Labour has criticised Matt Hancock, the health secretary, for not being open about the impact of a reduction in vaccine supply. In a statement Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said:

People across the country will be anxious and worried that the booking of new first dose vaccination appointments will be paused form the end of March.

Matt Hancock needed to explain exactly what these supply issues are and what he is doing to resolve them. Trying to dismiss or downplay the legitimate concerns of anxious people waiting for a vaccine is simply not good enough.

Jane Kirby, PA Media’s health editor, also says Matt Hancock was misrepresenting the nature of the latter about a reduction in vaccine supply.

Matt Hancock claimed the leaked NHS letter warning of a “significant reduction” in vaccine supply (see 4.56pm) was just a “normal, operational letter”.

But Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, says she has been told that’s not true.

Hancock says the dates in the roadmap still apply.

The data set out today by Public Health England gives him “increased confidence” that those dates can be met, he says.

And that’s it. The press conference is over.

Van-Tam says it takes time for antibody protection to build up after vaccination. In young age groups, it takes at least 14 days. In other people, it takes 21 days or more.

He urges people to “hold the line”, and to not assume that once they have been vaccinated, it is safe for them to meet others.

Hancock says he thinks people are being “unbelievably supportive” of the rules. There is nothing wrong with people playing football with their family in the park, he says.

Q: Wouldn’t it be useful to have an inquiry now?

Hancock says lessons are being learnt all the time.

Van-Tam says the timing of an inquiry is a matter for politicians. But he says, speaking personally, he would find an inquiry a distraction now.

Q: You are playing down the impact of this letter. But why should the under-50s have to wait while you strongarm over-50s into getting vaccinated?

Hancock says the government is committed to all over-50s getting their first dose by 15 April.

Q: But what about the under-50s? It looks like they will have to wait an extra month?

Hancock says the government is committed to ensure all adults get a jab by the end of July. It is still on track for that.

Q: How do you respond to Dominic Cummings’ comments about the failures of your department?

Hancock says the vaccine rollout has been a great success. A lot of people have been involved. There has been a positive esprit de corps, he says. He says he will leave it at that.

Q: Will shielding end on 31 March? I have both doses of the vaccine, and want to go back to work as a nurse.

Yes, says Hancock. He says he is delighted she will be able to go back.

Van-Tam turns to concerns about the AstraZeneca vaccine giving clots. But he says there is no evidence for this.

Vaccines do not save lives when they are in fridges, he says.

He says all medicines have benefits and risks. He reads out a list showing some of the side effects of paracetamol. He says people know this, but they understand the benefits.

Van-Tam is speaking now.

He says we are in the last stage of the phase 1 rollout.

It is important to get that done properly before moving on to phase 2, which will involve vaccinating the under-50s.

This sounds like a round-about way of confirming the implication of the NHS letter leaked to Sky - that the vaccine rollout will not be proceeding quite as quickly as planned. As the Times’ Chris Smyth points out, Hancock was hinting at this earlier.

Ramsay says the new figures also show that people who have been vaccinated are less likely to pass on the infection. So it is reducing transmission, she says.

Ramsay is talking now.

She starts by thanking those involved in the vaccination programme.

She says PHE is publishing an update to its analysis of the impact vaccinations.

She says there is a 60% reduction in your chance of catching Covid if you are over 70 and have been vaccinated.

And she says, even if you get Covid, the chance of going to hospital is reduced by a further 40%, she says.

She says, combining the figures, that means the vaccination programme is protecting 80% of the people in that age group.

Hancock says there is also new research out today showing the vaccines are reducing transmission.

They are saving lives, he says.

He says vaccines are now being offered to all people over the age of 50.

But he says he also wants to do more to get vulnerable people vaccinated.

Hancock says he is 42. He wants the jab. But he also wants to ensure the most vulnerable are protected first.

Hancock says this is making a real difference.

He presents a slide a showing the increase in the proportion of people with Covid antibodies. Around 90% of people aged 70 and above had the antibodies at the start of March, he says.

Here is the figure for the end of March. The area shaded blue represents people with antibodies.

Hancock starts by saying that more than half a million vaccinations were delivered yesterday.

Today marks 100 days since Margaret Keenan got the first authorised vaccination. And now the UK has hit 25m vaccinations.

It has been a huge team effort, and the best project he has ever been in, he says. He thanks all those involved.

Positive coronavirus cases rose in Greater Manchester last week, when schools reopened after lockdown.

