Labour’s health spokesperson Wes Streeting has said “Rishi Sunak has failed on the NHS” after new NHS England data showed that despite a slight fall, waiting lists are still higher than when Sunak promised to bring them down in January 2023. NHS England also missed its target on A&E waiting times, though the target on rapid cancer referrals was met for the first time. At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, former Post office boss David Smith acknowledged the “substantial distress” he had caused after telling the Post Office staff the result of Seema Misra’s trial was “brilliant news”. Misra was handed a 15-month prison sentence when pregnant. Former Post Office chair Sir Michael Hodgkinson also offered an apology, but his words came after a passage in which Sam Stein KC skewered him for his lack of curiosity in the way in which the company he chaired was prosecuting people. UK taxpayers have paid out more than £34,000 to cover the cost of science secretary Michelle Donelan’s libel case, more than double the sum the government had previously admitted. The Unite union has announced that about 1,500 steelworkers at Tata based in Port Talbot and Newport Llanwern have voted to take industrial action over plans to close its blast furnaces with the loss of 2,800 jobs. Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader Daisy Cooper has called on the prime minister to kick Nick Fletcher out of the party after he appeared to endorse Reform UK MP Lee Anderson. Bus drivers will be officially getting younger under government plans to relax laws on 18-year-olds behind the wheel. The news comes on the day Labour’s shadow transport secretary Louise Haigh announced plans to end what she described as the “managed decline” of the deregulated bus network under successive Tory government. Thank you for your comments today. I will be back with you tomorrow, slightly earlier than I had intended, as the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry is going to start earlier than scheduled. I will see you then, have a good evening.