That’s all from the blog for now – thanks for reading. Here’s a recap of what happened on a busy day in politics:

• King Charles outlined the new Labour government’s legislative plans for the coming year at the State Opening of Parliament, unveiling 40 bills.
• Among the measures in the King’s Speech was a bill to bring rail services back into public ownership once their current private contracts expire. This will be done through a new public body – Great British Railways – which will oversee both train services as well as fares.
• The King’s Speech outlined a Better Buses Bill, which will aim to give local authorities more power to franchise their services and make it easier to create new publicly owned bus operators.
• Labour’s National Wealth Fund will see more investment in national infrastructure projects such as ports, gigafactories and hydrogen and steel projects.
• Labour pledged to reform England’s planning system with the primary aim of building 1.5 million homes over five years.

• The English Devolution Bill will aim to devolve more powers to local authorities to take on more responsibility over policy areas, including transport and planning.
• Legislation that will ensure the Office for Budget Responsibility provides forecasts for “significant changes to taxation or spending” also featured.
• Labour revived plans to phase out smoking and impose restrictions on the sale and marketing of vapes to children. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill progressively increases the age at which people can buy tobacco so that future generations will never legally be able to do so.
• The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill will take a first step to modernising the upper house of Parliament by removing the right of the almost 100 remaining hereditary peers to sit and vote.
• The Great British Energy Bill will set up GB Energy, a new state-owned energy company which will invest alongside the private sector in big projects facilitating the decarbonisation of the electricity grid.

• Sir Keir Starmer said that Labour will deliver “national renewal” after the “chaos of the past 14 years”.
• Rishi Sunak called on the Government to commit to raising defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030, as the Conservatives pledged in the general election campaign.
• Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey used his first speech in the Commons since the general election to urge the Labour government to reform social care.
• Ministers charged with tackling child poverty faced calls to scrap the two-child benefit limit before their new taskforce had even met for the first time.
• Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, called for the two-child benefit cap to be lifted in Parliament.
• Earlier on Wednesday, the Office for National Statistics confirmed that inflation stayed at 2 per cent in the 12 months leading up to June.
• Dame Priti Patel has reportedly decided to enter the Conservative leadership race to succeed Rishi Sunak.

Sir Keir Starmer faces the threat of an immediate mutiny from his own MPs challenging him over the government’s stance on child benefits and arms sales to Israel.

The new Labour government set out its legislative agenda with a King’s Speech promising to “make people better off”.But the Prime Minister faced pushback from his backbenchers for not being more radical in some policy areas, including the controversial cap on child benefits.

MPs are planning to table amendments to the King’s Speech on scrapping the two-child benefit limit – something the Prime Minister said he would like to reverse but cannot yet afford to.

The limit was implemented by the Conservative Government in 2017 and prevents families claiming the child element of universal credit or tax credit for more than two children.

Kim Johnson, MP for Liverpool Riverside, will lay her amendment calling for the cap to be removed with support from others on the left of the party, including Zarah Sultana and John McDonnell.

The Scottish National Party has also said it intends to table an amendment calling for the same.

Read more here.

Robert Jenrick turns to the subject of migration, condemning the Labour government for scrapping the Rwanda scheme.

He says: “Scrapping the only known credible deterrent, with nothing else to put in its place is going to surrender to the people-smuggling gangs. It is wrong, it is a mistake and I worry that we are going to rue the day we did that.”

He urges the Government to also take legal migration seriously, describing the failure of previous administrations to meet targets as damaging for democracy.

The former immigration minister warns that continued failure to address the issue could lead to the rise of far right parties.

Robert Jenrick, who is thought to be preparing a bid for the Tory leadership, says there needs to be a “proper diagnosis” of the failings of the previous Conservative government.

“I think we did get some things wrong,” he tells the Commons. “When we stood in 2019, we promised to get Brexit done and we did that… but we also promised that we would secure our borders, that we would ensure a strong economy and lower taxes and a strong NHS and public services, which the public rightly expect.

“And on those counts, we did not deliver.”

He says that some of the policies announced in the King’s Speech are “radical for the wrong reasons”, like the “ideological” pursuit of net zero, which could cause economic harm.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has been told keeping the two-child benefit cap in place is a “slap in the face”, as hard-pressed parents urge him to scrap the “cruel” limit.

Labour’s legislative agenda, set out in the King’s Speech on Wednesday, made no mention of the cap, which prevents parents from claiming universal credit or child tax credit for a third child.

Thea Jaffe, a single mother with three children in north London, told i she was losing out on £287 a month – £3,400 a year – because of the limit introduced by the Conservatives in 2017.

