Here's an afternoon summary.



• Oxford University has criticised David Cameron for wrongly saying that the university only admitted one black student in 2009. Cameron said that record was "disgraceful". But Oxford said that it admitted 41 students with a black background in 2009-10, and that 22% of the student population that year came from an ethnic minority background. (See 2.45pm and 3.36pm.)

• Cameron has gone to war with local authorities over royal wedding street parties. In an unusual move, he has used a speech and a Q&A in the north of England to urge people to ignore councils who claim the organisers of street parties will need licences or costly public liability insurance. "I'm the prime minister and I'm telling you; if you want to have a street party, you go ahead and have one," he said. (See 3.04pm.)

• Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive, has virtually disowned the claim she made in 2003 about the Sun paying police officers for information. "We have paid the police for information in the past," she told the culture committee eight years ago, when she was editor of the Sun. The Commons home affairs committee recently wrote to her asking her for more information. In her reply, released today on the committee's website, she said: "My intention [when making the original comment] was simply to comment generally on the widely-held belief that payments had been made in the past to police officers. If, in doing so, I gave the impression that I had knowledge of any specific cases, I can assure you that this was not my intention." (See 3.21pm.)

That's it for today. Thanks for the comments.

Being middle aged and essentially uncool, I'm afraid I didn't really appreciate the MC NxtGen rap about Andrew Lansley health reforms, which I thought was a bit silly. But this Downfall spoof on the NHS reforms is (in my book) a gem. I know that Downfall satires have been done countless times already. But, as far as I'm concerned, they work every time.

Oxford University has accused David Cameron getting his facts wrong about its record on admitting black students. A spokeswoman for the university has given this statement to the Press Association.

The figure quoted by the prime minister is incorrect and highly misleading - it only refers to UK undergraduates of black Caribbean origin for a single year of entry, when in fact that year Oxford admitted 41 UK undergraduates with black backgrounds. In that year a full 22% of Oxford's total student population came from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Cameron was referring to the one British undergraduates of black Caribbean origin who started a course in 2009-10. But another 26 students started that year who said they were of black origin, and another 14 of mixed black descent. In total, there were 99 black undergraduates in all years at Oxford in the 2009-10 academic year. With postgraduate students included, this figure went up to 245, the spokeswoman said. In reality, the true figure was probably higher, because some students do not disclose their background, she claimed.

Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive, has now clarified what she meant when she told the culture committee in 2003 that Sun journalists had paid the police for information. She was just commenting "generally on the widely-held belief that payments had been made in the past to police officers", she says. If she gave the impression that she was referring to specific cases, that was a mistake she says. Jim Pickard has got more details at the FT's Westminster blog.

According to PoliticsHome, as well as going to war with Oxford University over its record on race (see 2.45pm), David Cameron also used his PM Direct event to tell people to ignore councils telling them that they would need special licences to hold royal wedding street parties.

I hope people are able to join in and celebrate and I am very much saying today that if people want to have a street party, don't listen to people who say "it is all bureaucracy and health and safety and you cant do it." It is very important to understand if anyone wants to have a street party you don't need a food license, you don't need an entertainment license, you don't need to have written documents about closing your street, you don't have to pay for street closures, you don't have to have special health and safety permission because there are councils out there telling you you do need these things – you don't.

The Department for Communities has even put out a press notice quoting Cameron delivering the same message. It's very combative. I can't remember the last time I read a Whitehall press release explicitly telling people not to believe what local authorities are saying.

There was a story in David Cameron's PM Direct event after all. According to the Press Association, he said Oxford University's failure to attract black students was "disgraceful".

I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year. I think that is disgraceful, we have got to do better than that. And I think [the new tuition system] - because you don't start paying back until you start earning £21,000 - we can help people get to the best universities in the country.

Cameron said that the number of pupils from state schools getting into top universities had gone done in 20 years. "That is a terrible record," he said.

Figures about the number of black students getting into Oxford were originally published in the Guardian, although our story did not say that Oxford had only admitted one black student in 2009 (as Cameron claimed), only that it had admitted one black Briton of Caribbean descent. The story was based on figures obtained by David Lammy, the former Labour higher education minister, who wrote about Oxford's apparent bias for Comment is free. The figures triggered a strong response from some commentators - like Sally Mapstone, Oxford's pro-vice-chancellor and virtual economics - who claimed they were misleading.

