Sunak branded ‘inaction man’ at PMQs as Starmer attacks record on schools, prisons and China – as it happened

• Ministers are at risk of having their plans to promote more housebuilding overturned in a vote in the House of Lords later this evening. They have already lost three votes on the levelling up and regeneration bill (see 1.42pm and 3.44pm) and peers are now debating the proposal to relax legacy EU anti-pollution rules (known as nutrient neutrality). No 10 claims the construction of 100,000 homes will be blocked if Labour and its allies overturn the plans in the Lords. (See 3.44pm.) Lord Deben (John Gummer), the former Tory cabinet minister and former chair of the Climate Change Committee, has just delivered a blistering attack on the government’s proposal in the Lords within the last few minutes. He said he did not regard himself as a rebel on this issue, because he thought it was the government that was not being conservative. He went on:

First of all, it is asking local authorities – and I can hardly believe it – to disregard the facts. This is the kind of attitude that you see in the Republican party in the United States; the people who don’t believe in climate change, that people who anti-vaxxers, don’t look at the facts.

Deben said he did not believe government claims that getting rid of the EU rule would lead to more homes being built. “The housebuilders are not building the houses they’ve already got planning permissions for in areas which are not in any way affected by this,” he said. And he said he objected to the government proposal that housebuilders should not have to pay for the pollution they caused. He went on:

I thought the Conservative party was in favour of the polluter pays. Now I just want to say to the minister, were she canvassing in the Mid Bedfordshire byelection at this moment, does she turn to an elector and say, ‘In future housebuilders building in the Wye Valley will not have to contribute for the cost and the damage they do, but you will through your taxes.’ So the Mid Bedfordshire voter in the byelection is now going to be asked to subsidise the housebuilders, because that is what these amendments are about.

Deben also said the government’s handling of this showed that it misled parliament when it said the Office for Environmental Protection would provide sufficient environmental safeguards for the public as the UK left the EU, and European law no longer applied. That was not true, he said. He went on:

We were assured that Glenys Stacey [chair of the OEP] and her department were going to be treated with all the respect which one would have expected. And we were told that she would have all the powers that were necessary for the government actually to take her seriously.

And what have they done [about the nutrient neutrality plan]? Two pathetic letters, and no statement …

It does mean that the British people are now less protected from government mistakes than any country in the rest of Europe.

For procedural reasons, if it loses, the government cannot reinsert the plans into the bill when it returns to the Commons, and a defeat would be particularly embarrassing because Sunak claimed last month that his reforms were already in place.

Old EU ‘nutrient neutrality’ laws prevent thousands of homes from being built here in the UK.

Nutrients entering our rivers are a problem, but the contribution made by new homes is small – these laws only block families from building the homes they need.

So I’ve reformed them.

But this could be another example (like small boats, and the Rwanda policy) where the Tories believe that, if they can’t do what they want to, at least they may be able to claim some electoral credit by blaming others for blocking them.

In the House of Lords peers are now debating the nutrient neutrality amendments. (See 9.25am.)

Lady Scott, a levelling up minister, is leading for the government and in her speech she said that nutrients entering rivers posed “a real and serious problem” but she said the contribution made by new homes was “very small compared with that from sources such as industry, agriculture, and our existing housing stock”.

She said that, under the current rules, new development was being stalled at the point of planning permission in some areas and that this was “an absurd situation”. She went on:

It is undermining local economies, costing jobs, threatening to put small developers out of business and above all leaving communities without the homes that they want and they need.

This is not to say the problem of nutrient pollution in our rivers is not important. It very much is. But developers and local planning authorities are bound up in a burdensome and expensive process that does nothing to give certainty to anyone, creating huge opportunity cost.

Scott said the current habitat protections were “focusing huge effort on a very small part of the problem”.

That was why, along with the amendments to get rid of the nutrient neutrality rule, the government was setting out “an ambitious plan for nature recovery”, she said. She said these measures would more than compensate for the nutrients expected from the new housing developments that would go ahead. She went on:

Natural England’s own judgment is that this is sufficient funding to compensate for any additional nutrient flows from up to 100,000 homes between now and 2030.

Michael Gove’s local council is warning it faces effective bankruptcy within two years after racking up millions of pounds in debt for failed property investments overseen by its former Conservative administration, Richard Partington reports.

Tobias Ellwood braced for no confidence vote as chair of Commons defence committee tomorrow

Dan Sabbagh

Tobias Ellwood, the Conservative chair of the defence select committee, faces a vote of no confidence at a meeting tomorrow afternoon after comments praising the Taliban for improving safety in Afghanistan.

The chair faces an uphill battle, given that the motion was put forward by two Conservative and two Labour MPs, with six votes required to achieve a simple majority of the 11 strong cross-party committee, including Ellwood himself.

Conservative malcontents are Mark Francois, a former armed forces minister, and Richard Drax, while Labour supporters of the motion are Kevan Jones and Derek Twigg, all unhappy with comments made by Ellwood in July.

In a tweet and accompanying video, Ellwood described Afghanistan as a “country transformed” following a trip there. He also said that “security has vastly improved, corruption is down and the opium trade has all but disappeared.”

It provoked strong criticism, particularly from veterans, and Ellwood, a former army captain, was forced to apologise saying “my reflection of my visit could have been much better worded and have been taken out of context”.

But that has not been enough to allay critics, who will have their say on his fate at the private meeting on Thursday, expected at 2pm.

Peers will soon be resuming the debate on the levelling up and regeneration bill. (They stopped for lunch, and they are currently on ministerial questions.)

Shortly before lunch the government lost a third vote on the bill, when peers voted for an amendment to allow local authorities to set planning application fees aimed at ensuring the processing cost is covered and does not fall on council taxpayers. That was passed by 181 votes to 148 – majority 33, a change. (See 1.42pm for more on the two earlier defeats.)

At the post-PMQs lobby briefing No 10 raised the stakes by claiming that, if Labour and other peers vote down the nutrient neutrality changes later today (see 9.25am), they would be blocking the construction of 100,000 homes.

The PM’s press secretary told journalists:

I think you can see the kind of political games being played that even [Keir Starmer’s] former housing secretary [Lisa Nandy] referred to not taking decisions to build housing as cowardice, and even Labour council leaders have been writing to the government urging us to take these steps to ensure houses that have local consent are built in these areas.

Asked whether the government amendment could be reintroduced when the bill returned to the government if the vote was lost tonight, the press secretary said that was not possible (because it was introduced only when the bill was in the Lords). She went on:

So the stakes are quite high … the next few hours will determine 100,000 homes.

Earlier this week Dorothy Bain KC, the lord advocate (chief prosecutor) in Scotland said she would not prosecute drug users for possession if they were were using drugs in a drug consumption room. Glasgow city council wants to open one as a pilot, and her announcement has now opened the door for this to happen, possibly within weeks.

During Scottish questions in the Commons earlier Alister Jack, the Scottish secretary, said that, although the UK government did not approve of the pilot, it would not try to block it. He told MPs:

Drug consumption rooms are not the easy solution.

There is no safe way to take illegal drugs. They devastate lives, the ruin families, they damage communities and the UK government believes the police and the procurator fiscal service should fully enforce the law.

However, if the Scottish government and the lord advocate decide to proceed with a pilot on drugs consumption rooms, the UK government will not intervene.