Davey claims ‘historic victory’ for Lib Dems after tokenistic vote in favour of customs union with EU – as it happened

Liberal Democrats leader Sir Ed Davey. Photograph: Jacob King/PA

5.30pm GMT

Afternoon summary

• The Conservatives have begun a policy review to slash the scope and cost of the benefits system, with Kemi Badenoch saying an “age of diagnosis” for “low-level mental conditions” was fast making it unaffordable.

• The former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield will chair the national grooming gangs inquiry in what will be a “moment of reckoning” for the nation, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has announced.

• Britain’s security services allowed a top agent inside the IRA to commit murders and then impeded a police investigation into the affair, according to a damning official report.

• Ed Davey has claimed a “historic victory” after the Commons passed a vote to allow a bill for the UK to join a custom union with the EU to go ahead. The bill won’t become law, and won’t even be debated again, but the short debate on it allowed MPs to air views for and against. (See 3.50pm and 4.33pm.)

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 5.32pm GMT

5.24pm GMT

During her Q&A today Kemi Badenoch rejected a suggestion (from my colleague Peter Walker) that her language about benefit claimants is too harsh. (See 10.42am.) But Peter (and perhaps Badenoch too) may be surprised to learn that Fraser Nelson, the Times columnist and former editor of the (pro-Tory) Spectator, agrees with Peter’s point. In a post on his Substack blog, Nelson says that, while Badenoch is right to argue that the welfare system incentivises people to claim benefits rather than work, she is wrong to say that claimants are to blame for this.

Here is an extract.

People respond to incentives and price signals: that’s why Budgets put the price of things up or down by a couple of percentage points. If you smash the economic rationale of low-paid work – as happened under the last Conservative government – then you remove the incentives to take job. Badenoch was right to speak about the 6m people on out of work benefits – a shocking figure and she’s one of the few politicians to use it. But let’s remember whose watch that happened under …

This is why the Tories need to be careful with their tone, or being even vaguely accusative of people who ‘think these jobs are beneath them’. Just before lockdown, the UK achieved the highest-ever economic participation rate. The moral character of the poor did not change since then: what changed was an insane economic system acting in ways that the Tories at the top did not realise. The failure was – and remains – in Whitehall.

Of course, an opposition needs to oppose. But if they’re seeking to find moral fault: well, that starts at the top. And if they think the problem is laziness or workshy people, they won’t fix it. Those affected are victims of a broken economic system.