Mini-budget 2022: pound crashes as chancellor cuts stamp duty and top rate of income tax – live

Tax cuts to cost Treasury around £37bn in 2023-24, official figures reveal

There are no urgent questions in the morning, and so Kwasi Kwarteng, the chancellor, will be delivering his statement soon after 9.30am.

The Commons starts sitting at 9.30am, but they always begin with prayers in private, and so Kwarteng will be up a few minutes later.

The last time they did it one third of the beneficiaries were people buying second homes or buy to let, so we are sceptical that this is the magic bullet to increase homeownership. What we really need to do is to build more houses and to help get people onto the property ladder by increasing the supply of housing.

When this has been done before, it has often fuelled an already hot market and many of the beneficiaries have been people buying a second or third home, rather than the first time buyers that we really want to help who are often trapped in private rented accommodation where they’re paying as much in rent every month as they would in a mortgage.

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National insurance increase will be reversed from 6 November, says Kwasi Kwarteng – UK politics live

The chancellor says the move will save 28m people £330 on average next year

Catholics outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland for the first time, a demographic milestone for a state that was designed a century ago to have a permanent Protestant majority, my colleague Rory Carroll reports.

Thérèse Coffey is deputy prime minister as well as health secretary. Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain this morning, and responding to a question from the former Labour MP Ed Balls, who was presenting, she said that as deputy PM whould be would “chairing things like the home affairs committee and different elements like that”. But she rejected claims this meant she would be doing the health job part time. She said:

I’m conscious that in two weeks we’ve already pulled together our plan for patients and we will continue to develop that.

I don’t think it will be a case of being part-time ... We don’t have fixed working hours.

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Local election leaflets show Tory candidates are ‘ashamed’ to be associated with Boris Johnson, Labour says – as it happened

Angela Rayner says Tory candidates at the local elections ‘are trying to hide from their own government’s record’. This live blog is closed – please follow this one for updates on the war in Ukraine

Savanta ComRes has published some new polling on voting intention in Scottish parliaement elections. Here are the figures for the constituency section.

And here are the figures for the list section.

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National insurance rise forces UK employers to shoulder £9bn tax burden

Bosses say 1.25-point rise heaps pressure on firms already enduring soaring costs linked to Covid and Brexit

Britain’s employers are being forced to shoulder a £9bn tax rise after the government pushed ahead with raising national insurance on Wednesday despite stiff opposition.

Company bosses said the 1.25-percentage-point rise in national insurance contributions (NICs), which is paid by workers and their employers, would add to already severe pressure from runaway inflation and soaring business costs this year linked to Covid, Brexit and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

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Raise benefits and pensions to help lower earners, thinktank tells Rishi Sunak

Resolution Foundation says pegging benefits to inflation will target help to needy better than scrapping NI rise

Rishi Sunak should consider raising benefits and pensions to keep pace with inflation, research has suggested, as the chancellor faced increasing pressure to tackle the cost-of-living squeeze in this week’s spring budgetary statement.

Increasing benefits by an extra five percentage points, by 8.1% rather than the 3.1% currently planned, would give four times as much help for low-to-middle income households for every pound spent as scrapping the planned national insurance rise, the Resolution Foundation said.

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Ukraine crisis puts Sunak under new pressure to axe national insurance rise

Tory MPs and business groups urge chancellor to scrap increase intended to fund NHS and social care amid fears of stagflation

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is under renewed pressure from MPs and business groups to rethink plans to increase national insurance next month, as fears grow that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will dramatically worsen the cost of living crisis and plunge the economy into “stagflation”.

Both Tory and Labour MPs believe Sunak can still be persuaded to ditch the 1.25 percentage point rise – announced last September to fund the NHS and social care – and want him to use the potentially devastating effects of events in Ukraine on prices as justification for what they say is an urgently needed U-turn.

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Boris Johnson to try to regain control with Brexit bill and policy blitz

PM hopes to move on from parties scandal with plans to make it easier to scrap EU laws and tackle cost of living crisis

Boris Johnson will attempt to seize back control of the government agenda this week with a policy blitz, a Brexit bill and flying visit to Ukraine, as Westminster remains in the grip of paralysis over the Sue Gray and police inquiries into No 10 parties.

Amid frustration in No 10 at the uncertainty surrounding the report on rule-breaking parties in Downing Street, sources said Johnson was determined to deflect public outrage with a schedule of high-profile announcements and photo opportunities that he also hopes will show MPs he remains focused.

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Boris Johnson lets slip manifesto pledge to cut national insurance

PM’s apparent blunder over £12,500 threshold could benefit him amid ‘factchecking’ row

Boris Johnson has said he wants to raise the national insurance threshold to £12,500, letting slip a major Tory tax cut from the manifesto as he was speaking to workers in Teesside.

The prime minister blurted out the key announcement as he was pressed by an employee at a fabrication yard about whether he would help “people like us”, not just the rich.

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