More NHS staff to strike as Rishi Sunak confirms use of private healthcare – as it happened

6.00pm GMT

Early evening summary

• More than 100,000 civil servants will join one-day strike action on 1 February in a major escalation of action by the PCS union.

• Health unions will not submit joint evidence to the NHS pay review body about the rise staff should get in 2023-24, in a move that threatens the system by which most health service pay is decided.

• A deal could be close to end the long-running RMT strikes on the railway, industry bosses have told MPs, adding that customers’ confidence is “ebbing away” as they start to switch to rival modes of transport.

• Rishi Sunak has said he is now registered with an NHS GP, having previously used private healthcare, during a prime minister’s questions dominated by the state of the NHS and the strikes by health and ambulance staff.

• Boris Johnson said he was at “the most unsocially distanced party in the UK right now” at a No 10 Partygate event for which he was not fined by the police, ITV has reported.

• The Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen has lost the party whip, probably permanently, after he provoked widespread fury among colleagues and elsewhere by comparing the use of Covid vaccines to the Holocaust.

Keir Starmer at PMQs. Photograph: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor/PA

5.48pm GMT

Ambulance workers on the picket line outside Soundwell Ambulance Station in Bristol today. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA