Isabel Hardman

What a nonsense debate the fight over the green belt has become. Today Keir Starmer has been – rightly – stoking it up arguing that councils should be given the freedom to build on green belt land. The Labour leader told the Times: ‘It cannot be reduced to a simple discussion of will you or will you not build on the green belt. This is why it’s important for local areas to have the power to decide where housing is going to be.’ The green belt holds a special, if strange, place in the British psyche. Its primary function is to prevent urban sprawl, rather than safeguard particularly green and pleasant land. While some of it is beautiful, a lot of the green belt is just green in colour. Intensively-farmed agricultural land isn’t that green at all, for example.

The Speaker of the House of Commons has just given Kemi Badenoch a furious dressing down over the government's u-turn on repealing retained EU laws. Lindsay Hoyle criticised the minister for using a written ministerial statement to sneak out the admission that the government will only be reviewing or repealing 600 laws by the end of the year, rather than 2,400 as promised by Rishi Sunak in his leadership campaign. When Badenoch came to answer the question, she apologised rather dismissively 'that the method we chose was not to your satisfaction'. Hoyle exploded, insisting 'that is totally not acceptable: who do you think you're speaking to?

Rishi Sunak has u-turned on his leadership campaign promise to repeal thousands of retained EU laws at a stroke. A written statement – always the preferred vehicle for awkward government news – from Kemi Badenoch this afternoon confirmed that the government will in fact only scrap around 600 laws in the Retained EU Law Bill by the end of this year. It has infuriated members of the European Research Group of Brexiteer Tory MPs. Former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg has also had a pop at the Prime Minister for an ‘admission of administrative failure, an inability of Whitehall to do the necessary work and an incapability of ministers to push this through their own departments’.

The political fallout from the coronation policing row shows us that if Labour does get into government after the next general election, it is going to have a hard time unpicking even reforms it has complained loudly about under the current administration. Though ministers are having to justify why the Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, many of whom seem not to have been planning the sort of disruption that the Public Order Bill is supposed to focus on, the bigger difficulty today has been for Labour. Rishi Sunak did his usual thing of being as detached as possible from events, saying the police were operationally independent from the government and, anyway, he thought they were doing their best to make the coronation the success it had been.

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer were both present for Prime Minister’s Questions, but the session was largely Why You Should Vote For This Party In The Local Elections Tomorrow. Backbenchers on both sides used the half hour to air their grievances with local councils led by their rivals, or praise the important work of authorities where their own party had power. Both party leaders framed their exchanges around their own local messaging, too, but what was interesting was that Starmer chose to lead on home ownership and housebuilding.  The Labour leader used housing as the latest example of things Sunak likes to pretend are going absolutely fine even when they manifestly aren’t.

The decision by the NHS Staff Council to accept the government’s pay offer is not the end of the stand-off between ministers and some healthcare workers, obviously. But it does mark a step away from the general hostility over pay that has marked the autumn and winter months. Unite and the Royal College of Nursing are still threatening more strikes, even though they are on the council of 12 unions representing all NHS workers (save for doctors and dentists) in England. The vote at today's Council meeting means the pay rise of 5 per cent for 2022/23 and 2023/24 and a one-off payment of at least £1,655 will go to all workers, but Unite and the RCN plan to hold out for more money.

The Illegal Migration Bill has passed its final Commons stage before it goes up to the Lords – but not without a number of blows being dealt by Conservative MPs. The legislation, which ministers claim will help ‘stop the boats’ crossing the Channel, passed its third reading in the Commons 289 votes to 230. But ministers had a miserable time trying to defend it: not from attacks from the Labour benches, but from their own side. One climbdown on child detention means ministers will work with backbenchers on a ‘new timescale’ for the number of days unaccompanied children could be detained without court approval. This meant Tim Loughton did not push his specific amendment on this to a vote, though the timescale isn’t yet specified in the legislation.

The debate about NHS strikes is turning into one of those 'am I being unreasonable?' threads on Reddit and Mumsnet, where posters jump all over each other to point out the way someone has messed up in a relationship. Health Secretary Steve Barclay is still hoping to win the war of attrition between the government and healthcare workers by appealing to the unions to be reasonable and constructive. Barclay made that argument again today when taking departmental questions in the Commons, but his announcement last night that he would be taking the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to court in a bid to stop that union's strikes showed that it is becoming harder, not easier, to stick to this line of attack.