The 38-year-old said her financial struggles have become more difficult since her 10-month-old son Isaac came along last year.

She told i paying for clothes, food and other things for nine-year-old Moses and two-year-old Jasmine had become more expensive.

“It’s such a slap in the face,” Ms Jaffe said about the two-child cap. “It makes no sense, it’s not fair, it’s just wrong. It’s cruel. Parents shouldn’t be punished for having too many children.”

Read more from Adam Forrest here.

Back in the Commons, Priti Patel, who has reportedly decided to enter the Conservative leadership race, defends the record of the previous 14 years of Tory government.

“We’re proud of our record and the transformation we led,” she says.

She describes the transformation of the public finances as one key achievement of the Conservatives, claiming the Labour government has inherited a strong fiscal position.

She adds: “We’re proud to have supported the creation of 800 jobs per day on average, having the fastest economic growth of many of our competitors, cutting the tax burden on incomes and fuel duties, overseeing increases in doctors and nurses working in our NHS, more teacher numbers and schools raising standards.”

Liz Truss has accused officials of breaching the civil service code after her mini-budget was described as a “disaster” in Government documents about the King’s Speech.

The former prime minister complained that references to the “mistakes” of her economic policy, which unleashed chaos in the markets and tanked the pound, were “untrue political attacks”.

She has written to the head of the civil service, Simon Case, asking him to “urgently investigate how such material came to be included in this document, ensure suitable admonishment for those responsible and the immediate removal of such political materiial from the version of the document on gov.uk”.

A section of the document outlining the Budget Responsibility Bill – which would seek to strengthen the role of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – proposes that significant and permanent changes to tax and spend would be subject to an independent assessment by the Treasury watchdog.

This would be introduced “to ensure that the mistakes of Liz Truss ‘mini budget’ cannot be repeated”, the briefing says.

Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin has said that Labour’s programme for Government is “still dominated by the short-term, the tactics of gaining power and retaining it”.

He told MPs that it does not address “the fundamental challenges that threaten our national survival,” which include: “debt, digitisation […], decarbonisation, deglobalisation […], demographics […] and defence.”

“If Russia succeeds in Ukraine we can say goodbye to European and trans-Atlantic security.”

He said: “I hope this Government will use its considerable majority to offer to make the reforms the NHS needs for example, by finding the cross-party consensus that will be needed to drive those reforms through.

“This Government has an unrivalled opportunity finally to tackle the social care question,” but will also need cross-party support for this, he added.

The key thing is the speed. It’s not the money or the radicalism. It’s the speed with which Labour will make its initial round of reforms, and the demonstrable ease with which the previous government could have done them too, if it had had the inclination.

Most of the things that were announced in the King’s Speech today were not about money. That’ll come later, if the plan works. Instead, they were about will. Their primary intention was to encourage economic growth. And their secondary effect will be to do lasting damage to the Conservative brand, by showing how easily it could have made similar changes.

Take the planning and infrastructure bill. It will streamline the delivery process for critical infrastructure, reform compulsory purchase compensation rules, modernise planning committees and increase local planning authorities’ capacity. It’s intended to unlock new housing and infrastructure projects – to fundamentally tilt the system away from Nimbys and towards Yimbys. It is likely to encourage investment, make housing more affordable and provide homes where people want to live. It was all right there for the taking. But the Conservative Party could not do so, because its supporters were more likely to be homeowners who complain about development.

The plan here is quite clear. Starmer knows he has no money to spend. The economy is stagnating. People’s living standards have been ruined, making tax rises an unappealing economic concept even if it were not a dangerous electoral proposition. He is also hamstrung by his emphasis on long-term plans. Even in the best possible world, with government management working at full efficiency, it will take years before improved NHS performance is felt by the public.

The onus is therefore on quick, cheap reforms, which give a sense of movement and momentum.

Keep reading here.

Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington John McDonnell has called for the Government to stop arms sales to Israel.

He said that during the election campaign, “overhanging our whole debate was the issue of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

“Night after night, coming in and seeing more children being slaughtered and war crimes committed.

“I don’t think we’ll solve this problem unless we seek an immediate ceasefire.”

He said other immediate steps would include “stopping the arms sales to Israel” and “respecting the [International Criminal Court] in ensuring that we recognise that war crimes should be punish.

“I’ve been trying to mobilise the last government […to] accept seriously injured children in Gaza to come here for treatment. Not one visa has been issued to a Palestinian child […] I’ve written to the Foreign Secretary and also the Home Secretary, and I’m hoping that our Government can welcome those children here, so that they can receive the treatment they need and hopefully then be returned to a Palestinian state that we recognise and that lives in peace.”

