In her response to the statement from Karin Smyth, Caroline Johnson, the shadow health minister, suggested the extra money for hospices would not fully compensate the extra costs the sector is facing because of the national insurance increase and the rise in the living wage. She said:

They are taking millions of pounds of hospices and palliative care charities and then think they should be grateful when they give them some of it back. This is socialism at its finest.

Smyth said that Johnson should be welcoming the announcement, and that under the Conservatives the sector was not properly funded.

In the Commons Karin Smyth, the health minister, is now responding to an urgent question on hospice funding.

She says the governments wants a society where everyone can get high quality care. It also wants to shift care out of hospitals. And hospices will play a big part in that, she says.

She says the government recognises the pressures facing hospices over a number of years

Today she can announce the biggest investment into hospices and end of life care for a generation.

She says there will be a £100m boost for adult and children’s hospices to ensure they have the best physical environment for care, and £26m to support children and young people’s hospices.

She says the details of the funding allocation will be set out in the new year.

British troops could start training Ukrainian troops in Ukraine itself, John Healey, the defence secretary, has suggested. He revealed this in an interview with Larisa Brown in the Times. In her story Brown reports:

John Healey said the UK needed to “make the training a better fit for what the Ukrainians need” as he left the door open for it to take place in the war-torn country instead of Britain.

“We [need to] make it easier to the Ukrainians to access and we [need to] work with the Ukrainians to help them motivate and mobilise more recruits,” he said to The Times on a visit to Ukraine.

Asked if this meant extending training of Ukrainian recruits inside the UK to Ukraine itself, he said: “We will look wherever we can to respond to what the Ukrainians want. They are the ones fighting.”

Water bills in England and Wales will rise by 36% over the next five years, as suppliers were accused of forcing struggling households to pay for years of underinvestment to fix leaky pipes and cut pollution, Jasper Jolly and Helena Horton report.

For the record, here is the full readout from No 10 about the conversation between Keir Starmer and Donald Trump yesterday.

The prime minister spoke to President-elect Donald Trump this afternoon from Downing Street.

The prime minister began by congratulating President-elect Trump on his recent team appointments and President-elect Trump warmly recounted his meeting with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in Paris earlier this month.

Both agreed on their joint ambition to strengthen the close and historic relationship between the UK and the US. They looked forward to working together on shared priorities, including international security and delivering economic growth and prosperity.

Turning to global conflicts, the prime minister reiterated the need for allies to stand together with Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression and to ensure Ukraine is in the strongest possible position.

On the Middle East, the prime minister underscored the need to work together to ensure peace and security in the region.

They agreed to keep in touch and looked forward to seeing one another at the earliest opportunity.

Good morning. It is the last day the House of Commons is sitting before the Christmas recess, and the main event will be in a committee room in Portcullis House where Keir Starmer will have his first question session with the liaison committee, the ‘prefects’ club’ comprising the chairs of all the other Commons select committees. For 90 minutes he will take questions on the economy, public services and global affairs from MPs who know their subjects pretty well. Most of them are Labour MPs, but they include people who have only become select committee chairs because, despite serving on the front bench before the election, they were not appointed ministers, and so it is wrong to assume they are all Starmer loyalists.

In theory, 90 minutes of intelligent questioning with the PM should produce a decent amount of news. In reality, past liaison committee hearings have often failed to produce much beyond a rehash of familiar No 10 lines to take. But we live in hope.

Relations with the US are almost certain to come up, and Starmer may be asked about an overnight story that suggests Starmer is firming up links with the incoming Donald Trump administration. Yesterday Starmer and Trump spoke on the phone. In its readout, No 10 says:

The prime minister began by congratulating President-elect Trump on his recent team appointments and President-elect Trump warmly recounted his meeting with His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales in Paris earlier this month.

Both agreed on their joint ambition to strengthen the close and historic relationship between the UK and the US. They looked forward to working together on shared priorities, including international security and delivering economic growth and prosperity.

No 10 did not say which of the Trump appointments Starmer wanted to applaud. Some of them have horrified progressive opinion around the world. CBS has a useful list of all the names here.

And, overnight, the Telegraph and the Sun have revealed that Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff, travelled to the US last week for talks with Trump’s team. The Guardian has confirmed the story. In his Telegraph story Ben Riley-Smith says:

Morgan McSweeney travelled to Florida to meet Susie Wiles, the political strategist who masterminded Mr Trump’s re-election campaign and will be his chief of staff in office.

Mr McSweeney also had policy discussions in Washington with Mike Waltz, the congressman who has been named as Mr Trump’s next national security adviser.

Riley-Smith also includes this quote from a “senior Downing Street source” summarising the position.

The mood music was very warm. President Trump is nothing but warm about the UK.

As the year closes, Team Starmer is confident the UK is in a good position for a strong bilateral relationship with the new presidency.

(Do they really talk like that in Westminster? I’m afraid they do.)

In his version of the story, Harry Cole from the Sun says Jonathan Powell, Starmer’s national security adviser, also attended the meeting.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: Steve Reed, the environment secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

2.30pm: Keir Starmer gives evidence to the liaison committee.

At some point today we are also expecting Downing Street to release a list of new peers.

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