For the week ending 12 March, cases increased from 88.7 per 100,000 people, to 96.5. However, testing also doubled in the same time period, as school-based lateral flow testing kicked into gear.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said that schools reopening were a “significant factor”, but there “may be more complex reasons” for the increase in positive cases. He said his team were monitoring the situation closely in his weekly press conference.

Cases increased in seven out of ten of Greater Manchester’s boroughs, the majority of which are in the 16-29 age bracket.

In more positive news, hospital admissions in the region have dropped significantly, with around half the number there were a fortnight ago. There were 94 patients admitted to hospital on the 8 March, which is comparable to the admission rate in mid-October last year. On that date, there were 426 Covid-19 patients in hospital, 93 of which are in a high dependency unit or intensive care.

More than one million first doses of the coronavirus vaccine have now been given, amounting to 46% of Greater Manchester’s population. Roll out of second doses of the jab is also under way.

Inspired by Boris Johnson’s call for a culture change to ensure women are treated with more respect (see 1.33pm), the Daily Mirror has dredged up some examples of the sort of comments he would presumably now like to consign to the dustbin.

The UK has also recorded 141 further coronavirus deaths, and 5,758 new cases, the government dashboard reveals.

At the Downing Street lobby briefing the prime minister’s spokesman, and Allegra Stratton, his press secretary, were unable to to give more details of what Boris Johnson thinks needs to be done to bring about the “cultural and social change in attitudes” towards women that he said was needed at PMQs. (See 1.33pm.)

They also sidestepped questions about misogynist comments made by Johnson in his previous career as a journalist.

But Stratton insisted that Johnson had a “strong record” on measures to protect women. She said:

If you look back to 2009, when he was London mayor, he launched a call to action to end violence against women. And that was first ever strategy of its kind for a major city.

It saw him quadrupling funding for rape crisis provision and opening three new centres in London, and a host of other measures ...

So this was “not something to which the prime minister has been recently converted”, she claimed.

She said the domestic abuse bill and the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill were both measures that would help women, and she said since the current consultation on violence against women and girls was reopened on Friday night last week, it had attracted 140,000 responses.

A total of 22,717,791 Covid-19 vaccinations took place in England between 8 December and 16 March, according to provisional NHS England data, including first and second doses, which is a rise of 433,751 on the previous day.

As PA Media report, of this number, 21,493,356 were the first dose of a vaccine, a rise of 370,842 on the previous day, while 1,224,435 were a second dose, an increase of 62,909.

Downing Street has defended the response of the Department of Health and Social Care to the coronavirus pandemic in the light of the claim from Dominic Cummings this morning that DHSC was an “absolute total disaster” and reduced to a “smoking ruin”. (See 11.56am.) Asked about Cummings’ comments, the prime minister’s spokesman told the daily lobby briefing:

Covid challenged health systems around the world. From the outset, it was always our focus to protect the NHS and save lives.

I would point to what was achieved last year in terms of establishing one of the biggest diagnostic networks in UK history, in terms of increasing the number of tests we are able to undertake every day.

We have procured over nine million items of PPE, we have established the NHS test and trace system which has contacted millions of people and asked them to isolate.

DH [Department of Health] and the NHS were central to the rollout of the vaccination programme.

Boris Johnson is expected to get his Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine later this week, PA Media reports.

It was understood that the NHS told the prime minister he would receive that specific jab because of the public interest surrounding the vaccine. But it has not been revealed whether Johnson specifically requested the AstraZeneca vaccine. Normally people have no choice.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, will hold a press conference at Downing Street at 5pm, No 10 has said. This will be the first Downing Street press conference this week. At the start of this lockdown the government was aiming to hold them about three times a week, but the frequency has declined as the coronavirus outlook has improved.

The doctor who led an inquiry into the UK response to 2009’s flu epidemic has backed calls for a review of the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic to start soon.

Dame Deirdre Hine, the former chief medical officer for Wales, suggested that it might be best to start with an independent, lessons learned review, which could be conducted relatively quickly. The swine flu inquiry she led took this form.

Such a review could be followed by a full public inquiry later, she said.

She told Radio 4’s the World at One:

It’s probably about time now, or perhaps in the summer, to start to learn lessons, but whether that should be in the form of a public inquiry or independent review is something the government really needs to think very carefully about.

A public inquiry … has a legal framework and has legal requirements throughout its operation which make it both expensive and usually very lengthy … whereas an independent review, of the kind that I chaired into the influenza pandemic, can operate faster and less expensively.