Re David Cameron, BBC News have obviously come to the same conclusion. (See 2.39pm.) They've just abandoned their live coverage.

David Cameron has started his Q&A. I missed the beginning, but if previous Cameron Q&As are a guide, that won't matter very much. They often produce zilch in terms of news.

The No to AV campaign have got a political broadcast going out on the BBC and other channels tonight. (It's like a party political broadcast, but they're not a party, so that's the wrong phase.) The yes camp have got theirs on air tomorrow. Here's the No to AV one. There are actually three separate mini-films, but they are all going out together.

Here's a lunchtime summary.

• Ministers have broadly welcomed a report calling for significant reform of the banking sector. Although the independent commission on banking chaired by Sir John Vickers did not call for banks to be broken up into retail divisions and investment divisions, its interim report did say that the retail divisions (that look after savers' money) required ringfencing and that Lloyds Banking Group should sell more branches to make the market more competitive. The government will give its full response after the final report is published later this year, George Osborne described the report as "a very good piece of work". Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, also welcomed what he described as an "important and authoritative" report, but he criticised Osborne for failing to get international support for bank reform. There is full coverage of the report on our business site.



• Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, has suggested that the deadline for the implementation of Andrew Lansley's NHS reforms could be allowed to slip. In an interview, Clegg said that the new GP-led consortia would not be allowed to take charge of commissioning NHS services in April 2013 if they were not ready. (See 8.30am.)



• Peter Carter, the Royal College of Nursing's general secretary, has said the health bill "could well turn out to be the biggest disaster in the history of our public services". (See 12.38pm.)

• The Commons authorities have released information showing that some MPs who publicly announced that they were repaying money after their expenses were criticised subsequently had money returned to them on the grounds that they had repaid too much. (See 12.20pm.)



• Lord Howe, the health minister, has announced that a new contract for NHS dentists will be piloted in 62 practices. Under the deal, dentists will be paid according to the quality of care they deliver rather than the number of procedures they carry out. The Department of Health has more details in a news release.

Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, is expected to attend the Royal College of Nursing congress later this week. It should be a lively session. Peter Carter, the RCN's general secretary, delivered a speech at the conference this morning saying the health bill could turn out to be the biggest disaster ever to hit the public services. Here's the key extract.

Even during the good times, when the sun was shining and the money was flowing, these reforms would have been huge. Now, that the clouds of economic gloom hang over us, and the cupboard is empty, reforming the NHS like this begins to look very difficult indeed. Let me be very honest with you Congress. Despite the honourable principles behind the bill, it could well turn out to be the biggest disaster in the history of our public services - if organisations like the RCN are not listened to, and listened to now.

Twenty three MPs who publicly repaid money to the Commons authorities after their expenses were criticised later discreetly applied to have some of that money returned to them, the Daily Telegraph's Rosa Prince reports.



The MPs were offered the expenses deals following the Legg audit of claims dating back to 2004 which was ordered in the wake of the expenses scandal. Under the terms of the review's remit – which was determined by the MPs themselves – the audit team could only ask for money back if claims were in breach of the notoriously lax rules at the time. As many MPs had voluntarily repaid sums in excess of the amounts identified by Sir Thomas Legg, head of the audit, they were secretly offered the opportunity to claim the money back.

At the weekend Ed Balls produced three tests for the proposed banking reform.

Labour's Chuka Umunna has now come up with six tests for banking reform.

Do I hear nine tests anyone?

I'm just back from the Number 10 lobby briefing. It wasn't particularly revelatory. Here are the main points.

• The prime minister's spokesman said the government wanted to see the banking sector "safer" and "more competitive". Asked about today's report from the independent commission on banking, he referred us to the comments already given about it by George Osborne. (9.35am.)

• Downing Street played down the significance of the African Union's peace mission to Libya. "Our position has not changed," said the spokesman. Colonel Gaddafi had to "end his campaign of violence against the people of Libya", the spokesman said. He also reaffirmed the government's belief - which does not seem to be shared to be shared by the African Union - that "it is difficult to see a future for Libya with Gaddafi playing a role".

