Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.

It is “not a fait accompli” that Reform will finish ahead of the Scottish Conservatives at the next Holyrood election, Kemi Badenoch has told reporters in Glasgow.

After a visit to BAE Systems in Glasgow, the UK Tory leader, on her first visit north of the border since her election last November, said:

We are the most successful political party in the history of Western democracy. The idea that we’re suddenly going to disappear, just because there’s competition on the right is just not serious.

We have just been kicked out of government. Of course, people will go to protest parties until they are clear about where we’re going and until we have rebuilt trust.

Responding specifically to the claim by Reform’s Richard Tice, visiting Glasgow last week, that his party would do better than the Scottish Tories in next May’s Scottish parliament elections, she said:

It’s not a fait accompli, voting Reform just helps the SNP, so anyone who is a unionist, anyone who is on the right, voting Reform is just going to get more leftwing governments, and that’s what we saw at the last election.

She also denied that the debate about single sex spaces was toxic, saying:

There are some people who have decided to make it an issue of toxicity. I don’t think that it is a toxic debate. I think it is an honest debate. We can’t be afraid to tell the truth.

And she reprimanded reporters asking why it had taken her so long to visit Scotland since her election for trying to present her as an alien.

The constant trying to present the Conservative party leader, or the prime minister of the United Kingdom, as something alien to the country is quite wrong, and we should stop doing that.

The Department for Work and Pensions has published new figures highlighting the sharp rise in the number of people claiming the top rate of universal credit for people with sickness or a disability.

It says there are now 1.8 million people in this category – up from 1.4 million a year ago.

At the start of the pandemic there were only 360,000 people in this category, the DWP says.

The DWP says that some of the increase were expected, because sick and disabled people were migrating to universal credit from other benefits, but 70% of the increase was not expected by the department. It says the UK is the only G7 country with higher levels of economic activity than before Covid.

People on the top rate receive their benefits without being expected to look for work and in its news release the DWP says: “1.8 million people on universal credit are getting no support to find work.”

But an alternative interpretation would be that 1.8 million people who have declared an illness or disability are getting top-up out-of-work benefit payments.

People who claim universal credit because they are not working as a result of a health condition or a disability are subject to a work capability assessment (WCA). People assessed as being capable of working at some point in the future are put in the limited capability for work (LCW) category and expected to take part in activities that will help them find a job in the future.

But people considered unable to prepare for work are categorised as limited capability for work-related activity (LCWRA) and it is this group where the caseload has risen up to 1.8m.

In its news release, published alongside a report setting out the latest quarterly statistics for these benefits, the DWP explains how a LCWRA assessment leads to higher benefits.

The current system, in which people 25 and over on the standard rate of UC get £393.45 a month and those with a health condition get an additional £416.19, gives an incentive for people to say they can’t work – and get locked out of help and support – simply to get by financially.

Over the past five years, 67% of people on universal credit who have been through a WCA were considered LCWRA - a symptom of the assessment system pushing people to prove their inability to work for a more generous payout.

The DWP also says young people are increasingly being assessed as LCWRA.

The number of young people aged 16 to 24 on LCWRA has risen by 249% from 46,000 to 160,000 since the pandemic – demonstrating a worrying increase in the number people becoming trapped in inactivity early in life, with almost one million young people not in education, employment, or training.

It also says these figures show the WCA process is “broken”.

In a statement Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, said these figures showed that people are being “locked out of work by a failing welfare system which abandons people - when we know there are at least 200,000 people who want to work, and are crying out for the right support and a fair chance”.

Next week the DWP is due to publish its plans to change the way sickness and disability benefits are paid.

Ed Balls, the former Labour shadow chancellor, has said the government would be wrong to cut disability benefits for the most vulnerable people in society.

He was speaking in the latest episode of Political Currency, the podcast he co-hosts with George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor, who said that when he was at the Treasury he ruled out freezing Pip (the personal independence payment – a disability benefit) because he thought that was not very fair.