What I would be bold enough to suggest is that what is required in the short-term is an independent review with lessons to be learned which are applied immediately - because there is always the chance of yet another pandemic - and that that would be followed up by an independent review under the Inquiries Act 2005.

Asked if an independent review would have the powers it needed to get people to give evidence, she replied:

The review I undertook in 2009 I had no refusals of anybody to come and give evidence to us. An independent review would take something like a year, a public inquiry can take anything up to 10 years.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) has won a Freedom of Information battle to find out how Thurrock Council spent £1bn of public money.

The outlet revealed last year that the Essex council had borrowed £1bn from other local authorities to gamble on secretive deals in green energy. The media company was blocked by the council in finding out where the money came from and how it was spent via an FoI request.

The Conservative-run Thurrock Council tried to justify local government secrecy under the grounds of “commercial sensitivity”.

But the Bureau, after taking the case to a tribunal with the backing of the Times, regional publishers Reach and Archant, the Local Government Chronicle, the Municipal Journal and freedom of expression group Index on Censorship, has won its disclosure battle.

The tribunal ruled there was a “significant public interest in transparency in relation to the actions of councils borrowing for the purposes of making a profit” and ordered Thurrock to disclose the information by 12 April.

Meg Hillier, chair of the Commons public accounts committee, said:

I applaud the determination of The Bureau for pursuing this and winning a victory for taxpayers.

As the information rights tribunal judge says – responsibility for holding local authorities to account for their borrowing and spending decisions ultimately falls on voters. Voters must be informed to make those decisions. Let the public judge what level of risk they are content to bear with the money they pay in taxes for essential local services.

Business leaders have said they support the opening of an EU office in Belfast months after the UK government blocked the move.

Glyn Roberts, the head of Retail Northern Ireland told the Northern Ireland affairs committee this morning it would allow “business groups, civic society leaders and politician for all parties” to build relationships with Brussels and capitalise on Northern Ireland’s new status as a potential “gateway” to the EU for foreign investors. He said:

I think having an EU office on the same basis as the Chinese government and the American government have consulates in Belfast, that would help in terms of dealing with our future relationship, dealing with ongoing problems and challenges.

He said questions also needed to be asked about the Stormont “gameplan for their office in Brussels”.

SDLP assembly member and former Downing Street adviser Matthew O’Toole has been pushing for an office, saying political leaders need to be “knocking down doors” in the EU, Dublin, London and the US to get investment on the back of NI’s unique post-Brexit status with a foot in both the EU single market and the UK.

Food wholesaler Andrew Lynas told the committee Brexit would add around £50,000 to his annual costs but there were opportunities for Northern Ireland, with one “quick service restaurant” chain in talks about supplying the EU from NI.

The Welsh health minister, Vaughan Gething, has expressed concern about growing rates of coronavirus in Anglesey, north Wales.

Gething said it was important to gain an understanding of why case numbers are rising but suggested that households mixing was to blame.

Local leaders in Anglesey have said it might be necessary to impose a local lockdown or close schools to bring infection rates back down.

Across Wales the overall rate of coronavirus “remains stable” at around 42 cases per 100,000 people. There are just under 1,000 Covid-related patients in hospital – the first time the country has dipped below the 1,000 mark for many months.

In Anglesey, however, the rate is at 112 per 100,000, according to the latest figures from Public Health Wales.

So far this month, 54% of the 174 positive coronavirus cases on Anglesey have been in and around the port of Holyhead.

Anglesey council deputy chief executive, Dylan Williams, said: “The situation in Holyhead and recent increase in cases is extremely concerning.”

The Welsh government is also concerned about rising numbers in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, where the rate per 100,000 is at 94, and Conwy, north Wales, at 96.

Nicola Sturgeon has told reporters that she “strongly refutes” comments made by Conservative MP David Davis, who last night used parliamentary privilege to criticise the Scottish government’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against Alex Salmond.

At her regular Covid briefing Sturgeon said:

I strongly refute the suggestions and insinuations from David Davis in the Commons last night. I’m not going to have this Covid briefing side-tracked by the latest instalment of Alex Salmond’s conspiracy theory. I have given eight hours of evidence to the parliamentary committee looking into this. They are now able to assess all the evidence they have taken, including I’m sure the evidence they have in relation to the claims made by David David last night. They have a job of work to do now, I’m going to get on with my job which is for the moment leading this Covid briefing.

