Post Office campaigner Alan Bates says he’s been waiting a month for reply from PM about compensation delays – as it happened

Alan Bates arriving at Portcullis house, London, to give evidence to MPs about the Horizon scandal. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty Images

5.32pm GMT

Afternoon summary

• Treasury officials may have broken the law when they failed to alert the Office for Budget Responsibility about £9.5bn of spending that should have appeared in the March Tory budget, MPs have been told.

• Kemi Badenoch has appointed the former policing minister Chris Philp as shadow home secretary and Alex Burghart as her de-facto deputy, as the new Conservative leader set out her full shadow cabinet.

• The Post Office campaigner Sir Alan Bates has told MPs that Keir Starmer has not yet responded to his requests for help with settling redress claims for those affected by the Horizon scandal. (See 4.07pm and 4.23pm.)

• A planned strike by tube drivers that threatened to halt all London Underground services on Thursday has been called off, their union announced.

• China is blocking requests to rebuild the British embassy in Beijing while the fate of its controversial mega-embassy in east London is being decided, the Guardian can disclose.

5.23pm GMT

No 10 says it took time replying to Alan Bates' letter about Post Office compensation so it could get it right

Downing Street said Keir Starmer has not replied yet to Sir Alan Bates’ letter to him about compensation to victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal (see 4.07pm) because the government wants to take time to get it right.

Asked about Bates’ comments to the business committee, the prime minister’s spokesperson told journalists at the afternoon lobby briefing:

It was obviously right that we took the time to consider the issues raised in the letter to the prime minister, consider our response, make sure it was accurate and substantial and obviously we engaged with relevant departments to ensure that the prime minister’s response was as full as possible.

I think that response was issued earlier today.

On the substance of the issue, the government is committed to getting redress to those affected as quickly as possible and is doing all it can to increase the pace of redress across all schemes.

What we don’t want to do is set an arbitrary cut-off date which could result in some claimants missing the deadline. We obviously don’t want to put pressure on claimants and put them off contesting their claim.

But each postmaster eligible for the GLO scheme should receive substantial redress by the end of March and we are doing everything we can to achieve that goal.