Brexit news: Further delays to import checks announced as PM scrambles for Biden support over protocol

Labour’s Jess Phillips read out the names of all the women killed in the past year as she called for more action on domestic violence

Speaking during an International Women’s Day Debate in the Commons, the Birmingham Yardley MP said: “In this place, we count what we care about. We count the number of vaccines done; we count the number of people on benefits; we rule or oppose based on data and we obsessively track that data.

“We love to count data about our own popularity. However, we don't currently count dead women.

“No government study is done into the patterns every year of the data of the victims of domestic abuse who are killed or died by suicide.

“Dead women are a thing we've all just accepted as part of our daily lives. Killed women are not vanishingly rare; killed women are common. Dead women do count”

MPs have warned there is an “epidemic” of violence against women in the UK which is not taken seriously enough after a woman disappeared in south London.

Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old marketing executive, went missing after leaving a friend’s flat in Clapham last week and police are now questioning a male police officer on suspicion of kidnap and murder. Human remains were found in Kent woodlands on Wednesday.

The case has sparked an outpouring of anger as women have told of instances where they were threatened or sexually harassed by men while walking home alone and MPs have noted the daily fear many women feel on the streets after dark.

Women’s correspondent Maya Oppenheim with the full report:

Chancellor Rishi Sunak said he is kept up at night with concerns over rising unemployment.

He told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee he was also worried about the impact a rise in interest rates would have on the public finances, given the debt mountain built up during the pandemic.

He also highlighted the potential for the economic “scarring” caused by the coronavirus crisis to be worse than the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast for the economy to be 3 per cent smaller than it would have been in five years’ time.

“So, even if the road map comes to pass and it turns out that the medium-term scarring impacts are worse than feared, that would be of concern because that is a very significant impact on the economy,” he said.

“Obviously the exact path of the labour market is one that I’m constantly kept up at night by - sadly three-quarters of a million people have already lost their jobs and more are forecast to do so.”

The forecast for unemployment to peak at 6.5% was lower than previously expected “but fundamentally that’s a large number of people who are going to lose their jobs over the course of this pandemic and minimising the number of those unemployed and finding them new opportunities as quickly as possible is a thing that keeps me up at night”.

He acknowledged the public finances “are much more sensitive to changes in interest rates and inflation than they were previously” and an increase in interest rates would have a “significant impact”.

PA

Boris Johnson’s equalities minister Kemi Badenoch is under pressure to resign after three of the government’s LGBT+ advisers quit their posts and issued damning criticism.

Jayne Ozanne was the first to quit the LGBT+ advisory panel on Wednesday – accusing Ms Badenoch and fellow equalities minister Liz Truss of letting the community down by failing to deliver on a 2018 Tory party promise to “eradicate” conversion therapy.

She was followed by James Morton, who expressed concerned that the government’s equality ministers were “not committed to LGBT equality”.

Adam Forrest has the story:

Labour should support strikes by nurses if they decide to take industrial action over the government's plan for a real-terms pay cut, senior figures in the party have said.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of greater Manchester, said the government's approach to the pay dispute was "straightforwardly wrong" and Labour that "have to back" strikes, writes Jon Stone.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, Keir Starmer's closest rival in last year's leadership contest, also called for her party to support nursing unions if they decided to take action.

Rishi Sunak has defended the government’s planned 1 per cent pay rise for NHS workers as "proportionate, fair and reasonable".

The chancellor was giving evidence to the Commons treasury committee.

Mr Sunak said he had set out a "targeted approach" to public-sector pay in last year's spending review, and added: “For a matter of fairness and also to protect people's jobs in the public sector we set out a targeted approach to public-sector pay which we thought was proportionate, fair and reasonable.

“What that actually did was ensure those in the NHS would actually receive a pay rise next year. In other parts of the public sector that will not be the case next year.

“We did also protect those on the lowest incomes, so that if you earn less than the median salary of around £25,000 – just under – you receive an increase of at least £250 next year.

“So that is a targeted approach to public-sector pay.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg has blown a massive hole in plans for the renovation of parliament, telling MPs they may have to meet virtually on a lockdown-style video link while the Palace of Westminster is closed for works which are expected to last six years or more, writes Andrew Woodcock.

The Leader of the Commons said that a £1.5bn scheme to house parliament’s two chambers elsewhere in Westminster, set out in a report today, were “for the birds”.

A looming £15bn cut in annual public spending is just a “change in forecast”, Rishi Sunak has claimed – as he dismissed a warning that it should be causing him “sleepless nights”.

Quizzed by MPs, the chancellor refused to accept his own watchdog’s warning that his Budget leaves many public services facing more years of austerity, writes Rob Merrick.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said departments other than the NHS, schools and defence would be hit by “real-terms cuts to their budget” – putting the figure at £15bn a year.

It requires a certain amount of determination to believe that Keir Starmer was once the UK’s most important prosecuting barrister. I happen to have been in a few courtrooms, over the years, seeing leading prosecuting barristers at work, writes Tom Peck.

Gerrie Nel, for example, the barrister who prosecuted Oscar Pistorius, is nicknamed in South African legal circles, “The Rottweiler” – and for good reason.

By the end of Pistorius’s lengthy cross examination, he had been reduced to a kind of human wreckage. His testimony had been not so much interrogated as brutalised; his brittle ego and fragile emotions laid waste upon.

#icymi

Boris Johnson has told Iran’s president that his country’s continued confinement of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is “completely unacceptable”, according to Number 10.

Downing Street said the PM held a phone conversation with Hassan Rouhani on Wednesday.

Mr Johnson demanded Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s immediate release, along with that of other British-Iranian dual nationals, Downing Street said.