Johnson says it was a “regrettable mistake” for Labour to claim last night, in a tweet about the police bill, that rape has been decriminalised. He says victims of rape should be encouraged to come forward.

Tahir Ali (Lab) asks why the PM has been economical with the truth in saying the government can only afford a 1% pay rise for nurses.

Sir Linday Hoyle, the Speaker, says “no honourable member on any side would actually lie or mislead the house”.

(Hoyle is referring to how the Commons is meant to operate, according to its own rulebook, not to what actually goes on.)

Johnson says the government is investing in more nurses for the NHS.

Sir Bernard Jenkin (Con) says the integrated review has been widely welcome as a statement about the UK’s place in the world. Does the SNP realise that, by rejecting the plan, they are rejecting jobs for Scotland?

Johnson says it is hard to know what motivates the SNP, but the UK is stronger together, he says.

Richard Burgon (Lab) asks the PM to take responsibility for some of the Covid deaths and to apologise.

Johnson says he takes full responsibility for what the government has done. He says he is “deeply sorry” about what happened to the country. An inquiry will allow us to understand what happened, and to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

Felicity Buchan (Con) says she has been deeply troubled by what is coming out of the Grenfell Tower inquiry about the conduct of contactors. Will the government consider a tax on the building materials industry to pay for cladding removal?

Johnson says he will consider this. And the government is considering blacklisting contractors who have committed professional negligence from government contracts.

Peter Grant (SNP) says he wants to ask again the question Ian Blackford asked: what gives him the right to impose more nuclear weapons in Scotland?

Johnson says this is another attempt to argue for an independence referendum.

Johnson says global Britain is all about promoting freedom of belief and religion.

Charlotte Nichols (Lab) says women do not have recourse to the criminal justice system because it deals with offenders so badly. How are women meant to get justice?

Johnson says Nichols is completely right. We can bring in more laws and tougher sentences. But we have to address the fudamental issue of “casual everyday sexism and apathy”.

Andrew Jones (Con) says he wants people to be able to go about their lives without being hindered by protesters. Will the police bill strike that balance?

Johnson says Jones has summed it up perfectly. And the bill will stop prisoners getting out early, he says.

Nicholas Fletcher (Con) asks if the PM will back a new hospital for Doncaster.

Johnson says Fletcher’s trust is in the running for one of the further eight hospitals, on top of the 40 the government is already building.

(As has been well established, the government is not building 40 new hospitals. It has plans to replace or renovate 40 hospitals over the long term.)

Ian Blackford, the SNP leader at Westminster, says the Scottish people would be best served with a government living up to their values, prioritising children not bombs.

Johnson says the SNP government in Scotland is just obsessed with breaking up the UK.

Blackford says the Tories want a 40% increase in nuclear warheads. We should find ways to make peace, not war, he says. When did the Scottish people give him the authority to do this.

Johnson says the people of Scotland contribute enormously to this country. Our nuclear defence is vital for our long-term security.

Starmer says the bill imposes a longer maximum sentence for damaging a statue (10 years) than the sentences in the three cases he has just mentioned. Labour will publish amendments to the bill. Will the PM meet Starmer and his team to discuss this.

Johnson says he is grateful for the collegiate tone of Starmer. The average sentence for rape is nine years and nine months. The maximum sentence is light. What he is trying to do with the bill is toughen sentences.

He says until women feel their voices are being listened to, we will not fix this problem.

Starmer says he was DPP for five years. He does not need lectures on enforcing the law. He say sentences for rape and sexual violence need to be longer. He give examples of apparently lenient sentences.

Johnson says it would be wonderful if a bill were going through the Commons to do just this. That would be a fine thing. As it happens, there is such a bill. Labour should have voted for it, he says. Voting against it was “crazy”.

Starmer says Labour has been pushing this point for five years. He says many women report sexual violence to find no one gets charged. He says 98.5% of rapes don’t lead to a prosecution. That is shocking. What will the PM do about this?

Johnson says Starmer is right. Prosecution rates for rape are a disgrace. He says he wants to toughen penalties for men who commit these crimes. It would have been good if Labour had voted for tougher sentences for people who commit violent and sexual offences last night.

Starmer says the bill says more about protecting statues than protecting women. But he thanks the PM for his answer. On protecting victims, Starmer says a new victims bill from Labour is before parliament. Will the government back it, so it can become law in six months?

Johnson says he will look at proposals from all sides of the Commons. He agrees that victims need to feel confident coming forward. He says funding for advisers for victims has been increased. But he won’t pretend this is the entire solution. Long-term cultural change is needed, he says.