• Downing Street refused to comment on possible specific changes to the health bill. Asked about Norman Lamb's call for the GP-led consortia to be made voluntarily, the spokesman said: "You are going to have 101 questions which I'm not going to answer specifically." He even refused to confirm that the new consultation would lead to "substantive" changes to the health bill, even though this is what Nick Clegg said last week, and again today. The spokesman just stressed that the government was "listening". He went on: "Where there are good suggestions for change, we will make those changes."

• The spokesman did not deny the Guardian report on Saturday saying that Nick Clegg stopped David Cameron putting Michael Howard on the commission considering the case for a British bill of rights, and that Cameron vetoed Clegg's candidate, Sir Menzies Campbell.

You can read all today's Guardian politics stories here. And all the politics stories filed yesterday, including some in today's paper, are here.

As for the rest of the papers, here are some articles worth noting.

• Andrew Porter in the Daily Telegraph says George Osborne hopes to cut the 50p top rate rate of income tax in 2013, on the grounds that a review will by then have shown that it does not raise money.

The Chancellor has insisted that the rate is only temporary and he wants to offer traditional Tory supporters tax cuts well before the next election. A review is about to begin into the how much the new rate – brought in by Labour but endorsed by the Coalition – brings in. But it is understood that 2013 has been pencilled in as the best-case scenario for the tax to be lowered. In his Budget last month Mr Osborne said that high personal tax rates "crush enterprise, undermine aspiration and often undermine tax revenues as people avoid them."

• Dan Snow in the Times (paywall) says the historians who came out against the alterative vote in a letter to the Times were talking nonsense.

The debate about AV has allowed a lot of people to talk utter nonsense, but historians, who should know better, have been among the worst culprits. "For the first time since 1928 and the granting of universal suffrage," we were told by one cabal of historians, "we face the possibility that one person's casting ballot will be given greater weight than another." This letter to The Times came from a convocation of history colossi: my former tutor Niall Ferguson, David Starkey, Andrew Roberts and many others. Even if we ignore basic facts about our current, manifestly unequal, system — the disproportionate influence of a small number of swing voters in a small number of swing seats, and the way a vote in Sutherland carries more weight than one in Surrey because constituencies are radically different in size — it is still utter bilge. Until the Representation of the People Act of 1948 certain university graduates could vote in both their home constituency and their university constituency — and if they had commercial property in a different constituency they could cast a vote there as well.

• Thomas Harding in the Daily Telegraph says the Ministry of Defence is going to get an extra £100m.

It is estimated that the Treasury will give the Ministry of Defence an extra £100million to keep the forces at strength. RAF fighters, pilots and transport aircraft, as well as Navy frigates, will all be protected from the cuts detailed in October's defence spending review. The extra funding is to come from a "back door" route in an effort to prevent other departments from complaining that the MoD is getting special treatment. David Cameron has asked for a breakdown of the costs over the next few days before he approves them.

• Michael Savage in the Times (paywall) says David Cameron has been told by senior ministers that he is losing the battle against Ed Miliband to win the support of the "squeezed middle".

A Tory Cabinet source said Mr Cameron's team had failed to give families hope for the future and was in danger of letting the Labour leader become the voice of low and middle earners. The complaint comes soon after the Government's admission that it had failed to convince the public about its NHS reforms and its embarrassing U-turn over the proposed sell-off of publicly owned forests. It has also had to relaunch its Big Society initiative after signs that most people remained unconvinced by the project.

• James Slack in the Daily Mail says a council survey suggests that more than 50% of households have to wait two weeks to have their bins emptied.

A survey of 117 town halls revealed that 59 per cent have switched to fortnightly collections. They are acting in clear defiance of Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, who said it was 'a basic right' for the public to have their rubbish collected every week. After coming to power 11 months ago, the Coalition demanded the reinstatement of weekly services. But the authoritative survey found not one council planning to increase the frequency of their waste collections.

I'm off to the lobby briefing now. I'll post again after 11.30am.

On Twitter Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn complains that Nick Clegg had an easy ride on the Today programme this morning. Corbyn says that Clegg should have been asked why Lib Dem MPs are now trying to rewrite the health bill when they voted in favour of it at second reading. Those voting for the bill included Norman Lamb, who is now so concerned about it that he considers it a resigning issue.

