At her press conference, Kemi Badenoch said she would not scrap the pension triple lock to fund higher defence spending.

Asked about this, she replied:

You know very well that very single time I’m asked this question, I say that the triple lock is not where the issue is.

Our welfare bill … we have a welfare plan till 2031. We do not have a defence investment plan for next year.

If we get people off welfare and into work, it is a double whammy. We’re not paying their benefits, and they are paying more tax and helping to grow the economy.

We came into 2010 with a lot of pensioner poverty. That is why the triple lock was put in place. Rather than moving money around and robbing Peter to pay Paul, what we need to do is get people into work and start funding our defence.

At his press conference, Robert Jenrick is being asked about Labour’s social media ban for under-16s.

He says he is a parent of young girls, and so he understands why this is a concern. He thinks the Labour plan is “well intentioned”.

But he goes on:

Nigel and I are sceptical about this. We think it is very impractical and that it’s highly unlikely to succeed and deliver the outcomes that it aims to do.

You only have to look at the uptake of VPNs by people across the country immediately after the Online Safety Act came into force.

Jenrick said the evidence from Australia was very mixed. He went:

A majority of the young people in Australia who are subject to the ban there are still on social media, they’re still using it because they’re smart, they found a way around this. So it doesn’t feel to us like this is the right way to proceed.

Jenrick also said he and Farage were worried this could be “a backdoor route into mandatory ID”.

He ended saying Keir Starmer’s plan was “very likely to fail and have a lot of unintended consequences”.

Kemi Badenoch has been holding a press conference at the same time as Robert Jenrick. She said Keir Starmer should resign if he cannot prove that the long-delayed defence investment plan (Dip) will protect national security.

She said the Tories would apply three tests to decide if the Dip would protect national security.

First, it had to ensure defence spending rose ot 3% of GDP by 2030. “As a minimum, the funding must deliver the additional £28bn over four years that the chief of defence staff has asked for”, Badenoch said.

Second, the Dip had to meet a “readiness” test, she said. She said spending could not be “backloaded” into the next parliament.

And, third, the Dip had to pass a “capability” test. Badenoch said:

The plan must be transformative. It must enable us to address the threats of the next war, not the last. The defence investment plan should equip Britain with a more lethal and operationally effective armed forces with a mixture of traditional equipment and modern tech such as drones and counter drones.

Badenoch said Starmer should resign if his Dip could not pass these tests.

If the prime minister is unable to provide the leadership within his cabinet to deliver a defence investment plan that meets these three tests, and he should resign now and make way for a leader who can.

Yesterday Nigel Farage published a 6,000-word essay on his new Substack account claimed that Britain is a two-tier state – biased against white people. There is a much shorter rebuttal explaining Farage’s charge does not stack up from Rob Powell from Sky News here.

But, at his press conference this morning, Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson is banging away at the same theme. He claims that for at least the last 20 years the labour market has been biased against British workers who have faced unfair competition from migrant workers willing to accept low pay.

He says Reform UK would address this with two new policies.

• Reform UK would scrap Labour’s rise in employer national insurance contributions – but only for British workers, Jenrick says.

• And Reform UK would impose a migrant labour levy on firms that employ foreign workers. It will be extremely low for high-skilled workers, but it will “clamp down hard, very hard, on employers who are dependent on cheap foreign labour”, Jenrick says.

Jenrick said the full details of the migrant levy would be set out nearer the election. But he said that a levy set at around £3,750 for a full-time worker on the national living wage could raise £10bn from non-EU migrants. This would more than pay for scrapping Labour’s employer NICs increase, he says.

Sundus Abdi is a Guardian reporter.

YouTube has said that the social media ban for under-16s announced by Keir Starmer this morning could push teenagers into using “less-safe services”.

A YouTube spokesperson said:

We’ve invested in expert-led, age-appropriate experiences and default protections for teens for over a decade and will continue to do so.

YouTube is a vital resource for young people, educators and parents.

Blanket bans push kids out of such curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less-safe services.

Shephard turns to the Makerfield byelection.

Q: Do you want Andy Burnham to win the byelection.

Yes, said Starmer.

Q: So what will happen if he challenges you?

Starmer said he did not think there should be a leadership challenge.

But, if there is one, he will fight it, he said.

He said he was elected two years ago with a mandate to serve for five years.

He said he always said change would take time. He completely understood why people want that to happen more quickly.

Charities that work on behalf of children have welcomed the government’s announcement.

Chris Sherwood, chief executive at the NSPCC, said:

Today is a win for children and parents and all of us who have campaigned for better child protection online. Big Tech must not have access to our children where their dangerous platforms are causing appalling harm to young people. This is a watershed moment for child protection.