Next week the government is due to announce major cuts to sickness and disability benefits. The details have not not been announced, but one ITV News report last week said the Treasury wants to save up to £6bn by freezing the level at which Pip is paid (instead of uprating it in line with inflation, which normally happens with benefits), and making it harder to claim. The government wants to get more people off benefits and into work, but ITV said “even those with extreme disabilities in the unfit to work category are likely to lose money”.

Balls said:

It’s one thing to say the economy is not doing well and we’ve got a fiscal challenge … but cutting the benefits of the most vulnerable in our society who can’t work to pay for that - is not going to work. And it’s not a Labour thing to do … It’s not what they’re for.

Balls was a major figure in the Blair/Brown government, as Gordon Brown’s chief adviser and then as a cabinet minister. But he lost his seat as an MP in 2015 and he now works as a TV presenter and podcaster. He is married to Yvette Cooper, the current home secretary.

In the same episode Osborne implied that, if Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, does decide to freeze Pip, she will be acting even more harshly than he did. He said:

I didn’t freeze Pip. I thought [it] would not be regarded as very fair.

Osborne said he did try to cut eligibility for Pip in his 2016 budget, hoping to save £4bn, “which I guess, adjusting for inflation, is roughly what Labour is looking for now”. But Iain Duncan Smith, the then welfare secretary, resigned in protest, “and I had to back down”, Osborne said.

More than one in four patients undergoing urgent cancer checks now wait more than 28 days for the disease to be confirmed or ruled out, PA Media. In its report on the NHS England performance figures out today, PA says:

Data released today shows 73.4% of patients in England urgently referred for suspected cancer were diagnosed or had cancer ruled out within 28 days in January.

This is down from 78.1% the previous month and is the lowest figure since April 2024, as well as being below the government target of 75%.

The government and NHS England have set a new target of March 2026 for this figure to reach 80%.

In addition, the proportion of patients who had waited no longer than 62 days in January from an urgent suspected cancer referral, or consultant upgrade, to their first definitive treatment for cancer was 67.3%, down from 71.3%.

The government and NHS England have set a target of March 2026 for this figure to reach 75%.

Elsewhere, the NHS England figures show the overall waiting list for planned hospital treatments has fallen for the fifth month in a row. (See 9.53am.)

A total of 198,868 people in England had been waiting more than 52 weeks to start routine hospital treatment at the end of January, down from 200,375 at the end of December and the lowest number since November 2020.

In addition, 73.4% of patients in A&E were seen within four hours in February, up from 73% in January.

The number of people waiting more than 12 hours in A&E departments in England from a decision to admit to actually being admitted also stood at 47,623 in February, down from a record 61,529 in January.

In its own news release on today’s figures, NHS England presents a different take. It says:

NHS staff have more than halved the average wait for tests and checks since the height of the pandemic as the waiting list continues to fall, new data shows today.

Patients were waiting an average of 17 days for tests and checks in January – 43 days less than at the height of the pandemic (May 2020).

Average waits for tests are now the lowest since 2.1 weeks in February 2020.

Two of the leading health thinktanks in the UK have said that, while they can see the case for abolishing NHS England, the benefits for patients might be modest

In a statement, Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of the King’s Fund, said:

Today’s announcement lands on the same day that NHS stats show people continue to wait days in A&E and many patients remain stuck in hospital beds despite being well enough to leave. The most important question is how will the abolition of NHS England make it easier for people to get a GP appointment, shorten waits for planned care and improve people’s health? That hasn’t yet been set out – ministers will need to explain how the prize will be worth the price.

It is absolutely right that democratically elected politicians must have clear oversight of how the NHS delivers for patients and spends hundreds of billions of taxpayer money. It is also reasonable to want to deliver better value by reducing duplication and waste between two national bodies where they are performing a similar role. It is true that over its just over a decade of existence, NHS England has been asked to take on a lot more additional power, functions and therefore staff, than it was originally designed to do.