Starmer thanks Johnson. Many women feel unsafe on the streets. Labour wants a law on harassment and a tougher law on stalking. Will the PM take these measures forward?

Johnson says he is always happy to look at new ideas. Tougher measures on stalking are already being introduced. He says the police bill does a lot to protect women and girls. Labour should have backed it, he says.

Sir Keir Starmer says Sarah Everard’s family and friends will be suffering unspeakable grief. She was just walking home. Some cases are watershed moments, and this should be one. It should change the way women and girls are treated. He wants to work with the government on this. Does the PM agree this must be a turning point?

Johnson says he does. He says the reaction to Everard’s death has been wholly understandable. The government is trying to address this. Unless and until we have a change in our culture, which leads women to think they are not heard, we will not achieve change, he says.

Simon Fell (Con) says GSK reneged on a promise to invest in Barrow and Furness. Will the government try to get the company to deliver on those jobs?

Johnson says he will meet Fell on this. Bioscience should be a growth area for the UK, he says.

Boris Johnson starts by wishing MPs a happy St Patrick’s day.

These are from Chris Cook, a reporter at Tortoise and a public policy expert, on Dominic Cummings’ evidence to the science committee.

In an interview on the Today programme this morning Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, said he agreed with Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, about the need to do trade deals with countries with poor human rights records. (See 8.50am.) Kwarteng said:

What I don’t think is productive and what doesn’t make any sense is to simply metaphorically pull up the drawbridge and say we aren’t going to have any dealings with whatever country it is and then at the same time tell the country when we think they are not behaving properly or treating their minorities well.

I think you have to engage in order to be taken seriously and in order to have influence, and that’s what we are trying to do.

But Emily Thornberry, the shadow international trade secretary, said the UK should not be striking a trade deal with China at the moment. She said:

I think it would be an abomination to sign up to a trade deal, giving China preferential rates and access to our economy at the moment, I really do.

Q: Do you regret your decision to leave?

No, says Cummings. He says he told the PM in July that he would be gone by 18 December at the latest.

He says he would be happy to come back and answer questions about how No 10 works and why he left. And he would be happy to clarify the “crazy stories” in the media.

That’s it. The hearing is over.

I will post a summary soon.

Cummings says the Ministry of Defence has a £10bn black hole in its budget because of “disastrous” decisions taken in defence reviews when George Osborne and David Cameron were in power.

Now the MoD is using “honest” figures, he says.

Graham Stringer (Lab) says 90% of scientists voted to remain in the EU. That was partly because the EU funded research.

Q: I felt cooperation became more important than the science in those projects. Do you agree?

Yes, says Cummings. He says he and Stringer (a leave supporter) both took the view that it would be dangerous to let the EU regulate UK science.

The EU system has blown up over vaccines, he says. That shows what happens when you have an anti-science bureaucracy like the one in Brussels.

Cummings says the UK has a huge amount to learn from the approach to science policy in Asia.

He says the Chinese president sits down for days on end to discuss funding state-of-the-art science projects for the long term.

The UK will lose out if it does not do the same, he says.

He also says China and Russia have made great efforts to acquire British knowledge, both legally and illegally. That is because they take it seriously, he says.

He says the state should not be trying to decide whether Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is right.

But it should be thinking about how to fund science, he says.

He says, while PMQs was going on, he used to have meetings for something called Project Speed, to consider this. He had nothing to do with PMQs, he says. He says he hopes this work is still going on.

Q: Is the UK a science superpower?

Cummings says there are areas where the UK is doing world-class research.

But, when he was in government, there was a feeling the UK was “falling behind”, he says. He says Nobel prizes from the past have been used as branding.

The true situation “is more worrying and dangerous than it appears”, he says.

Rebecca Long-Bailey (Lab) goes next.

Q: What proportion of the budget should be going on R&D?

Cummings says he does not know what decisions were taken since he left. But he says Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, is very committed to R&D. He says Sunak say his priorities are R&D and the skills agenda.

He says it is not particularly helpful to think of it as a share of GDP. It is more helpful to focus on the total spend, he says.

Countries like China and South Korea are taking science spending very seriously. But David Cameron and George Osborne were not serious about investing in R&D, he says.

He refers to the circle on the chart he showed earlier. (See 9.41am.) He says if the UK spends differently, it can spend more effectively.

