UK politics: Government abandons plans to delay 30 local council elections in May – as it happened

A dog outside a polling station Photograph: Maureen McLean/REX/Shutterstock

6.15pm GMT

Early evening summary

• Ministers have dropped plans to delay 30 local elections this May after receiving legal advice that doing so might be unlawful. The news was announced about two hours after Keir Starmer gave an interview to Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine in which he seemed to rule out further U-turns. James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, has sent an open letter to Steve Reed, the housing secretary who ordered the U-turn, saying that he needs to justify the decisions he took in this case – or resign. Cleverly said:

The reality is that Labour are scared of voters. I believe that you have manipulated the democratic process to serve Labour’s political interests. Rather than postponing the elections, Labour should have postponed Angela Rayner’s botched, top-down and rushed unitary restructuring.

There are now serious questions about your personal propriety as a minister. The sunlight of transparency is the only way forward to address the way in which our democracy has been tarnished. If you are unable or unwilling to answer these questions, you must resign.

Here is an extract from Cleverly’s letter.

“Wednesbury unreasonableness” is a test of unreasonableness that applies in judicial review cases.

• Keir Starmer has pledged action on young people’s access to social media in “months, not years”, while saying this did not necessarily mean a complete ban on access for under-16s.

• Keir Starmer has said Britain “needs to go faster” on defence spending, though any increase to military budgets in this parliament would probably not be as high as the £15bn suggested in an overnight report.

• The Cabinet Office is examining the commissioning of a report that made false claims about journalists who were investigating Labour Together, the thinktank closely linked to Keir Starmer, a cabinet minister has said.

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

Updated at 6.36pm GMT

6.01pm GMT

Norfolk elections going ahead sets Farage's Reform UK up for contest with Rupert Lowe's new party

Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.

The green light for Norfolk county council’s election to go ahead sets up a clash between Nigel Farage and his one-time fellow Reform Rupert Lowe, with whom he has had a spectacular fall-out.

Lowe launched his own Great Yarmouth First Party on Friday in the Norfolk town, which I covered here, and it will be aiming to win all seats in that borough.

Farage sought to laugh off the challenge of Lowe’s party when asked about it today but the Norfolk MP’s new national party and rival to Reform, Restore Britain, will aim to act as an umbrella for other independents now, including in areas where elections will go ahead

Elsewhere, locations where Reform is expecting to do well include Basildon borough council, Cannock Chase district council, Harlow borough council, West Sussex borough council and Thurrock council.

Farage said in Romford today:

You can look at Norfolk, Suffolk, East Sussex and West Sussex, and you can say, well, these are the Tory heartlands. But I think there’s going to be a degree of punishment voting going on when these elections happen. So I fancy our chances there.

However Reform now faces the challenge of ramping up its candidate selections, which Farage dismissed as a major issue, saying that all parties would now be “panicking” and that Reform would be able to draw on its significantly increased membership.

If you think about the run-up to the elections last year in May, we put more candidates in the field than any other party and we had very few problems.