Downing Street has now released the new material.Here is the letter from Rachel Reeves to the PM explaining what happened.She says the letting agency had told the family that they would sort out the licence, and failed to do so.But she accepts that it should have been her responsibility to check that this had happened.The lettings agency that rented out Rachel Reeves’s family home has taken responsibility for the failure to apply for a council licence and apologised for the error, quashing speculation about the chancellor’s position.

The Conservative MP Katie Lam spoke “imprecisely” in stating the party would deport large numbers of legally settled families from the UK, Kemi Badenoch said, adding she had no plans to make tougher immigration rules retrospective.Ministers are planning to speed up public appointments to bodies such as Ofcom, the Environment Agency and BBC by allowing more of the hiring process to be delegated to senior officials.For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.This is from the former Tory MP Miriam Cates, criticising the party for calling for Rachel Reeves’s resignation over her rental licence error.If most Brits seriously think that inadvertently failing to obtain an obscure housing rental licence makes someone unfit to serve as Chancellor, then quite frankly we richly deserve to be governed by uninspiring technocrats.

The former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has posted a message on social media saying he agrees.In the last parliament Cates co-chaired the New Conservatives group with Danny Kruger, who has defected to Reform UK.Reform UK hasn’t been calling for Reeves’s resignation today.And, in general, the Reform leader Nigel Farage is reluctant to call for ministerial resignations over misconduct allegations – perhaps in part because he is regularly criticised on standards grounds himself.The Conservatives started the day calling for Rachel Reeves’s resignation over the rental licence error.

(See 8.42am.) In the light of the apology from the letting agency (see 5.35pm), most reasonable observers will conclude that the blame lies largely, or wholly, elsewhere.But CCHQ is in less forgiving mood.

It has just issued this statement from a Tory spokesperson.Last night Rachel Reeves said “she had not been made aware of the licensing requirement”.Today, we find out that Reeves was alerted to the need for a licence in writing by the estate agents.Having been caught out, the chancellor is now trying to make the estate agents take the blame, but Reeves never followed up with them to ensure that the licence had been applied for, or checked if the licence had been granted.Regardless, under the law, Reeves and her husband are responsible for ensuring the licence is granted.

With more information coming to light every few hours, the prime minister needs to grow a backbone and start a proper investigation.But the spokesperson has, though, not repeated the call for Reeves to resign; instead that seems to have been downgraded into a call for a full investigation.(The Tories may instead be saving their ‘Reeves must resign’ effort until after the budget –see 9.26am.)Here is part of the email exchange between Nick Joicey, Rachel Reeves’s husband, and the letting agency, Harvey Wheeler.

It includes the email where the agency employee says they will sort out the licence.Downing Street has now released the new material.Here is the letter from Rachel Reeves to the PM explaining what happened.She says the letting agency had told the family that they would sort out the licence, and failed to do so.But she accepts that it should have been her responsibility to check that this had happened.

Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, wants to offer teachers in England an unusual pay rise of 6.5% spread over the next three academic years, according to proposals published today.The Department for Education has asked the School Teachers Review Body (STRB), the independent group that makes pay recommendations, to back a settlement running from 2026-27 to 2028-29 that would amount to a 6.5% increase.The DfE’s evidence to the STRB said “the department’s view is that a 6.

5% pay award over 2026-27, 2027-28 and 2028-29 would be appropriate, with the level of awards weighted towards the latter part of the remit,” by allowing schools to draw up long-term budgets.The evidence claims that based on forecasts for inflation, the pay deal “would be a real terms increase of almost 4.5% over the five years” after accounting for previous pay rises.But the offer had drawn the ire of education unions.Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said:This Labour government is failing to deliver on its promises.

Instead of 6,500 more teachers, we have botched Ofsted reforms, declining school funding, and now a pay recommendation that will do nothing to address the continued crisis in retention.Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the proposals were “extremely disappointing”.He said:The proposed pay award over three years doesn’t address historic pay erosion and is dangerously close to being a real-terms pay cut as it relies on inflation being low across the period.We urge the pay review body to assert its independence once again and recommend a pay award at the level needed to attract people into teaching and keep them in the profession.The lettings agency involved in Rachel Reeves’ rental arrangements said it had apologised to her for an “oversight” that led to a failure to obtain a licence.

Gareth Martin, owner of Harvey Wheeler, said:We alert all our clients to the need for a licence.In an effort to be helpful our previous property manager offered to apply for a licence on these clients’ behalf, as shown in the correspondence.That property manager suddenly resigned on the Friday before the tenancy began on the following Monday.Unfortunately, the lack of application was not picked up by us as we do not normally apply for licences on behalf of our clients; the onus is on them to apply.We have apologised to the owners for this oversight.

At the time the tenancy began, all the relevant certificates were in place and if the licence had been applied for, we have no doubt it would have been granted.Our clients would have been under the impression that a licence had been applied for.Although it is not our responsibility to apply, we did offer to help with this.We deeply regret the issue caused to our clients as they would have been under the impression that a licence had been applied for.Presumably the emails Downing Street plans to publish later (see 4.