By failing to overturn the two-child benefit cap, and other social security cuts, Labour is prioritising the wealth of the rich over the welfare of children.

Throughout the election campaign, voters consistently told pollsters the two most important issues were the NHS and the cost of living crisis. Labour had many good policies in today’s King’s Speech (from rail public ownership to the Hillsborough Law), but nothing to tackle the two most pressing issues.

The last Parliament will go down in history as the only one, postwar at least, in which living standards fell. NHS waiting lists have also surged to record levels, and child poverty has risen by 700,000 to 4.3 million.

And even the latter statistic masks the real pain – for those who were already in poverty, it is more brutal. More families than ever are existing in temporary accommodation without a home to call their own, and destitution has increased – last year one million children could not meet their most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed.

This has not happened by accident or even by negligence, but through deliberate policy changes by successive Conservative governments to freeze benefit rates and cap increases. Punitive measures such as the bedroom tax, the household benefit cap and, most egregiously, the two-child limit – which restricts child tax credit and universal credit to the first two children in a family – have all contributed.

Read more here.

SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn offered his “best wishes” to Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour colleagues.

He joked that he was “not sure who fared worse” in the election between the Tories and the SNP, but added that the “opportunity that is now before this Labour Government is enormous”.

He said: “It affords them the ability to deliver change. What that change looks like […] is so important. My colleagues and I on the SNP benches will try to do everything we possibly can to be as constructive as we can.

“I was a little bit disappointed today by, not necessarily some of the things that were in the King’s Speech, but some of those things that weren’t.”

He made reference to the SNP amendment to the Speech, proposing an end to the two-child benefit cap, which he described as a “heinous policy”.

“It retains children in poverty, hundreds and thousands of children across these isles.

“It was not mentioned in the Government’s programme today. Instead, all we have heard is that a taskforce is going to be created, no timeframe for that taskforce […] and all the while those children will remain in poverty.

“Surely it should be the bare minimum expectation of a Labour Government to seek to do everything it possibly can, immediately, to lift children out of poverty.”

Ministers charged with tackling child poverty have already faced calls to scrap the two-child benefit limit before their new taskforce has even met for the first time.

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall met child poverty charities on Wednesday morning to hear their views ahead of the announcement of the new taskforce that will develop Labour’s promised child poverty strategy.

But on the same day, many of those charities reiterated calls to abolish the two-child benefit cap that affects some 1.6 million children.

Labour has faced consistent pressure to scrap the limit since before the election, from charities and its own backbenchers, with some reported to be considering backing an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for the policy to be abolished.

Calls to abolish the two-child limit come against the background of rising child poverty, with more than four million children now living in low-income households.

But the party leadership has so far resisted such calls, claiming the fiscal situation means the cap cannot be abolished unless economic growth is secured first.

Instead, shortly after the King’s Speech on Wednesday, the Government announced a new taskforce to look at “all the available levers we have across Government” to deliver the “ambitious” child poverty strategy promised in Labour’s manifesto.

Dan Paskins, of Save the Children UK, welcomed the announcement of the taskforce as a “signal of intent”, but added that the strategy would not be “credible” without abolishing the two-child cap.

He said: “With 1.6 million children impacted by this cruel and unfair policy, the two-child limit punishes children just for having siblings.

“Scrapping it could immediately lift half a million children out of poverty and would be the first major step to deliver on the aims of the child poverty taskforce.”

Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said the taskforce was “a welcome first step”, but added that scrapping the cap “has to happen in the Government’s first Budget”.

Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch Dame Meg Hillier has told MPs that during the nearly 10 years she spent chairing the Public Accounts Committee under the last Government, she saw “many egregious examples of incompetence, bungling and waste”.

“Again and again, government bungles, poorly drafted contracts, lack of oversight, dodged responsibility, endless excuses, and the taxpayer picking up the tab.

“No wonder people were so angry at the election. No wonder they voted for change.

“Yet now, the true extent of the Tory mess is coming to light. As […] the Chancellor has revealed, it is even worse than we thought.

“The previous government partied, they squabbled, they helped their mates, but they did not fix the roof while the sun shone […] they weakened the fundamentals of our economy.

“The consequences of the mess left behind by the previous government are human […] Nearly one fifth of children in my borough of Hackney live in absolute poverty.

“My constituency is in the top five per cent of English constituencies with children who are income-deprived.

“This is the shameful legacy of 14 years of failure. In one of the greatest and richest cities, a bus ride from the financial powerhouse of Liverpool Street, no child should be cold or hungry.”