And Lynn Perry, chief executive of Barnardo’s, said:

For too long, children have been put in harm’s way – left to navigate an online world, and the risks that come with it, alone. So we welcome the government’s decision to take decisive action in making the online world a safer place for children.

Q: Do you think there is a link between smartphone use and the epidemic of mental health problems that young people are having?

Starmer replied:

I think there is a correlation. Obviously establishing hard evidence is always difficult, but I do think there’s a correlation.

He did not go as far as saying there was a causal relationship.

Q: How will you explain this to President Trump, whose administration has opposed this?

Starmer replied:

Look, I honestly think that, across world leaders, there has always been a recognition that leaders have to take steps to protect children. I don’t think that’s controversial.

Starmer said he did not anticipate a problem.

And he said he would be discussing this with other world leaders, including Trump, at the G7 later.

Q: Will you fine children who ignore the ban? And what are the implications for freedom of speech?

On teenagers, Starmer said:

We’re not going to start taking action against 13 or 14, 15-year-olds who are trying, as they always will, to get around the rules that adults put in their path.

And, on freedom of speech, Starmer said:

I’m a great advocate of free speech, I really am.

But sending sexually explicit pictures to and from children – that’s not free speech, that’s basic protection.

UPDATE: Starmer said:

How many people in this room are prepared to defend adult strangers contacting children online? And we know what happens when that develops into the sort of abuse and worse.

How many people are prepared to stand up and say ‘that’s free speech and I wouldn’t do anything about it’ any more than you’d say we wouldn’t take measures to stop that happening in the offline world?

I think it’s extraordinary that somehow we’ve got ourselves to a position where until now we’ve shrugged our shoulders – I genuinely think it’s difficult to think in what circumstances any of us would put our children into a place where unknown adults could have access to them without us knowing anything about it one to one, we wouldn’t do it.

So, it’s not about free speech, it’s about basic protection of children.

Q: Is this announcement about you wanting a political legacy?

Starmer said there were people in the room who have been campaigning for years on this issue. He went on:

And I think we do them and all those who’ve been concerned about this, a disservice to try to put that into a particular week where there’s a byelection. That’s not what it’s about.

This is a huge this is a statement of our values, who we are as a country. and it’s a way of actually bringing our country together.

So for me, this is bigger than some of the usual to and fros of politics, although there’s plenty of that.

Q: Will this stop children accessing useful services? And won’t teenagers get round this with VPN services?

Starmer said some services, like YouTube Kids, would be protected.

He repeated the point about how some children will get round this. (See 8.27am.)

And he said the government had learned from the Australian experience.

I think we’ll be better at enforcing it, actually, having learned from the Australian model and having learned from our own experience with the Online Safety Act.

So I genuinely think we can enforce it.

Q: When did you change your mind on this?

Starmer says he started the consulation with an open mind.

It is a step that I’ve taken after sitting down and listening, particularly to parents who had lost, usually a teenager, in relation to what happened on social media …

[I am taking the decision] having looked at the evidence, having gone through the consultation, having looked at what happened in other countries, having listened, to parents, grieving parents, listened hard.

And you can listen in two ways. You could listen in a sense if you’re just going through the motions, or you can listen and you can take in what people are saying to you.

I’m in the second category – always have been – and that’s why I’m absolutely clear in my mind that this ban is the right outcome.

Starmer is now taking questions.

Q: When will this start?

Starmer says the government can move quickly.

We took powers, earlier this year to make sure we could move at speed.

I was very conscious that with the Online Safety Act it took the last government eight years from sort of identifying the beginnings of the problem to actually passing legislation, and [I] was determined that will not happen in this case.

He says legislation already passed gives ministers the powers to act using secondary legislation.

He says:

We hope to pass regulation before Christmas, and therefore to bring the ban into force in the early part of next year, probably about springtime, so we can move a real pace here.

Starmer acknowledges some teenagers will get round these restrictons. But that does not make the rules pointless, he says.

Will it mean that no child ever looks at social media again? No.

But look, this might shock you, but it doesn’t shock parents of teenagers; they get around other laws too.

But we don’t say, ‘Look, a teenager managed to get a drink somehow, so let’s not bother banning alcohol sales to children.’ We don’t do that, do we? That will be utterly ridiculous. And so I just don’t accept that argument.

Starmer says he knows tech companies will oppose this.

Some technology companies want us to think that social media is unchangeable, part of an almost natural order.

But we have to resist that kind of learned helplessness. We have agency, we can change it, and we will.