Cummings says, in his last conversation with Boris Johnson before leaving No 10, he recommended moving responsibility for science funding for the business department to the Cabinet Office. Johnson agreed, he says.

Cummings is now talking about science funding generally.

He says when he arrived in government in 2019, anyone applying for funding for maths research needed to fill out an impact assessment. That made no sense for pure research, he says. He says Alan Turing would not have got support in 1930s on that basis.

He says he spent a lot of time trying to change the rules. In government it is important to “wage war on process”, he says.

Carol Monaghan (SNP) goes next.

Q: How will you ensure that extreme freedom does not lead to extreme cronyism in funding?

Cummings says that is looking at the problem the wrong way round. The current funding model is flawed, he says.

He says, if you look at the history of the Manhattan project, when Congress went to look at it after the way, they were amazed by how productive it was. It spent up to 2% of GDP with very few checks. But the spending was effective.

When tighter checks were introduced in the 1960s, the corruption and cronyism got worse.

Q: But the Manhattan project had a specific goal. Aria doesn’t?

Cummings says the same argument he is making applied to Arpa in the 1960s.

Current systems reward high-status, well-connected people, he says.

Katherine Fletcher (Con) is asking the questions now. She asks, under Cummings’ plan, what would stop someone from the “tin foil hat brigade” pulling the wool over the eyes of the five people from Aria approving the funding.

Cummings says he wants Aria to have a flat organisational structure, with a director in charge with good taste able to identify good ideas.

He says he recently spoke to one of the physicists who published a paper in the early 1980s that was very influential in the development of computing. They said their research would never get funding now, he says.

Cummings tells the committee that one of his hires when he was in No 10 proved crucial in dealing with Covid.

From Tom Newton Dunn from Times Radio

Dominic Cummings starts by explaining why he believes in the Aria concept. He says it should fund proposals that cannot get funding from other sources. He holds up a graphic to illustrate his point.

Good morning. Following the publication of the government’s integrated review of security, defence and foreign policy yesterday, Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, will be giving a speech at lunchtime at the Aspen Security Forum warning that democracy is in retreat. He will say:

Democracy is in retreat. This decade, the combined GDP of autocratic regimes is expected to exceed the combined GDP of the world’s democracies, but think about what that means for a second.

Tyranny is richer than freedom, and that matters to us here at home. Because stable, freedom-respecting democracies are much less likely to go to war, house terrorists or trigger large scale flows of migrants and they are generally, not always, but generally easier to trade with, and easier to cooperate with to solve our shared problems.

According to extracts released in advance, Raab will also say that the UK’s mission is to be “a force for good in the world”. But his message has been somewhat undermined by a leak obtained by HuffPost’s Arj Singh revealing that Raab told Foreign Office staff that the UK would seek trade deals with countries with poor human rights records. Raab said:

I squarely believe we ought to be trading liberally around the world.

If we restrict it to countries with ECHR-level [European convention on human rights-level] standards of human rights, we’re not going to do many trade deals with the growth markets of the future.

The Foreign Office said the original HuffPost report misrepresented what Raab actually said. It released a further extract from what Raab said, showing that while he believed in engaging with countries with poor human rights record, he accepted there were limits. Raab also said:

There will be moments, and I can think of behaviour that would cross the line and render a country beyond the pale.

But fundamentally I’m a big believer in engaging to try and exert positive influence even if it’s only a moderating influence, and I hope that calibrated approach gives you a sense that it’s not just words – we back it up with action.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to the PM, gives evidence to the Commons science committee about a new UK research funding agency; at 11am Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, will give evidence.

10am: George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, gives evidence to a Lords committee about relations with China.

12pm: Boris Johnson faces Sir Keir Starmer at PMQs.

12.15pm: Vaughan Gething, the Welsh government’s health minister, holds a briefing on Covid.

1pm: Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, gives a speech at the Aspen security forum.

1.30pm: Downing Street is due to hold its daily lobby briefing.

2pm: Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, holds a press conference.

Politics Live has been mostly about Covid for the last year and I will be covering UK coronavirus developments today, as well as non-coronavirus Westminster politics. For global coronavirus news, do read our global live blog.

I try to monitor the comments below the line (BTL) but it is impossible to read them all. If you have a direct question, do include “Andrew” in it somewhere and I’m more likely to find it. I do try to answer questions, and if they are of general interest, I will post the question and reply above the line (ATL), although I can’t promise to do this for everyone.

If you want to attract my attention quickly, it is probably better to use Twitter. I’m on @AndrewSparrow.