She called on the Government to “really drive that change to deliver” for housing around the country and particularly in inner-city areas, so people have the homes they need.

The Government is to hold fresh talks with the union representing train drivers in a bid to resolve their long-running pay dispute.

Aslef said there would be an initial meeting with the Department for Transport next Tuesday, voicing hopes of “constructive” talks.

It is understood the Rail Delivery Group, which represents train companies involved in the row, will not be involved in the discussions.

Aslef members have taken 18 days of strikes since the dispute started two years ago, causing huge disruption to passengers.

Sam Monaghan, chief executive of national care charity MHA, has said: “We congratulate the new Government on its first King’s Speech, but we feel an opportunity was missed to address some of the immediate and long-term issues faced by the social care sector.

“With demand for social care services continuing to rise, we desperately need to see more urgency around how changes will be delivered. The fair pay agreement is welcome, but only if it is backed by the funding required to successfully deliver it.

“On the back of yesterday’s ADASS report, which highlighted in stark detail the many challenges around sustainable funding and staffing, we had hoped to see more of a public commitment to fixing social care for the many people who rely on it and work within it.”

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey tells MPs that “we should all commit ourselves to a new politics where we disagree with respect, where we listen to each other”.

He pays tribute to the late Labour MP Sir Tony Lloyd, and condemned the “appalling” assassination attempt on Donald Trump.

He says that the England football team “did us proud” at the Euros.

He welcomes Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, and says that Labour “have an enormous undertaking, and we wish them well”.

He adds: “I read somewhere that the PM apparently surfed to power with a wave of Conservative failure, but can I say to him gently – with a pang of envy – watersports are my thing”, in a nod to his exploits during the election campaign.

He continues: “There is much to welcome in the programme set out today, not least the Government’s focus on getting our economy growing strongly again. The PM is right to say that building more homes is an essential part of that.

“The best way to build the many extra homes we need […] is to properly engage local people and communities.

“That is the community-led approach that we on these benches will continue to champion.”

He says that most voters believe that “nothing seems to be working as it should,” and that the electorate has “overwhelmingly rejected” the “out-of-touch Conservative government”, but also appears to have lost faith in the system, meaning that Labour has a “big job to do”.

“Where they act in the national interest […] we will support them.”

Sir Ed highlights issues with NHS and dentistry waiting lists, as well as the pressure on the social care system, and adds that “fixing this crisis in our NHS is essential, not only for people’s health and wellbeing, but also for our economy and growth”.

It is tradition that the first MPs to speak in the King’s Speech debate are chosen from the Government benches and provide a jokey commentary of their colleagues in the House.

Labour MP for Bootle Peter Dowd opened, joking that while he was not the first person in his family to be an MP he could at least claim to be the first to do the humble address for the King’s Speech.

He was followed by Florence Eshalomi, MP for Vauxhall & Camberwell Green, who said this was her “opportunity to get on record that Nigerian jollof is the best jollof” – referring to the rivalry between Nigerians and Ghanaians.

But perhaps the biggest laugh came for Rishi Sunak when it was time for his address – as Leader of the Opposition.

Welcoming new MPs to their seats, Sunak said: “On the government benches life comes at you fast. Soon you might be fortunate enough to be tapped on the shoulder and offered a junior ministerial role.

“Then you’ll find yourself attending Cabinet, then in the Cabinet. And then when the prime minister’s position becomes untenable, you might end up being called to the highest office.

“And before you know it, you have a bright future behind you. And you are left wondering whether you can credibly be an elder statesman at the age of 44.”

Sir Keir says: “My determination for everyone in our country – England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales – no matter where they started in life, is to feel that success belongs to them.

“It is a cause that I do believe unites this House and indeed the people of this great nation.”

He says that he carried out a tour of the UK’s four nations as soon as he was elected, and “it matters to me that we make progress on all matters across our nations.

“That [visit] was a statement of intent.”

Sir Keir Starmer says Labour will deliver “national renewal” after the “chaos of the past 14 years”.

“Mr Speaker, this Government has been elected to deliver nothing less than national renewal to stop the chaos of the past 14 years, turn the page on an era of politics as noisy performance, and return it to public service,” the Prime Minister told the Commons.

“And start the work of rebuilding our country. A determined rebuilding, a patient rebuilding, a calm rebuilding, a rejection in this complicated and volatile world of those who can only offer the easy answer, the snake oil charm of populism.

“Mr Speaker, as the last 14 years has shown, that road is a dead end for this country. It does nothing to fix our foundations, and the British people have rejected it, as they have throughout our history. What people really want is change, and change is what this government of service will deliver.”