Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner has hit out at Boris Johnson for failing to say whether a ban on eviction would be extended.

“Families are facing eviction in less than 2 weeks, in the middle of a deadly global pandemic, because this government is refusing to protect them,” she tweeted.

Boris Johnson said the opposition should “stop sniping from the sidelines” and instead “back business and back the British people”.

Keir Starmer replied by saying that Labour “would rather listen to businesses” than the Conservatives, adding that the prime minister had not made any decisions on business rates or furlough yet.

Speaking during PMQs, the Labour leader added: “I’m not going to take lectures from a man who wrote two versions of every column he ever wrote as a journalist, proposed Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize and gave Dominic Cummings a pay rise.”

The government has not done enough to protect the UK’s borders from the arrival of new coronavirus variants, Keir Starmer has warned.

Citing research from Oxford University, the Labour leader said there were 33 countries who had tougher border measures than the UK. These include Canada, Denmark and Israel.

Boris Johnson responsed by reasserting that we have “one of the toughest” border regimes in the world.

Labour leader Keir Starmer asked the prime minister to confirm that business rate relief would be extended beyond 31 March.

In response, Boris Johnson said he would have to wait until the next budget in March.

The prime minister also failed to say more about whether the country’s furlough scheme would continue.

Mr Starmer said this was not good enough, adding: “The trouble is that businesses don’t work as slowly as the prime minister.”

England’s deputy chief medical officer has ruled out safety concerns with the Covid-19 vaccines being administered in the UK.

Jonathan Van-Tam said on Wednesday: “We are well over the 12 million mark now in terms of vaccines we’ve deployed. We’re getting to a point where, if we were going to see any kind of safety signal, it would be pretty obvious by now.”

He also quashed rumours that the vaccine could affect fertility, describing it as “a nasty, pernicious scare story” which was “completely, utterly groundless”.

Our political editor Andrew Woodcock has more details:

Professor Neil Ferguson, who sits on the government’s Nervtag emergency virus committee, has suggested that ministers failed to learn lessons from the first lockdown.

He told Sky News that the “fragmented” consensus about the appropriate level of restrictions meant that the country was in a weaker position in the run-up to Christmas than it should have been.

“Had we learnt the lessons properly from the first wave, then we would have been in a better situation coming into Christmas and much lower infection levels and therefore fewer deaths,” he said.

Between mid-November and the end of January, the UK’s coronavirus death toll doubled to 100,000.

One of Ireland’s leading retail distributors said it has lost a significant amount of revenue as a result of the new Brexit trade regulations.

AM Nexday reported that its turnover last month was 12 percent lower than the previous January.

Senior manager Sarah Hards said the company had hired extra staff and had paid additional costs to deal with new post-Brexit paperwork.

“There does not seem to be enough rewards for us really here,” she told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

The president of the European Commission has said she “deeply” regrets the bloc’s threat last month to override the Northern Ireland protocol during a row over coronavirus vaccines.

Speaking about the fiasco, Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament on Wednesday: “Allow me a word on the island of Ireland. The bottom line is mistakes were made and the process leading up to the decision and I deeply regret that.”

She added that the bloc was right to backtrack on its threat and said the Commission “will do its utmost to protect the peace of Northern Ireland”.

Grant Shapps has told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that “people shouldn’t be booking holidays right now – not domestically or internationally”.

He said it was “too soon” to do so because it was unclear how quickly coronavirus cases and deaths will decline.

The transport secretary added that Boris Johnson will give more details about lifting lockdown in a speech on 22 February.

Anna Soubry, the former Conservative MP, tweeted that this was yet more “mixed messaging” from the government, after health secretary Matt Hancock said he had a booked a summer holiday to Cornwall.