Having now made the decision to abolish NHS England, and while we still wait for the publication of the NHS 10 Year Plan, the government must be clear why this significant structural change at this time is necessary, and how it fits into their wider plans. The potential cost savings would be minimal in the context of the entire NHS budget, and so they must ensure that the changes produce the improved effectiveness which is sought by making this change.

And Thea Stein, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, said:

Today’s news will be devastating for staff at all levels of NHS England, and we must remain mindful of the human cost of this decision. With the public finances under extraordinary pressure it does, however, make sense to remove the duplication and bureaucracy that exists currently – and patients and the public are probably not going to shed many tears over the shifting of power from an arm’s-length body into central government.

But profound problems facing the NHS remain: how to meet growing patient need in the face of spiralling waiting lists and how to invest in care closer to home with the NHS’s wider finances already underwater and social care reform in the long grass. It is not immediately clear that rearranging the locus of the power at the top will make a huge and immediate difference to these issues, which ultimately will be how patients and the public judge the government.

Keir Starmer has said that he was not entirely surprised by Russia’s apparent rejection of the US-led ceasefire proposal for Ukraine.

In an interview with the News Agents podcast (perhaps he too consulted ChatGPT about the best podcasts to appear on – see 1.08pm), Starmer said:

Well, firstly, keep our focus on a lasting and secure peace in Ukraine, which is what we all want.

It doesn’t entirely surprise me that Russia is taking this stance. They’ve made it pretty clear. They put it in lights a number of times over.

I think progress was made on Tuesday, and I always felt that and hoped that out of Tuesday that would put the ball in the Russian court, if you like, where the pressure would come on Russia. That has now happened.

That is a good thing, because Russia is the aggressor. Russia is the country that where there had been previous deals and agreements, [it] has not honoured those.

We know that Putin has ambitions that are barely disguised.

The News Agents have posted the clip online. The full interview will be available later.

Jakub Krupa has more on what Starmer said on Ukraine in his Europe live blog, which today is largely focused on the Ukraine story.

Unison, which describes itself as the largest healthcare union in the UK, has described the announcement about the abolition of NHS England as “shambolic”. Christina McAnea, its general secretary, said:

The health service needs thousands more staff and to be able to hold on to experienced employees. At the moment, it’s struggling to do that. Giving staff a decent pay rise would help no end.

But this announcement will have left NHS England staff reeling. Just days ago they learned their numbers were to be slashed by half, now they discover their employer will cease to exist.

The way the news of the axing has been handled is nothing short of shambolic. It could surely have been managed in a more sympathetic way.

Downing Street has refused to commit to cutting the overall number of quangos.

At the morning lobby briefing, asked if the government was aiming for a net reduction in the number of quangos, the PM’s spokesperson replied:

The objective here is to deliver better outcomes for the public.

Where the right answer is to remove an organisation in order for the state to be more effective, then that’s what we’ll do.

But where previous governments have sort of said that the outcome here is fewer quangos or fewer civil servants, we are focused on the outcomes on public services, on working people, so we will take the decisions to do that.

In my opening post this morning, about Keir Starmer’s civil service reform speech, I speculated about AI replacing politicians. (See 9.35am.) It was intended as a joke, to lighten the tone at the end of something a bit long and dry, but it turns out that I was more prescient than I realised. Because New Scientist has just revealed that Peter Kyle, the science secretary, consults ChatGPT when he is conducting work research.

In his story Chris Stokel-Walker says:

This week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the UK government should be making far more use of AI in an effort to increase efficiency. “No person’s substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard,” he said.

Now, New Scientist has obtained records of Kyle’s ChatGPT use under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act, in what is believed to be a world-first test of whether chatbot interactions are subject to such laws.

These records show that Kyle asked ChatGPT to explain why the UK’s small and medium business (SMB) community has been so slow to adopt AI. ChatGPT returned a 10-point list of problems hindering adoption, including sections on “Limited Awareness and Understanding”, “Regulatory and Ethical Concerns” and “Lack of Government or Institutional Support”.

