Is Sunak winning over the Universal Credit uplift?

If the Treasury gets its way, the Chancellor will score a big victory. But Ministers should watch for Labour stealing their thunder over taper rates.

Paul Maynard: The pandemic has left many people with serious health and financial problems

‘Social prescribing’ can really help to resolve the complex web of financial, health and legal issues the most vulnerable face.

Paul Maynard: There are better ways to help low-income families than the Universal Credit uplift

There will always be a case for just giving people money, but ministers should consider a much wider spread of better-targeted interventions instead.

Paul Maynard: Our political problem with free school meals isn’t happening by accident. We are failing to focus on life chances.

We don’t just need to build back better with economic policy, but use the challenges of the pandemic to address social concerns too.

How to ensure that disadvantaged children are fed when schools are closed

Ministers could not have handled the matter worse if they’d tried. But Paul Maynard, pictured, is championing a solution.

Conservative MPs made a strong case against Labour’s free school meal plans in the Commons yesterday

The media have been quick to pick up on some less well-chosen remarks, but this paints a misleading picture of the full debate.

Paul Maynard: Here’s why I believe as an ex-Minister that a hard rain may indeed be coming for the civil service

The machinery of state has shown itself to lack the bandwidth and agility required to deliver complexity at pace.

Cummings 1) Rolling list of Conservative MPs who’ve called on him to go

We’re now on Day Four of the controversy. This list began on Day Two and continues. One Minister has resigned from the Government.

Paul Maynard and Tim Alderslade: The Government must support Britain’s world-leading air transport industry

The right measures now will not only keep companies afloat in the short term but equip them to support an economic rebound when the crisis is passed.

HS2. All aboard the Ninky Nonk.

This site would scrap the scheme. But sunk political costs as well as economic ones are likely to keep this Cameron modernisation legacy project chugging on and on.

Which MP is backing which candidate. Our named estimates. Johnson 131, Hunt 48, Gove 36, Javid 22

Here’s our best stab at who is voting for whom, and this list will be updated each morning, as the contest continues.

Seven Cabinet Ministers. Half the Whips Office. Eleven Ministers. All these failed to back the Government in yesterday’s extension vote.

Now some of these MPs may have been ill, or absent, or abroad. But how many were slipped with the connivance of the system?

Over-shuffling the whips’ office has undermined its effectiveness

All but one of the current team has been appointed since May became Prime Minister. What institutional memory are they supposed to draw on?

Battlegrounds Revisited 1) The North West

In the aftermath of the election, we revisit our regional profiles to see how the parties fared compared to expectations.

Tony Lodge: This competition probe may stop Sir Humphrey blocking more choice on the railways

The Competition and Markets Authority is set to intervene – which is cause for hope.