Jackie Long , Social Affairs Editor and Presenter

Being poor and on benefits in the UK can mean surviving on very little money – now the United Nations rapporteur on poverty has come to the country to investigate just how severe a problem it is.

Charities have taken to social media to “set the record straight” after Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey said in the House of Commons that a number of organisations had welcomed changes to Universal Credit. We talk to Sophie Corlett from the charity Mind.

A cross-party committee of MPs has condemned the government’s benefit sanctions regime, calling for it to be “urgently re-assessed”.

Cornwall Council has been criticised for housing a vulnerable teenager in a tent. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman found a long list of failures by the council.

One announcement in the budget yesterday was a one-off cash injection of £400 million for England’s schools. On average, headteachers will get between £10,000 and £50,000 to pay for extra kit like whiteboards and laptops. The Chancellor described his decision as “a nice gesture”. But some unions and headteachers say government cuts mean they can barely afford the essentials.

After much criticism of the rollout of the new universal credit system, the Chancellor is ploughing in more than £2bn to help make the benefit work better, including a £1,000 a year increase in the amount people can earn before their benefits start tapering away.

Pressure is building on the government to stop the roll-out of universal credit, as a leaked document suggests more radical changes to the benefit might be needed to mitigate its impact on vulnerable claimants. The government says it will publish plans for the next stage of universal credit in due course, though another delay to…

The clamour from all sides to intervene in the national rollout of Universal Credit is rising. Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, faces calls to open the country’s chequebook ahead of his budget at the end of the month. Yesterday, Esther McVey, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said she accepts many people would be significantly worse off. Today the Times reported…

The Work and Pensions Secretary, Esther McVey, has conceded that some benefit claimants will end up worse off because of the new Universal Credit system. However, Ms McVey wouldn’t comment on estimates by a think-tank that around three million people would lose around £1,800 a year. The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said the system needed dramatic change.

One of Theresa May’s main policy announcements this morning was lifting the strict cap on councils’ ability to borrow money to fund more house building.

They’re normally the strictest observers of the rules, but today hundreds of headteachers put down their red pens and marched to Downing Street to protest about what they say is a lack of funding for schools. They claim funding in real terms in England has fallen by eight percent since 2010. The government says school…

Dany Cotton, head of the London Fire Brigade, told the Grenfell Tower Inquiry today that as soon as she arrived at the fire she knew that “there was going to be loss of life that night.” But, to the fury of survivors watching on, she insisted that she, “would not change anything we did on…

The government’s security minister, Ben Wallace, gives his reaction to the TV interview given by two men accused in the Skripal case.

Inspectors found very high levels of violence with inexperienced staff struggling to cope. The chief inspector, Peter Clarke says the government needs to intervene to stop years of “continual and unchecked decline” at the jail.

20-year-old Rico Finlayson was out for the evening when he was set upon by a gang of men wielding knives. One of the attackers even told him he wasn’t the man they set out to target – but they tried to kill him anyway. Now Ricoh and his father, Justin, are working to encourage young people to turn away from violence.