Chinese ‘state-affiliated’ organisations behind cyber-attacks on MPs and Electoral Commission, Dowden says – as it happened

• Chinese state-backed hackers were responsible for two “malicious” digital campaigns targeting the UK’s democratic institutions and politicians, the security services have found.

• Rishi Sunak is to face another tricky byelection in the coming weeks after the former Conservative backbencher Scott Benton quit parliament before the conclusion of a recall petition among his constituents.

• Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, has been criticised by campaigners for giving a non-committal response in the Commons to the report saying the government should pay compensation to the Waspi women. (See 5.26pm.) The chair of Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi), Angela Madden, responded to what he said with this statement:

The secretary of state now says this matter is so complex, he needs yet more months and years of head scratching to sort it out. He has made much of the report being 100 pages long as if he were being asked to digest War and Peace.

The fact it is has taken five years for the ombudsman to produce his conclusions is a pretty perverse reason to say more delay is now justified.

The report is not complicated at all. He says that 1950s-born women should be compensated and that Parliament should intervene to make a scheme happen.

Every day 111 of the affected women die waiting for justice. The Commons must get a debate and vote on compensation as soon as possible after Easter.

• Labour’s plan for state-backed offshore windfarms will be a “gamechanger”, Keir Starmer has said, as the party seeks to regain the initiative on green policy after the slow-motion ditching of its £28bn investment pledge.

• Michael Gove breached standards rules by failing to register hospitality he enjoyed with a Conservative donor whose company was awarded personal protective equipment contracts during the Covid pandemic, parliament’s sleaze watchdog has found.

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Murdo Fraser, a Conservative MSP, has threatened to take legal action against Police Scotland after a tweet he posted comparing choosing to identify as non-binary to “choosing to identify as a cat” was logged as a hate incident, the BBC reports.

The Home Office has announced that it is accepting the recommendations in the report from Dame Elish Angiolini last month into the events leading up to the rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a police officer. They include calling for a public campaign “to raise awareness that indecent exposure and sending unsolicited photographs of genitals amounts to criminality”.

The Conservatives have had to remove an online video attacking Labour’s record on crime in London after it was pointed out to them that the video they were using was from New York, Kevin Schofield from HuffPost UK reports.

In the Commons Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, is giving a statement about the report from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) published on Thursday saying the goverment should pay compensation to women who lost out because the government did not adequately communicate the fact that a decision was taken in the 1990s to raise the age at which they would start getting the state pension. These are the so-called Waspi women, named after the campaign called Women Against State Pension Inequality.

The PHSO said its compensation plan could cost up to £10.5bn (campaigners claim this isn’t enough, and that a more generous compensation scheme is needed) and on Thursday the government just said it would consider the recommendations, without committing to compensation of any kind.

In his statement Stride said very little that went beyond this. He said the PHSO did not criticise the decision to raise the state pension age for women, and he said that women involved did not suffer a “direct” financial loss from the decision taken by the DWP. But it did find the DWP did not publicise the forthcoming changes as well as it should have done, he said.

The government would “fully and properly consider the findings” in the report, he said.

Keir Starmer and Vaughan Gething, the new first minister of Wales, gave a brief interview to WalesOnline today while they were on their visit to Holyhead. According to the write-up, much of it consisted the two leaders giving slightly evasive answers about the prospect of the plan to build an M4 relief road in south Wales being revived.

When Mark Drakeford was first minister, he ruled out the idea on environmental grounds.

At the weekend Ken Skates, the new transport secretary in Gething’s cabinet, gave an interview implying there could be a rethink in relation to some road schemes that have been blocked. He was fairly clear that the M4 relief road plan would not be resurrected (“I just can’t see that happening – the cost would just be astronomical”). But David TC Davies, the Welsh secretary, responded to the Skates interview by claiming that if money were the only problem, Westminster might be willing to help out – thereby implying this could be an election issue.

Starmer and Gething both stressed to WalesOnline that they wanted more infrastructure investment in Wales, while not saying anything to suggest that an M4 relief road would be on their list. “David TC Davies may say he wants to sit down and talk to us but that isn’t the relationship we find with the UK government,” Gething said.

Carol Monaghan (SNP) asks about the threat posed by electric cars manufactured in China to the UK.

Dowden says cars would have to meet UK safety standards. And he says the government can block investments on security grounds.

Back in the Commons Vicky Ford (Con) says she is very concerned about the physical safety of MPs. She says on Friday last week the security guards she was advised to have at her constituency surgery did not turn up. That was the second time this year this has happened, she says.

Dowden says the government takes threats to MPs exceptionally seriously. He says he will take his issue up.

Chris Law (SNP) asks why anyone can trust the government when it has been “far too late” responding to the threat from China.

Dowden does not accept that. He says he has consistently warned about the threat from China.

Stephen Kinnock (Lab) asks about David Cameron’s visit to Sri Lanka to back a Chinese investment scheme. He says the Foreign Office has not replied to Freedom of Information requests about this. Will Dowden ensure it does?

Dowden says this is “pretty desperate stuff”. He goes on:

Trying to link Chinese cyber-attacks to our our current foreign secretary just doesn’t wash.

Here is our story on the Dowden announcement by Pippa Crerar and Eleni Courea.