Rishi Sunak flew back to London from Dorset last night before flying to Cornwall this morning, No 10 confirms – as it happened

• Elections for the Northern Ireland assembly are to be delayed again, with a new deadline of 18 January next year for the Democratic Unionist party to return to power-sharing, the UK government has announced.

• Rishi Sunak has rebuked Lee Anderson just 48 hours into Anderson’s career as Conservative party vice-chair after he said he supported the death penalty because “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”.

The government has published two consultation documents setting out how minimum service levels could operate under its strikes bill in two sectors. The ambulance service one is here and the fire and rescue services one is here.

This is what the ambulance service one says about the minimum services that ambulance staff would have to provide during an ambulance strike under the government’s plan:

Our proposed approach is that the minimum service level would mean that the employer responsible for running an ambulance service would be required to ensure the resources required to respond appropriately to life-threatening and emergency incidents are in place. By the term ‘life-threatening and emergency incidents’ in England and their equivalent in Wales and Scotland, we mean calls that could include stroke, chest pain, loss of consciousness, breathing difficulties, major lacerations, compound fractures, sepsis and major burns, among other incidents of similar severity.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa), which was set up after the expenses scandal to decide what MPs should be paid, has decided they should get a 2.9% increase in 2023-24.

This is well below the current rate of inflation (10.5%), and below what it is likely to be by the end of the year, even if Rishi Sunak achieves his aim of halving it. The Bank of England expects CPI inflation to be around 4% at the end of the year.

Ipsa has chosen this number because its policy is to increase MPs’ pay line with the amount by which public sector earnings increased in the previous year, and 2.9% is the figure for the 2021-22 increase.

It means that from 1 April, MPs’ salaries will go up from £84,144 to £86,584.

Richard Lloyd, Ipsa’s chair, said:

In confirming MPs pay for next year, we have once again considered very carefully the extremely difficult economic circumstances, the government’s evolving approach to public sector pay in the light of forecasted rates of inflation, and the principle that MPs’ pay should be reflective of their responsibility in our democracy.

Our aim is to ensure that pay is fair for MPs, regardless of their financial circumstances, to support the most diverse of parliaments. Serving as an MP should not be the preserve of those wealthy enough to fund it themselves. It is important for our democracy that people from any background should see representing their communities in parliament as a possibility.

Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin president, has described the UK government’s decision to push back the deadline for the next Stormont elections as “legislating for further drift”.

Speaking to the media after a meeting with Chris Heaton-Harris, the Northern Ireland secretary, she said it was unacceptable for the DUP to keep blocking the creation of a power-sharing executive. “The idea that the DUP, on a rolling basis, would prevent that could not possibly be acceptable to anybody who calls themselves a democrat,” she said.

The DUP is boycotting the power-sharing executive because it wants to Northern Ireland protocol overhauled or abolished first. Under current law, with no executive formed, a fresh election should take place, but the government is legislating to ensure no election is necessary until next year.

McDonald said:

The secretary of state himself expressed a level of frustration at the fact that there is no executive – he tells us that he wishes to see the institutions re-established, we are prepared to take him on his word.

I have described the decision to set the election deadline back to January as legislating for further drift, I think that’s a real danger. I hope I’m wrong in that, and I hope that the positive noises that we have been hearing in recent times actually amount now to a result – inclusive government back up and running again with the kind of budget that will be needed here to support health services, to support education, to support the infrastructural needs of this place, which are very significant.

Anneliese Dodds, the Labour party chair, has also criticised Rishi Sunak for flying around the UK too much instead of taking the train. She says it shows he’s out of touch.

Seven Russian nationals have been hit with sanctions by the UK and US over their links to the development and deployment of ransomware, as part of a government crackdown on cybercriminals, PA Media report. PA says:

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) said asset freezes and travel bans had been imposed on the seven individuals for their ties to strains of ransomware which had been used to attack UK infrastructure, and others internationally.

Ransomware is a form of cyber-attack that locks files and data on a user’s computer and demands payment in order for them to be released back to the owner and has been used as part of a number of high-profile cyber-attacks in recent years, including the 2017 attack on the NHS.

The FCDO said recent victims of this type of cybercrime included UK schools and local authorities, while the National Crime Agency (NCA) had identified 149 British victims who had been affected by strains of ransomware linked to the sanctioned individuals and was responsible for extricating at least an estimated £27m.

James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, said:

By sanctioning these cybercriminals, we are sending a clear signal to them and others involved in ransomware that they will be held to account.

These cynical cyber-attacks cause real damage to people’s lives and livelihoods.

We will always put our national security first by protecting the UK and our allies from serious organised crime – whatever its form and wherever it originates.

Latest figures suggest only 4% of 2 million people without useable ID under new election rule will get one before May poll

Peter Walker

Efforts to provide free photo ID to would-be voters who lack it before new election rules are used nationally for the first time in May are still faltering, according to information passed to the Guardian.

At the start of this month, just 10,000 people had applied for a so-called voter authority certificate, issued by councils to those who do not have one of the small list of photo ID documents now needed for people to vote in person.

As of today, a source has said, the total number of applications via a central government website, which are then passed on to councils, is slightly below 16,000, indicating a continued lack of public awareness about the new rules.

Voter ID will be used nationally for the first time in the UK outside Northern Ireland at local elections on 4 May, just 12 weeks away. If the current rate of about 5,000 applications a week fails to pick up, that would mean around 75,000 certificates being issued overall, less than 4% of the official estimate of 2 million voters who do not have useable ID.

The Electoral Commission has already run an advertising campaign about the new system, which has seemingly reached few people, and will be concerned at the idea of very large numbers of people being potentially disenfranchised.

UPDATE: In the comments adamcgf points out that, if you don’t have photo ID and don’t want to get one, you can also vote by post. There is an application form here.

Another Conservative MP has announced that they are standing down at the next election. Jo Gideon was only elected in 2019, to represent Stoke-on -Trent Central. In a message posted on Twitter, she says she is not standing again.

Gideon does not give a reason for her decision. There are 17 Tories who have already said they are not standing again, and some of them are relatively young (like Dehenna Davison, another MP first elected in 2019, who is 29). But Gideon is 70.

She also had a majority of just 670 at the last election, which may have lessened her enthusiasm for fighting another campaign.

Zac Goldsmith, a Foreign Office minister, has spoken out against his own government’s plans to shelve import bans of fur and foie gras, which were supposed to be a “Brexit bonus”, my colleague Helena Horton reports.