Stokel-Walker says Kyle also used ChatGPT to give advice on what podcasts he should appear on to reach an audience appropriate to his ministerial responsibilities, and to define scientific terms like antimatter, quantum and digital inclusion.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology initiatially rejected the FoI request on the grounds that Kyle consulted ChatGPT in a personal capacity as well as in a work capacity. But it responded when the request was revised just to cover work seaches.

In his story Stokel-Walker quotes one expert saying he was surprised that the department agreed to release the responses to a ChatGPT question under FoI. A laywer told New Scientist that, on the basis of this precedent, Google searches could be covered too. But another expert argued that Google searches don’t create new content, whereas a ChatGPT question does.

The DSIT told Stokel-Walker that the material Kyle got from ChatGPT was not a substitute for the “comprehensive advice” he received from officials.

Jeremy Hunt, the former Tory health secretary, said that potentially this announcement could lead to “real transformation”. He told Streeting:

Can I commend the boldness of today’s announcement. If the NHS is going to be turned around, it’s going to need radical reforms.

If the result of today is to replace bureaucratic over-centralisation with political over-centralisation, it will fail. But if what happens today is that we move to the decentralised model that we have for police and for schools, it could be the start of a real transformation.

Hunt also asked if this change would lead to the 100 or so central targets, making the NHS “the most micro-managed system in the world”, would be abolished.

In response, Streeting suggested that he agreed with Hunt that political over-centralisation was a mistake.

He said that he believed “democratic accountability matters, both in terms of patient outcomes and value for taxpayers money”.

But he also said that recently he had annoyed by health leaders, and charities, by attacking “this fallacy that the secretary of state can or should just fire endless instructions into the system, as if a secretary of state, or for that matter an NHS England, could just pull some big levers and drive change in such a vast and complex system. This is a falsehood.”

He went on:

This over-centralisation has got to stop.

And so for the future, it will be for the department and the NHS nationally to do those things that only the National Health Service can do, providing the enablers for the system as a whole.

But what we are presiding over and embarking on is the biggest decentralisation of power in the history of our National Health Service, putting more power into the hands of frontline leaders and clinicians – but, even more fundamentally and transformationally, more power into the hands of patients.

Simon Opher, the Labour MP for Stroud and a GP, asked if this change would reduce admin for doctors.

Streeting said he did think that was the case. He also said he did want to “liberate front-line staff and managers to help them be more effective”.

Streeting told MPs that many Tories had told him privately that they should have reversed the Andrew Lansley health reforms of 2012 that set up NHS England as the executive body in charge of the English health service, largely independent from central government. The reforms also introduced more competition in the provision of NHS service, in a manner that has been widely criticised on the grounds that it hindered necessary cooperation.

Streeting said:

I cannot count the number of Conservatives who have told me in private that they regret the 2012 reorganisation and wish they had reversed it when in office, but none of them acted.

They put it in the too difficult box while patients and taxpayers paid the price, because only Labour can reform the NHS.

Streeting says work has already started ending duplication between NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

During the transformation period, NHS England will focus on “holding local providers to account for the outcomes that really matter, cutting waiting times and managing their finances responsibly”.

He says that it will take two years to bring NHS England’s functions back into the DHSC entirely.

He goes on:

These reforms will deliver a much leaner top of the NHS making significant savings of hundreds of millions of pounds a year. That money will flow down to the front line to cut waiting times faster and deliver our Plan for Change by slashing through the layers of red tape and ending the infantilisation of frontline NHS leaders.

In the Commons Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has just started making an announcement about the abolition of NHS England.

He says the government is “turning one team into one organisation”.

Keir Starmer took some questions from staff members before he invited questions from journalists, and in response to one of the first points raised, he also raised the point about NHS England duplicating work done by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). He said:

On the question of NHS England, amongst the reasons we’re abolishing it is because of the duplication.

So if you can believe it. We’ve got a communications team in NHS England, communications team in the health department of government. Got a strategy team in NHS England, a strategy team in the government department …

If we strip that out, which is what we’re doing today, that then allows us to free up that money to put it where it needs to be, which is the front line.