If you want to know more about the background to Norman Lamb's decision to threaten to resign yesterday over the health bill, it's worth reading the blog that my colleague Nicholas Watt has posted about this. He points out that Lansley and Lamb had "an almighty falling out in the run up to the general election over the financing of long term care for the elderly" and that Lansley then stopped Lamb being appointed as a health minister.

At an event in America Gordon Brown has admitted that he made a "big mistake" in relation to bank regulation before the crash. He has talked about this often before, but not, I think, in such blunt terms. He was speaking at an event organised by the Institute for New Economic Thinking in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. According to the Press Association, here are the key quotes.

We know in retrospect what we missed. We set up the Financial Services Authority believing that the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution. So we created a monitoring system which was looking at individual institutions. That was the big mistake. We didn't understand how risk was spread across the system, we didn't understand the entanglements of different institutions with the other and we didn't understand even though we talked about it just how global things were, including a shadow banking system as well as a banking system. That was our mistake but I'm afraid it was a mistake made by just about everybody who was in the regulatory business. I have got to accept my responsibility and I do, and I have been very open about saying we made mistakes on that. But in a world where the understanding of what global meant was incomplete, I think many writers as well as many regulators made exactly the same mistake.

George Osborne, the chancellor, has broadly welcomed the report from the independent commission on banking. According to PoliticsHome, this is what he told the BBC.

Our goal is to make sure that in future to make sure that we have safer banks but also that millions of pounds of taxpayer money is not spent again bailing out those banks. John Vickers has produced this report, I recommend everyone to read it. It's a very good piece of work and now of course we've got to wait for his final report in September. I think that the decision we took, that I took, that Vince Cable and the new government took to set up the commission has been vindicated today.

James Naughtie's interview with Nick Clegg wasn't as colourful as Jemima Khan's, but I think we're starting to get some clues as to where the consultation on the health bill is going. Some Liberal Democrats want Andrew Lansley to make the whole process voluntary, so that GPs would have the option of setting up commissioning consortia, just as schools have the option of becoming academies. Clegg did not quite endorse this, but he made a point of stressing that GP consortia would not take over by April 2013 (Lansley's deadline) if they weren't ready. That looks very much like a hint as to where a compromise may be emerging. (The Lib Dems would be able to say they had slowed the process down, while Lansley would be able to say that nothing fundamental had changed because the odd delay was always inevitable.)

Here are the main points.

• Clegg said GPs would not be allowed to take charge of commissioning NHS services if they were not ready. Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, wants GP-led commissioning consortia to take charge of commissioning services by April 2013. But Clegg signalled that this could slip.

We're not going to allow GP consortia who are not ready to take on these commissioning functions if they're not ready by the April 2013 deadline.

If the consortia were not ready, "alternative arrangements" would be made, Clegg said.

• He suggested that the new consultation on the health bill would lead to "substantive" changes. There was not point having a pause "unless you are prepared to make substantive changes at the end of it", he said. But he also said that he and his party did not want to "re-open the Pandora's box of the basic design" of the new system. They were still in favour of giving GPs more financial responsibility. But they just wanted to consider the "detail" of how this was done. The government would change the bill "where necessary", he said.

• He refused to back Norman Lamb's call for GPs to be given the right not to join commissioning consortia. In an interview yesterday, Lamb, a Cabinet Office minister and Clegg's senior parliamentary adviser, said that the new GP commissioning consortia should become voluntary, not compulsory. Lamb suggested he would resign if Andrew Lansley did not accept this. Clegg said Lamb's plan had "some virtues" but also "some drawbacks". It could create a very "uneven" NHS.

• Clegg backed the independent commission on banking's call for banks to have to do more to separate their savings business from their investment business.



It's not right to have very high risk, and then low risk, banking activities so intertwined so that when something goes wrong, it's the taxpayer who picks up the bill for the mistakes made. That is simply not acceptable.

Asked if he thought the commission should have gone further, he said the Lib Dems were in favour of setting up a commission to deal with this issue because they were "not theological" about exactly what needed to be done to make the system safe. The government would consider the recommendations in the report "very carefully", he said.

• He dismissed suggestions that the Lib Dems were divided.