13pm) relate to this.A seaside neighbourhood in Essex, part of the parliamentary constituency represented by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, has once again been named the most deprived in England, PA Media reports.PA says:The latest official data shows that an area of the coastal village of Jaywick, close to the town of Clacton-on-Sea in the local authority of Tendring, has been classed the most deprived neighbourhood for the fourth time in a row.Areas of Blackpool again make up most of the rest of the top 10, along with new appearances for neighbourhoods in Hastings and Rotherham.Thursday’s data, published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), presented relative levels of deprivation in areas or neighbourhoods of England in 2025.

Jaywick had previously topped the list in the 2019, 2015 and 2010 publications.Farage was elected MP for Clacton in July 2024.Jaywick received international coverage in 2018 after it was used in a US election campaign advert, with a bleak picture of the area, showing unpaved roads and dilapidated homes, to warn voters about the consequences of not backing Donald Trump ahead of midterm elections in the US.Farage told PA Media that he was “obviously sad that things aren’t improving more quickly” and while he felt he had helped with investment and tourism for the area, “there’s a limit to what one person can do”.This chart from the report gives the most granular depiction of where deprived areas are in the UK.

It shows deprivation by LSOAs (lower-layer super output areas, areas containing about 1,500 people).Severin Carrell is the Guardian’s Scotland editor.Scotland’s auditor general has warned the government in Edinburgh it is failing to manage a “stark” gap between its income and spending, which is forecast to reach £4.7bn in four years’ time.Doubling down on previous criticisms of its spending controls, Stephen Boyle said today the Scottish government was making only short-term and temporary cuts in its spending, and had failed to address fundamental problems with its overspending.

That damaged the fiscal sustainability of the public sector.Boyle said this year the SNP government recorded a £1bn surplus only because of an extra £2.2bn in grant funding from the Labour government in London, which also meant it could cancel plans to use £460m in offshore wind leasing revenues to prop up its day to day spending.He said:A forecast gap of nearly £5bn remains between what ministers want to spend on public services and the funding available to them.The Scottish government needs to prepare more detailed plans setting out how it will close that gap by the end of the decade.

Audit Scotland added that the £4.7bn gap was “due to policy choices and higher workforce costs.However, the government’s plan to make savings over the next five years lacks detail on how they will be delivered.”It said the government’s 2025 medium-term financial strategy paper showed a £2.6bn gap in day-to-day spending in 2029/30 and a £2.

1bn gap in capital spending in 2029/30.It added that “a lack of available data means that the Scottish government is not clearly demonstrating that public spending is delivering the intended outcomes.”Kemi Badenoch says the revelation that No 10 intends to publish new information about the Rachel Reeves rental licence error (see 4.13pm) shows why a full inquiry is needed.This whole thing stinks.

The Prime Minister needs to stop trying to cover this up, order a full investigation and, if Reeves has broken the law, grow a backbone and sack her!Here is John Crace’s sketch of Kemi Badenoch’s speech this morning.And here is his take on Badenoch’s call for Rachel Reeves’s resignation over two separate issues.(See 9.26am.)Badenoch began with the overnight story of Rachel Reeves’s failure to obtain a licence before letting out her Dulwich house.

Given that Reeves had campaigned for such a licence to be introduced, this must qualify as right up there with one of the most brain-dead blunders.Stand by for Reeves to be included on a register of dodgy landlords.Kemi couldn’t believe her luck.If the chancellor couldn’t be trusted to run her own affairs, how could she be trusted to run the economy? She had broken the ministerial code and should resign.This presented a problem.

Because within minutes of a very short stump speech, Kemi was also demanding that Rachel resign if she were – as Reeves has virtually already broadcast herself – to break a manifesto promise by increasing income tax.Now we were in two parallel worlds at the same time.One where Rachel resigned right now and another where she resigned in four weeks’ time.For Kemi, Mel and Priti Patel, both scenarios were not just desirable but totally possible.In an infinite number of universes, there could be an infinite number of Reeveses.

Any number of resignations were thinkable.This is from my colleague Peter Walker, about the Rachel Reeves emails.Emails will be out later - between lettings agent and Reeves’ husband.The guidance is that this will be good news for Reeves’ case.No 10 has revealed that inquiries into Rachel Reeves’s rental licence error – which in effect wrapped up within hours last night – have been reopened.

At the afternoon lobby briefing, the No 10 spokesperson issued this statement.Following a review of emails sent and received by the chancellor’s husband [Nick Joicey], new information has come to light.This has now been passed to the prime minister and his independent adviser.It would be inappropriate to comment further.The initial reaction at lobby was that this could be career-ending for Reeves, particularly because initally the spokesperson declined to say that the PM has confidence in the chancellor.

But the spokesperson swiftly corrected the impression he had given, and said that the PM does have “full confidence” in the chancellor.Downing Street is expected to publish these emails later today.The spokesperson would not elaborate on what the emails show, or what they imply for the chancellor’s career, but he repeated the point about the PM having full confidence in her.Sir Laurie Magnus, the ethics adviser, is looking at the new material.But the fact that he is reviewing new material does not mean that he is opening a full, formal investigation