One person who knows a lot about this subject is Starmer’s own director of strategic communications, James Lyons. Before joining the No 10 team, Lyons was head of communications for NHS England.

And another person who may have advised Starmer on the NHS England/DHSC duplication problem is Chris Wormald, the new cabinet secretary. He was as previously permanent secretary at DHSC.

Q: NHS England has a big presence in Leeds. What do you say to people worried about their jobs?

Starmer says there are always consequences of decisions. If people just focus on those, they will always be in a “defensive crouch” and nothing will ever get done.

He goes on:

Is it a good idea for the front line of the NHS to get rid of two sets of comms teams, two sets of strategy teams, two sets of policy teams, where people are basically doing the same thing. Yes, it is.

And it’s very difficult for me to look at people who desperately need the NHS, haven’t got the treatment that they want, at the speed they want, through no fault… [and] say I could do something about it, and I don’t think this duplication is very sensible, but I’m not going to do it.

That is what’s gone wrong in politics, which is an unwillingness to take difficult decisions. And that’s why we end up where we are.

So we have to take difficult decisions. Obviously, the people in NHS England are hugely qualified, highly skilled, doing a fantastic job, and we will work with them in relation to what comes next. Of course we will, because I believe in dignity and respect at work …

I’m not abandoning anybody in this. But I can’t look people in the eye who say I want a quicker appointment and say I could do something to help you, but I’m not going to do it, because I’m somehow fearful of making a difficult decision. I’m not going to do that. Haven’t done that in politics, I’m not going to start now.

And that is the end of the Q&A.

Just as he’s leaving, Starmer says how much he likes the Reckitt offices, which he describes as “modern” and “open”. He says he would like to do an office swap. This place is better than Downing Street, which is a “rabbit warren of dark rooms, half of them underground”.

Q: [From Christopher Hope from GB News] Will you scrap woke diversity and inclusion policies? That is what GB News viewers want.

Starmer says the government want to ensure money is well spent. He goes on:

We’re not slashing our commitment to equality and important issues like that. Nobody would expect that, but we are making sure we’re stripping away what is unnecessary.

Q: And how do you feel about the prospect of sending British troops to war with Russia?

Starmer says the point of deterrence is to avoid war.

He says he is working with other countries to ensure that a peace deal for Ukraine would last, because Ukraine was defended.

And the Department of Health and Social Care’s press release quotes And it quotes Wes Streeting, the health secretary, as saying:

This is the final nail in the coffin of the disastrous 2012 reorganisation, which led to the longest waiting times, lowest patient satisfaction, and most expensive NHS in history.

When money is so tight, we can’t justify such a complex bureaucracy with two organisations doing the same jobs. We need more doers, and fewer checkers, which is why I’m devolving resources and responsibilities to the NHS frontline.

NHS staff are working flat out but the current system sets them up to fail. These changes will support the huge number of capable, innovative and committed people across the NHS to deliver for patients and taxpayers.

Just because reform is difficult doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. This government will never duck the hard work of reform. We will take on vested interests and change the status quo, so the NHS can once again be there for you when you need it.

The Department of Health and Social Care has just put out a press released about the abolition of NHS England headlined:

World’s largest quango scrapped under reforms to put patients first

Explaining what is happening, it says:

NHS England will be brought back into the Department of Health and Social Care to put an end to the duplication resulting from two organisations doing the same job in a system currently holding staff back from delivering for patients. By stripping back layers of red tape and bureaucracy, more resources will be put back into the front line rather than being spent on unnecessary admin.

The reforms will reverse the 2012 top-down reorganisation of the NHS which created burdensome layers of bureaucracy without any clear lines of accountability. As Lord Darzi’s independent investigation into the state of the NHS found, the effects of this are still felt today and have left patients worse off under a convoluted and broken system.

The current system also penalises hardworking staff at NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care who desperately want to improve the lives of patients but who are being held back by the current overly bureaucratic and fragmented system.

Starmer is now taking questions from journalists.

