Reeves says she should have checked rental licence had been obtained as letting agent apologises – as it happened

Rachel Reeves at 11 Downing Street. Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

6.50pm GMT

Early evening summary

• The lettings agency that rented out Rachel Reeves’s family home has taken responsibility for the failure to apply for a council licence and apologised for the error, quashing speculation about the chancellor’s position.

• The Conservative MP Katie Lam spoke “imprecisely” in stating the party would deport large numbers of legally settled families from the UK, Kemi Badenoch said, adding she had no plans to make tougher immigration rules retrospective.

• Ministers are planning to speed up public appointments to bodies such as Ofcom, the Environment Agency and BBC by allowing more of the hiring process to be delegated to senior officials.

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.

6.43pm GMT

This is from the former Tory MP Miriam Cates, criticising the party for calling for Rachel Reeves’s resignation over her rental licence error.

If most Brits seriously think that inadvertently failing to obtain an obscure housing rental licence makes someone unfit to serve as Chancellor, then quite frankly we richly deserve to be governed by uninspiring technocrats.

The former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has posted a message on social media saying he agrees.

In the last parliament Cates co-chaired the New Conservatives group with Danny Kruger, who has defected to Reform UK. Reform UK hasn’t been calling for Reeves’s resignation today. And, in general, the Reform leader Nigel Farage is reluctant to call for ministerial resignations over misconduct allegations – perhaps in part because he is regularly criticised on standards grounds himself.