Yes, it’s hard to legislate for, hard to regulate, hard to enforce.

And we’re not just bringing forward a ban, we’re going further. We’re taking world-leading action on gaming services and live streaming platforms, where at the moment strangers can contact any child unchecked.

Starmer is now explaining why he is doing this.

This is not something I do lightly, and I will not present it as cost free, as if social media has brought no benefits to young people, because clearly that is wrong.

But government is always about choices, and it’s clear to me that a full ban is the right choice.

I come to it as a parent myself. I know exactly the fears that we all feel when we’re thinking about this issue. You know, all I’ve ever wanted for my own children, hand on heart, is for them to be happy and for them to be safe. And I think that’s what any parent wants.

But I ask the question now; do we truly believe that social media creates a happy environment for our children? Do we truly believe that it’s a place where they can feel safe?

I don’t think I even need to answer those questions, do I?

Every parent can see it with their own eyes. Social media is making children unhappy. It’s making it easier for bullies to harass and abuse them, and it could even be harming their mental health, exposing them to content that is dangerous because that’s what grabs the attention.

It’s designed to be addictive – of course it is. Features like the Infinite Scroll – they’re designed to lock you in for hours.

And if nothing else, there’s an opportunity cost to that. It stops children doing their homework, reading, playing with their friends outside, going to bed at decent hour.

Starmer confirms the ban is happening.

Today is a big moment for our country. This is a big step, a real change for our children and our future.

Because today I can announce that the government will ban access to social media for all children under the age of 16.

Starmer turns to the social media ban, and he says he is glad that people who have been campaigning for a ban are in the room in Downing Street to hear the announcement.

Some people are dismissive of processes like this, but policy making that doesn’t listen very carefully to the voices of those it seeks to serve – that is not how this government carries out its business. And so I just want to thank you for the role that you have all played.

This is an implicit acknowledgement that the government has changed its mind on this issue.

Here is an explainer by Dan Milmo and Aisha Down about the plans Keir Starmer is about to announce.

Good morning. In Downing Street officials reportedly refuse to talk about Keir Starmer wanting to establish a legacy. But it is hard for the rest of us to avoid the word, particularly on a morning when he has summoned reporters to Downing Street for an 8am press conference on his plans for a social media ban. In lobby terms, this counts as unconscionably early. The announcement could easily wait. But Starmer is heading to France for the G7 summit later, that will keep him busy until Wednesday night, and on Thursday it’s the Makerfield byelection. Starmer is determined to make this announcement before then because Andy Burnham seems on course to become an MP in the early hours of Friday and at that point UK politics may start to change drastically – and Starmer’s window for legacy making may swiftly close.

Last summer the UK government showed little interest in following the Australian government when it announced its social media ban for under-16s. Within months the view in government was changing, and by early 2026 Starmer said there would definitely be some sort of crackdown. But he suggested he was still undecided between a full social media ban for under-16s, and alternative measures to crackdown on the most harmful features of these apps.

In the end, Starmer seems to have gone for both these options – under measures being described as “Australia plus”. Jessica Elgot, Dan Milmo and Aisha Down have details here in our overnight story.

The Conservatives are saying Starmer is following their lead. Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, said:

It’s shameful that it’s taken the prime minister’s job to be on the line for the government to finally u-turn and ban social media for under 16s.

Three times Labour voted against a ban, failing to stand up to Big Tech and protect children from the extreme content they are exposed to every day.

As Conservatives we did not give up, I kept fighting for the brave bereaved parents, health professionals, and campaigners who continued to make the case for change. This victory belongs to them. The Conservatives in opposition can make a difference and this change will finally help parents and protect childhood.

Here is the agenda for the day.

8.10am: Keir Starmer holds a press conference about his plans for a social media ban for under-16s.

10am: Starmer is interviewed on ITV’s This Morning.

11am: Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, holds a press conference. The party has flagged this to journalists as a Jenrick press conference, but Politico says Farage will be there too – perhaps provoked by the Financial Times joining the Guardian in writing about how his enthusiasm for media scrutiny seems to have mysteriously vanished since the revelations about his £5m donation from a crypto billionaire.

11am: Kemi Badenoch holds a press conference.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Steve Reed, the housing secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

After 3.30pm: Liz Kendall, the technology secretary, makes a statement to MPs about the social media ban for under-16s. And we are also expecting a statement from Dan Jarvis, the new defence secretary, about British troops seizing a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in the Channel.

4pm: Antonia Romeo, the cabinet secretary, gives evidence to the Commons public adminstration and constitutional affairs committee.

Afternoon: Starmer arrives in Evian in France for the G7 summit.

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