Q: [From the BBC’s Chris Mason] How soon can you turn this around?

Starmer says he is frustrated. He cannot recall a time when internation instability was having as much impact at home.

He says he is not saying “it’s the fault of somebody else”. He is not blaming civil servants, he says.

He has tried to analyse what the problem is.

Starmer is now talking about NHS England.

He says it was a mistake for the last Conservative government to make it more independent of central government.

(He is referring to the Andrew Lansley reforms.)

He goes on:

I don’t see why decisions about £200bn of taxpayer money on something as fundamental to our security as the NHS should be taken by an arm’s length body, NHS England.

And I can’t, in all honesty, explain to the British people why they should spend their money on two layers of bureaucracy [NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care]. That money could and should be spent on, nurses, doctors, operations, GP appointments.

So today, I can announce we’re going to cut bureaucracy across the state, focus government on the priorities of working people, shift money to the front line.

So I’m bringing management of the NHS back into democratic control by abolishing the arms length body NHS England.

That will put the NHS back at the heart of government where it belongs, free it to focus on patients – less bureaucracy, with more money for nurses.

That is a big announcement, that goes way beyond what we were expecting Wes Streeting to announce later today. (See 9.48am.)

But what this will mean in practice is not clear.

Starmer is now talking about regulatation, and giving examples of where he thinks it has gone too far.

l give you an example. There’s a office conversion in Bingley, which, as you know, is in Yorkshire. That is an office conversion that will create 139 homes.

But now the future of that is uncertain because the regulator was not properly consulted on the power of cricket balls. That’s 139 homes. Now just think of the people, the families, the individuals who want those homes to buy, those homes to make their life and now they’re held up. Why? You’ll decide whether this is a good reason because I’m going to quote this is the reason ‘because the ball strike assessment doesn’t appear to be undertaken by a specialist, qualified consultant’. So that’s what’s holding up these 139 homes.

And if you put that in these contexts, people across Britain are frustrated. They don’t think politics works for them. It doesn’t deliver on its promises. How can you justify that in such circumstances that parts of the state see their job as blocking the government from doing the very things that it was elected to do?

Starmer says the figures just out this morning showing waiting lists down for the fifth month in a row. (See 9.53am.)

He says he is committed to reforming public services, and says he has always believed in the power of government.

There was a good example of government at its best last summer, he says.

When we had those terrible riots … what we saw then, in response, was dynamic. It was strong, it was urgent. It was what I call active government, on the pitch, doing what was needed, acting.

But for many of us, I think the feeling is we don’t really have that everywhere all of the time at the moment.

Starmer explains what he thinks is going wrong at the moment, using some of the language briefed in advance. (See 9.35am.)

The state employs more people than we’ve employed for decades, and yet look around the country; do you see good value everywhere? Because I don’t.

I actually think it’s weaker than it’s ever been, overstretched, unfocused, trying to do too much, doing it badly, unable to deliver the security that people need.

I believe that working people want an active government. They don’t want a weak state. They want it to secure our future, to take the big decisions so they can get on with their lives.

So we don’t want a bigger state, a more intrusive state, an over-expanding state, a state that demands more and more of people as it itself fails to deliver on core purposes.

Starmer says AI will enable civil servants to work more effectively. He stresses that he is “not about questioning the dedication or the effort of civil servants”.

Keir Starmer speaking about civil service reform at an event in Yorkshire. He is at the Reckitt HQ.

He starts by saying that at the election Labour promised change.

The decision not to classify Axel Rudakubana as a terrorist following the Southport murders was right because it would be unhelpful to stretch the definition of terrorism to cover all extreme violence, Jonathan Hall KC, the UK’s terror watchdog, has concluded. Rachel Hall has the story.

The Times today is running a story saying that Peter Kyle, the science secretary, “has described himself as a ‘disruptor’ with similarities to Elon Musk or Dominic Cummings” because he wants to use AI to modernise the delivery of public services.

As explained on the blog yesterday, the government is now in favour of “disruptor” politics.

