SNP in ‘total meltdown’ following arrests and party funding investigation, say Scottish Tories – as it happened

First Minister Humza Yousaf before his speech to MSPs. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

5.53pm BST

Afternoon summary

• Scotland’s new first minister, Humza Yousaf, has set out a “fresh vision” for his next three years in government that delays, redraws or reverses a number of his predecessor Nicola Sturgeon’s key policies. But, as Libby Brooks reports, opposition leaders said any attempt at a relaunch had been “utterly torpedoed” by the arrest earlier on Tuesday of the SNP treasurer, Colin Beattie, amid the ongoing police investigation into the party’s funding and finances.

• The senior Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood has accused the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, of concealing a potential Russian “act of war” against an RAF spy plane, during an emergency debate in the Commons.

• The energy secretary, Grant Shapps, has urged Ofgem to turn words “into action” to ensure new industry rules designed to protect vulnerable people from being forced on to prepayment meters are properly enforced.

• The government is considering issuing guidance to single-sex schools in England saying that they cannot be legally obliged to take transgender pupils, as part of advice to be released this term.

Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, travelling to York today. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

5.29pm BST

Ministers ignored advice that would have stopped prisoners dying during Covid pandemic, MPs told

Ministers have not done enough to prevent deaths of prisoners in England and Wales, an independent reviewer has said.

Juliet Lyon, the chair of the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody until January this year, said ministers had ignored advice which would have helped to protect detainees during Covid, and the current state of prisons was “awful”.

Giving evidence to the Commons justice committee this afternoon, Lyon was asked if the government had done enough to protect prisoners during the Covid pandemic. She replied:

No ... They made a very rapid choice, as you know, to lock everyone down as their best way of trying to keep people safe. There were other choices that could have been made.

She said there had been talk of releasing 4,000 vulnerable prisoners during the pandemic, but in fact only 262 were released. Lyon said ministers ignored strong clinical advice that there should have been universal vaccination in prisons, as happened in care homes, because it was “not considered politically palatable”.

She told the committee:

That was a real revelation to me that ministers couldn’t accept the advice that was coming from every quarter because they feared that the public wouldn’t find it acceptable. I don’t believe that was a good enough reason to put people’s lives at risk.

The deprivations that happened particularly during Covid and the extreme imprisonment and the choices that were made to hold people in isolation, have ... continued in some shape or form.

Lyon suggested it would “concentrate minds” if ministers were made to apologise to families bereaved as a result of a death in custody.

Ending her evidence to the committee on a sombre note, she said:

Until and unless the prison service is able to be properly staffed and properly resourced and seen as a really important public service, with all that that involves, it’s really difficult for them to keep people safe.

Updated at 5.36pm BST