One of the interesting things - surprising things for many people who watch politics and comment on politics - is quite how resilient the Liberal Democrats have been. We just had our party conference in Sheffield and there was almost entire unity in the party.

Naughtie says the Lib Dems are now being seen as anti public sector.

Clegg says that's a "complete caricature". Labour would have had to cut public services too, he says.

Clegg says most people who use the NHS "love" the NHS. But they think there is too much bureaucracy in it.



Q: Do you feel you are the "fall guy" for the coalition?

Clegg says: "Not at all." Any government governing now would be taking difficult decisions.

Q: You told Jemima Khan in the New Statesman that you often cry to music. What makes you cry?

Clegg says he has probably said enough about this already.

That's it. I'll post a summary in a moment.

Naughtie asks about the state of the Lib Dems.

Clegg says it is surprising how "resilient" the party has been. There has been almost total unity, he says. Anyone in government at this stage would be in a difficult position.

Most people in the country accept the need for the government to do "difficult things" now.

Q: You are describing the mission of the government as a "repair job"?

Clegg says the government has to restore the government's finances. But it is also putting in place long-term reforms. It has restored the earnings link for pensions, set up a pupil premium for schools and raised the income tax threshold. These changes will outlast the financial crisis.

Q: Norman Lamb said yesterday he could not support the health bill as it stands now. Will the government reconsider the plan to scrap primary care trusts?

Clegg says there is no point having a "pause" in the legislation unless there is a proper re-think. "I think it's a good thing that we are listening," he says.

Q: Lamb wants GPs to allowed to opt in to the new GP commissioning consortia. But Andrew Lansley says that would create a two-tier health service.

Clegg says everyone agrees that GPs should be made more financially responsible. There are different views about how this could be done.

Lamb's "opt in" plan has some virtues. But it has some drawbacks.

But Clegg says GP consortia won't be allowed to take over commissioning functions in 2013 (the Lansley deadline) if they are not ready. If they are not ready, alternative arrangements will have to be made.

Clegg says he is not going to "reopen the Pandora's Box of the basic design" of the bill.

But "the detail of exactly how you make those principles work in practice" is up for consultation, Clegg says.

James Naughtie is interviewing Nick Clegg. He starts by mentioning the New Statesman interview in which Clegg said he was "not a punchbag". Clegg thanks him for the cheery introduction.

Q: What do you think of the banking commission report?

Clegg says it confirms that the status quo is untenable. He says it is not right to have very high risk and low risk banking activities "so intertwined" because this leaves taxpayers having to pick up the bill if things go wrong.

Q: Do you want the separating of the two arms of banking to go further?

Clegg says he is "not theological" about this.

It has been too hard for new competitors to enter the market. Some of the suggestions in the report need to be considered very clearly.

The publication of the interim report from the independent commission on banking is set to dominate the news today. Sir John Vickers, the commission chairman, is holding a press conference at 10.30am, but the report itself came out at 7am and my colleague Jill Treanor already has a story about it on our website. Here's an extract:

Lloyds Banking Group should sell more branches to reduce its dominance on the high street and all banks should be forced to ring-fence their savings operations from the rest of the business under proposals unveiled on Monday by the independent commission on banking. Lloyds, created by Labour during the 2008 financial crisis to save HBOS, is already being forced to sell 600 branches to appease EU regulators. The independent banking commission, chaired by Sir John Vickers, is now suggesting that even more be sold off to tackle its 30% share of current accounts, 24% of mortgages – more than any other bank – and a 23% share of small business banking, second only to RBS. Lloyds was the first bank to respond to the commission's much-anticipated report. "We are currently assessing the full implications of the report and will provide a further update to the market once we have had the opportunity to review the report in detail," Lloyds said. The major banks will also be affected by the commission's propositions that they be forced to separate their savings business from the rest of their operations to reduce the need for another taxpayer bailout of the system.

Otherwise, it seems relatively quiet. David Cameron is doing a PM Direct event this afternoon, and Nick Clegg is about to give an interview on the Today programme. As usual, I'll be covering all the breaking political news, as well as looking at the papers and bringing you the best politics from the web. I'll post a lunchtime summary at around 1pm, and an afternoon one at about 4pm.