But, an in interview with LBC, Kyle was keen to clarify what this meant. Asked if he wanted to be seen as a disruptor like Musk or Cummings, he replied:

I aspire to be a disruptor in a positive way that takes people with us and excites people for change.

The issue about disruptors and disruption – in the past, it’s been used in a fearful way, in a threatening way, in a way that actually creates circumstances where people are fearful of change.

In Keir Starmer as prime minister, you see somebody who wants to lead positively through change, but yes, be assiduous and be determined in delivering the outcome.

The headline hospital waiting list figure for England has fallen for the fifth month in a row, PA Media reports.

An estimated 7.43m treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of January, down from 7.46m at the end of December, NHS England figures show.

This is the lowest figure since April 2023.

But 6.25m patients were estimated to be waiting for treatments at the end of January, up slightly from 6.24m at the end of December.

The two figures are different because some individuals are waiting for more than one procedure.

The waiting list hit a record high in September 2023, with 7.77m treatments and 6.5m patients.

Good morning. All prime ministers, sooner or later, get frustrated when they realise that the central government machine isn’t as effective as they would like. They arrive thinking that if they tell their officials to do something, it will happen, and they find out that it’s not that simple. When talking about this, they normally combine their criticism of the system with comments about how the individual civil servants with whom they work personally are excellent.

Keir Starmer has arrived at this stage more quickly than some of his predecessors and this week there have been a series of announcements about shaking up Whitehall. Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has said measures will be taken to ease out officials who are under-performing. On Tuesday Starmer told cabinet that the government should be taking more responsibility for decisions, and not outsourcing them to regulators. And today Starmer is going to say that the state has become “bigger, but weaker”.

Ahead of the speech (or mini-speech – No 10 are billing it as an intervention, not a proper, set-piece policy speech), Starmer has published an article in the Daily Telegraph setting out his thinking.

Starmer says he is only interested in making the state more effective, and does not care if it gets bigger or smaller.

We need to go further and faster on security and renewal. In such uncertain times, people want a state that will take care of the big questions, not a bigger state that asks more from them. We need to be operating at maximum efficiency and strength. I believe in the power of the state. I’m not interested in ideological arguments about whether it should be bigger or smaller. I simply want it to work.

I saw the state at its best in our response to the riots last summer. It was dynamic, strong and urgent. But for the most part, that’s not the state that most people will recognise.

And he says the state has become “overcautious” and “flabby”. He cites planning policy as an example.

I heard from a family business owner in Wales that builds homes for first-time buyers. During the consultation delays and the lengthy planning application, the cost of resources went up. The regulations held him back for so long that he lost the site. Business unable to grow because of red tape. Families unable to buy because an overcautious flabby state got in the way.

As Rowena Mason reports in her preview, Starmer is also going to use the speech to say artificial intelligence (AI) should be doing more work currently done by civil servants.

According to the extracts released by No 10 in advance, Starmer will argue that civil service reform should be shaped by the mantra:

No person’s substantive time should be spent on a task where digital or AI can do it better, quicker and to the same high quality and standard.

Starmer will be taking questions. Obviously reporters will want to question him about the growing Labour revolt over the proposed sickness and disability benefit cuts, but hopefully someone will ask if this mantra should apply to politicians too. You would not want AI running the control (I presume?), but most ministers who turn up on the morning interview programmes to regurgitate the No 10 line to take could easily be replaced by an AI bot.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

9.30am: NHS England publishes its latest monthly performance figures.

10am: Helen Whately, the former care minister, gives evidence to the Covid inquiry as part of its module looking at PPE procurement.

After 10.30am: Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, makes a statement on next week’s Commons business.

Morning: Keir Starmer is doing a Q&A in Yorkshire where he will deliver a short speech about reforming the state.

Noon: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions at Holyrood.

Early afternoon: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit near Glasgow where she is expected to speak to reporters.

And at some point today Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is holding a meeting with the Sentencing Council to discuss the guidelines that Mahmood claims would implement “two-tier” justice.

If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.

If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.

I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.