Levelling up bill includes no funding to make levelling up happen, say MPs – as it happened

A factory in Longton, Stoke on Trent. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

4.36pm BST

Afternoon summary

• Boris Johnson has made a final visit to Kyiv as prime minister, telling the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that the country “can and will win the war”.

• Rishi Sunak has declined to say he would vote for an emergency budget brought forward by Liz Truss to enact tax cuts, after arguing that it would cause an inflationary spiral and damage the economy.

• Truss would be “robbing Peter to pay Paul” if she diverted £13bn of funding for the NHS to deal with a Covid backlog in social care, experts have said.

• The government’s levelling up bill has been criticised by MPs for not including the funding needed to make levelling up happen. (See 2.09pm.)

• Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, is to back the growing Enough is Enough movement, whose leaders are planning dozens of rallies against the cost of living crisis which they say will result in people dying. As my colleague Robert Booth reports, Burnham, a former Labour health secretary viewed as a centrist, joins a group with a growing network of local activists in more than 70 towns and cities, from Crawley to Blackpool. Its demands include a cut to the energy price cap to the pre-April level of £1,277 a year, a real-terms public sector pay rise, a reverse to the national insurance hike, and a £20-a-week universal credit increase – a programme that could cost more than £100bn a year.

• Scotland’s spending deficit has hit a record of nearly £2,200 a head, despite a massive increase in tax revenues driven by the global surge in oil prices.

Boris Johnson receiving Ukraine’s order of liberty, the country’s highest award for foreign nationals, from the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in Kyiv today. Photograph: Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA

4.23pm BST

Covid-19 testing among NHS and care home staff with no symptoms in England is to be “paused” at the end of August, the Department of Health and Social Care has announced.

Officials said that the decision to stop all “asymptomatic testing” comes as cases of the virus continue to fall.

Asymptomatic testing will remain in place for people being admitted hospices and for those going into care homes and for immunocompromised patients who are being admitted to hospital, the DHSC says in its news release.

Updated at 4.25pm BST