked Reeves if the government had the data it needed to operate a successful targeted energy support programme.

Reeves said the last government had to run a universal support programme because they “hadn’t done the contingency planning”.

So they, in the end, had a choice about doing nothing or providing blanket support. And it was that blanket support that cost £78bn.

What we have been doing is working with the Department for Work and Pensions, with local government and others to ensure that we will be able to target support at those who need it most.

Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, responded for the Tories. He claimed the economy was “in tatters” under Reeves. He criticised Labour for not allowing more drilling in the North Sea. And he said that when Rishi Sunak was PM, Keir Starmer was calling for the govenrment’s energy support package to be universal. There had been “no consistency” from Labour, he claimed.

UPDATE: Stride said:

Nothing exemplifies this government’s economic folly more than its approach to oil and gas. The utterly misguided net zero obsessions of the energy secretary have led to the absurdity of reduced extraction, whilst we see jobs destroyed, tax revenues foregone, and energy security smashed …

Less oil and gas extraction means greater dependency and less security. This road leads to ruin …

On energy, on the cost of living, on jobs, on growth, on public finances, on every measure that matters, this chancellor has left us weak, weak, weak. And in the face of this energy shock, there are millions who are about to suffer as a result.

Reeves ended her speech covering direct support for people affect by energy price rises.

Referring to action already taken, she said:

We don’t yet know what the full impact of this conflict will be. So we must be agile in responding appropriately at each moment.

We extended the five fuel duty cuts and we have pushed out the cheaper fuel finder, empowering people to avoid rip off prices and chasing down the last few filling stations to reach 100% compliance.

And when wholesale kerosene prices more than doubled overnight, we stepped in with £53m of support to those who needed it most within a matter of days, and from next week households will benefit from £150 off of their energy bills thanks to the action that I took in my budget, with a price cap giving households certainty on their bills until July.

She criticised the household support package introduced when the last Conservative government was in power (originally by Liz Truss, although it was subsequently watered down when Rishi Sunak was PM). It was a universal support scheme, and Reeves said it meant “households in the top income decile received an average of £1,350 of direct energy bill support”.

That added to high levels of national debt, Reeves said.

Implying she would take a different approaching, targeting help on the poorest, she said:

I can confirm to the house that contingency planning is taking place for every eventuality so that we can keep costs down for everyone and provide support for those who need it most, acting within our ironclad fiscal rules to keep inflation and interest rates as low as possible.

Reeves says helping people with the cost of living is a priority, and she lists various measures, already implemented to help achieve this.

And she says she is giving the Competition and Markets Authority new powers to deal with price gouging.

Today I can announce that we are going further to make sure that the Competition and Markets Authority have the powers that they need that were denied to them by the previous government to detect and to crack down on price gouging.

She says the government will bring in “a new anti-profiteering framework” and is conssering giving time-limited targeted powers to the CMA and other regulators.

She goes on:

This government will not tolerate any company exploiting this crisis.

Reeves says the government is working on energy security.

The last governments failure to invest in energy was a failure to protect our country. But through determined action, this government is taking control of our own energy supply and investing in renewables, lifting the ban on onshore wind and streamlining grid connections.

[The government is] running the biggest offshore wind auction in European history last year and bringing the next renewable auction forward to this July, and driving forward negotiation on the UK’s participation in the EU internal energy electricity market.

She says she can announce that the government will legislate in the next session to implement the recommendations of the Fingleton review, which will allow a new generation of nuclear power stations to be rolled out.

She also says the government will change planning rules to allow more power infrastructure to be built. There will be indemnities for critical energy security projects.

This is how the Treasury explained this in a briefing.

Currently, when planning consent for a major project is legally challenged, construction can be forced to stall - meaning vital infrastructure is held up by the courts even where consent has been granted. The proposed indemnities would keep priority projects moving in those circumstances, protecting energy security and keeping the path to lower bills on track.

Before the statement starts, Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, says he does not normally allow government statements on opposition days (days when the time is allocated to the opposition). He says he will not run this for long.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, starts by saying the economic impact of the Iran war is uncertain. She says the Bank of England expects inflation to be between 3% and 3.5% for the next few quarters.

The Liberal Democrat local elections campaign launch is running late. Ed Davey, the leader, has been posing for photographs. But he is now giving his speech.

He starts by saying Kemi Badenoch once dismissed the Lib Dems as the sort of people who fix the church roof. She meant it as a sneer, but Davey says he embraces this description.

Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.

Nigel Farage should sack a Reform UK mayoral candidate who described a Jewish community security group as ‘cosplayers’ and likened them to “Islamists on horseback,” the Liberal Democrats have said.

Chris Parry, who remains Reform’s mayoral candidate for Hampshire despite a previous controversy in which he said David Lammy should “go home” to the Caribbean, made the comments yesterday about Shomrim, a group of volunteers who safeguard communities including Orthodox Jewish families.

Parry, a retired rear admiral, also retweeted a post on X by Catherine Blaiklock, a co-founder of the Brexit party, hours after news of the attack on a Jewish charity ambulance service in north London emerged, in which she asked: “Can Christian’s [sic] in Britain set up their own police and patrol certain neighbourhoods?”

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesperson Max Wilkinson said the comments, some of which were later deleted, were ‘deeply insensitive’ about Jewish community. He went on:

Nigel Farage should act now to drop Chris Parry as Reform’s Hampshire mayoral candidate. These remarks were deeply insensitive, insulting and not befitting of someone who wants to hold public office.

At a time when we are all thinking of the Jewish community after such a disturbing attack, these comments will compound the pain so many people are already feeling.

The tobacco and vapes bill, the legislation that will ensure that anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 will never be allowed to legally by cigarettes, is due to finish its passage through parliament soon. MPs voted down anti-government Lords amendments to the bill last night and, when peers pass the final version of the bill, it will become law. It is essentially cross-party legislation, because the original version of the bill was proposed by Rishi Sunak when he was PM. Only 47 MPs voted against the Labour version when it had its second reading in November 24 – 35 Tories, 7 Lib Dems and 4 Reform UK MPs.

But Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, says that if he wins the election, he will get rid of it. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, he claims it will never work.

Ask yourself this. How is the ban meant to work? Ten years from now, a 27-year-old will not be legally able to buy cigarettes, but a 28-year-old will be able to. A decade later 37-year-olds will not be deemed old enough to smoke, but 38-year-olds will be free to do so. And so forth.

The onus will be on the poor shopkeeper to identify those old enough to make a legal purchase. If he fails to carry out his duty as some kind of health policeman, he will be fined £200. How will he ensure that his customers are entitled to make a purchase?

He also says he objects to it in principle.

Britain was once held to be a beacon of freedom in the world. Now, as I observed in the Commons, the puritanical spirit of Oliver Cromwell again stalks the land. Our bossy, ruling elite’s default response to something is moving to ban it.

People who speak out against the woke orthodoxy infecting public and now private institutions can expect to have their collars felt. Minority pursuits, such as trail hunting, will be consigned to the history books and anyone who seems to be having fun in a way not approved of by the high priests of the progressive cathedral turns into a target.

In his article, Farage quotes polling commissioned by the the Freedom Association which found that, “of those expressing a view, a majority thought that the ban was ‘unworkable’”. But other polling suggests there is strong public support for the measure.

In an article for the Observer at the weekend Sam Freedman argued that Reform UK’s support has been dropping in recent months because “its policy agenda is increasingly tailored to the true believers rather than the voters it really needs”. This latest announcement could turn out to be another example of this.

Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, has criticised Labour’s decision not to allow Andy Burnham to stand as the candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection. In a long interview with the House magazine, she said:

I think it is right that members are allowed to make their own choices about who they want to be their candidates in elections – I’ve always thought that right. And while I respect the views of colleagues on the national executive committee, had I been sitting in that seat – is that what you’re asking me, what I would have voted? – yeah, I would have voted to allow him to stand, as Lucy [Powell] did.

Nandy said she understood the NEC’s argument that he should not be allowed to stand as a candidate because he is mayor of Greater Manchester and should serve out his time in office. But, she implied, respecting internal Labour democracy was more important.

[Labour members] deserve to be in the driving seat of their own lives, and it offends me when people are not, and I think that goes for our members as much as everybody else.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, will present his party as an opponent of President Trump’s “nasty” politics when he launches his local elections campaign this morning.

In extracts from his speech released overnight, he attacks Reform UK in particular for being keen to copy Trump.

He says:

Some politicians would rather divide our communities than fix them. They’d rather point the finger of blame than get their hands dirty. They want to import Donald Trump’s nasty style of politics over here.

That’s not who we are. We’re different. We don’t do division. We do potholes and police officers, doctors’ appointments and cleaning up dirty rivers. We do the hard work that actually makes people’s lives better.

The Liberal Democrats will change our politics so we can fix the country we love. Every vote for the Liberal Democrats in May is a vote for a strong local champion who will bring our communities together and get the job done.

In a briefing note, the Lib Dems say:

Reform-led councils elected last year have mimicked the White House in dodging media scrutiny, with an unprecedented ban on local journalists in Nottingham. In Durham, they have scrapped renewables projects that would’ve saved taxpayers tens of thousands. Across the country, their Musk inspired Doge projects have failed to find savings, leading to Reform councils raising council tax despite promising to cut it.

In his Times Radio interview Michael Shanks, the energy minister, confirmed that the government is more interested in a targeted energy bill support package (targeting those most in need) than a universal one (targeting everyone). (See 8.56am.) This would be “the most efficient use of public money”, he said.

He said:

Genuinely we are looking at every option. Clearly part of that is, is there a way to target support at people who need it most? I think most people would recognise that as the most efficient use of public money but we also want to make sure that we’re not missing people …

But, in honesty, we’re three weeks into this conflict, although people are really worried there’s no certainty of how this is going to end or when and so we are looking really carefully at what that longer term support needs to be.

The UK government has dismissed a warning from an energy trade body that failing to produce more homegrown North Sea oil and gas will leave the UK increasingly reliant on imports at a time of rising global instability, Jillian Ambrose reports.

Good morning. At lunchtime Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, will give a statement to MPs that will cover what the government is doing, and (more tentatively) might do, in response to the soaring global energy prices caused by the Iran war. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, also creating a global energy shortage, the Conservative government ended up spending £40bn supporting families and firms with energy bills over the following winter. Reeves’s problem is that she has not got £40bn spare. With spring upon us, and people starting to turn down their central heating, the issue may not seem particularly pressing in many households (although heating oil and petrol prices are already soaring.) But, by the end of this year, this could be the sort of colossal economic crisis that gets remembered for half a century.

As Chris Mason explains in a good preview, Reeves is expected to cover three points. She is expected to confirm that the government wants to give the Competition and Markets Authority new powers to deal with any potention profiteering by oil companies. She will confirm that the government wants to go “further and faster to secure the next generation of nuclear power and to reclaim Britain’s place as a leading nuclear nation” (as the Treasury puts it in its overnight preview).

And she is also set to set out some ideas about how the government might help households with energy bills if it thinks this is needed when the current energy price cap runs out at the end of June. What she won’t do is unveil a plan; it is too early for that. But Mason says she will “talk about the principles that will drive any further support to families if energy bills spiral in the coming months”, and she is expected to endorse the hints being dropped by Keir Starmer yesterday about any support package being targeted, not universal.

Michael Shanks, an energy minister, has been on the airwaves this morning taking questions ahead of Reeves’s statement, and he has stressed that there is no need for drivers to worry about a fuel shortage. He told Times Radio:

[Drivers] should do everything as absolutely normal because there is no shortage of fuel anywhere in the country at the moment. We monitor this every single day, I look at the numbers personally. There’s no issue at all with that …

People should go about their business as normal. That’s what the RAC and the AA have said. It’s really important people do that. There’s no shortage of fuel and everything is working as normal.

Asked if people should drive more slowly to conserve energy, Shanks replied:

Look genuinely, people shouldn’t change their behaviour or their habits in the slightest.

Ministers do believe there is no fuel shortage. But they are also saying this because they don’t want to say anything that might trigger panic buying.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Keir Starmer chairs cabinet.

9.30am: Executives from X, Meta, TikTok and Google give evidence to the Commons science committee about misinformation on social media.

9.45am: Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, launches his party’s local elections campaign in West Surrey.

Morning: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit meeting members of the Jewish community in Stamford Hill in north London.

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

Noon: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

After 12.30pm: Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, makes a statement to MPs about the economic response to the Iran war.

Afternoon: MPs debate a Tory opposition day debate calling for the windfall tax on energy companies to be abolished, and for the ban on new oil and gas licences for the North Sea to be lifted.

2.30pm: Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, and Jenny Chapman, the development minister, give evidence to the Commons international development committee.

Afternoon: Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is on a visit in Leeds where he is due to speak to the media.

And at some point today the business department is publishing a written ministerial statement giving an update on the goverment’s commitment to publish documents about how Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was appointed a trade envoy.

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