A bit more from Rishi Sunak, who's been speaking at the launch of the Welsh Conservative manifesto.

Acknowledging that his party has made mistakes while in power, Sunak says the economy "is now turning a corner" before continuing to hit out at Labour.

He repeats a claim that a Labour government will "whack up everyone's taxes" - specifically that leader Keir Starmer "would charge every working family £2,000 more in council tax and other tax rises".

For context: Earlier this month, Sunak denied he had misled people after the UK statistics watchdog said anyone who heard Sunak say Labour would raise taxes by £2,000 per working household would have no way of knowing that was a sum totalled over four years.

"Once you have handed Keir Starmer and Labour a blank cheque, you can't get it back," Sunak says this morning.

He then moves on to defence spending, adding that only the Conservatives can keep Britain safe.

In Wales, Rishi Sunak has been speaking ahead of the Welsh Conservatives' manifesto launch.

He begins by saying Wales "is a great country" but one "let down by Labour".

Speaking directly to attendees, he says: "Our country is in danger. I know you are frustrated with our party, frustrated with me, but do not let Labour waltz into office without scrutinising them, without seeing what their policies would mean for our country and your families' security."

The prime minister hits out at Labour leader Keir Starmer for "changing his mind" on tax and free movement, asking how can voters trust him not to change his mind in the future.

"This is a man who tried to overturn the result of the Brexit referendum, who twice urged everyone to make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister, who ran on a series of pledges to be Labour leader that he cynically then abandoned," Sunak says, adding: "My friends, because he has such a past, he doesn't deserve to decide your future."

You can watch Sunak speaking in the player at the top of this page.

The Lib Dem leader, armed with charcoal, might have been self-confessed "bottom of the class" in art at school but today’s drawing, he says, was "quite relaxing".

On a campaign trip to Yorkshire, he's quizzed once again on his party’s previous tuition fee pledge but insists he’s learnt lessons from that - "never to make promises [he] can’t keep" and to rebuild trust by listening to voters to shape priorities.

As for this week’s Tory gambling allegations, he doesn’t think Rishi Sunak’s response has been sufficient: "If people know the outcome of something and they bet on it - I think that’s immoral. Too often in this Parliament we’ve seen the Conservative Party, certainly members of the Conservative Party, looking like they’re in it for themselves not for public service…"

“I hope he’ll take some tougher action," Davey says of the prime minister.

Image source, PA Media

Sam Hancock
Live reporter

Morning interviews done, another party manifesto launched and the day's first (albeit old) dog-at-a-polling-station photo published - it's now time to hit the campaign trail.

As we said earlier, there's a fair bit happening today, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Labour leader Keir Starmer, his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey all out and about.

We're going to start with Davey, who's been in Yorkshire this morning, so stay tuned as we head there now. After that, we'll bring you key lines from the other candidates.

A moment now for the BBC's interactive poll tracker - which today shows that the Conservatives have dropped further. They're currently at 20% on average - their lowest share since the last general election in 2019.

Labour's average score (41%) is also lower than at the beginning of the election campaign - but they continue to enjoy a lead of about 20 points.

A number of the polls this week suggest that the Conservatives are now in a close battle with Reform UK for second place. On average, the Conservatives are still ahead of Reform but several polling companies now put the two neck and neck.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats are still a little ahead of where they were when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the election. The Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru have remained broadly stable throughout the campaign.

Image source, EPA

Parties around the UK have been launching their manifestos over the past few weeks - we've just heard from Welsh Labour and and the Welsh Conservatives are coming up later - but how do the manifestos compare and what are parties promising on the key issues?

You can find out via our interactive guide here.

It will be updated in the coming days as the final parties outline their pledges.

A reminder for anyone who needs it - a manifesto is the list of pledges parties make to voters, explaining what they would do if elected.

Shelley Phelps
Westminster correspondent, BBC Wales

Labour is launching its Welsh manifesto today - setting out plans to recruit new teachers and strengthen employment rights.

The event is taking place at an old miners’ welfare institute near Wrexham

Labour says the history of the building and the people it served is at the core of the promises being made today.

The constituency of Wrexham is vital to Welsh Labour’s aim of winning back a batch of marginal seats it lost to the Conservatives in 2019. Until then the party had held Wrexham since 1931.

Vaughan Gething says the pledge to recruit more state school teachers would be paid for by Keir Starmer’s plan to add VAT to private school fees. Education is a devolved issue.

The party is also promising to set up a new Fair Work fund - Gwaith Teg in Welsh - to tackle unfair practices and discrimination in the workplace. Trade unions and businesses would be invited to work with the Welsh government on the plans, with the scheme financed through replacement funds for economic aid that Wales used to get from the European Union.

Key to the party’s strategy in this campaign has been to argue that two Labour governments - one in Cardiff Bay and one in Westminster - working together could achieve more for Wales.

Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, First Minister Vaughan Gething, shadow Welsh secretary Jo Stevens and former Labour leader Neil Kinnock are all giving speeches.

Kinnock kicked things off saying “on 4 July change is on the ballot paper”.

Gething says Wales must make sure “we don’t just send a message to Westminster, but we elect a government to send to Westminster.”

David Cornock
Politics reporter

As well as BBC Breakfast and the Today programme, Angela Rayner was also on BBC Radio Merseyside this morning, where she suggested a Labour government would not make changing council tax bands in England a priority "at the moment".

Instead, she said, Labour would focus on building news homes, reform planning rules and a "new deal for working people".

She said: "These are our priorities. Our priority is not to do anything with the council tax banding at the moment."

Council tax bands in England have not been changed since the tax was introduced in 1991. The Labour-run Welsh government has made changes and the Conservatives have suggested Labour could follow suit in England.

Rayner said: "I think at the moment if I'm really honest to your listeners we have got a lot on our plate. I want to build 1.5 million homes, which I think is a huge task.

"We're going to review planning reforms, we're going to look at how we can use the affordable homes grant which the Tories gave £2bn of that back during a housing crisis, which is unbelievable really."

Tom Espiner
Business reporter

Image source, Getty Images

Let's bring you some numbers now on government borrowing, after new figures for May show that it hit the highest level since the Covid crisis but was lower than the UK's fiscal watchdog had forecast.

Borrowing reached £15bn last month, which was £800m higher than May last year.

It means that the public sector spent more than it received in taxes and other income, leading the government to borrow billions of pounds.

It is the third highest figure for May since records began in 1993, surpassed only by the pandemic years.

However, borrowing was £600m less than the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had expected.

With the general election fast approaching, whichever party wins will face similar challenges on tax, spending and debt, economists have warned.

Alison Holt and Eleanor Lawrie
BBC News

An open letter, signed by organisations including Age UK and Marie Curie, has called for parties to do more for the social care sector, whoever is in power after the general election.

More than 50 organisations and 24,000 people have put their names to the letter which says that social care provision "has slipped far below an acceptable level".

Signatories are asking politicians to promise they will "make change happen" with sustainable funding and workforce support.

Julie Sharp got in touch with the BBC via Your Voice, Your Vote. She needs access to lifesaving emergency injections for Addison’s disease and wants politicians to "remove some of the rules and red tape" to enable people to do their jobs - her council-funded respite care workers are not currently allowed to give the injections.

• You can read our full piece and Julie's story here
• To find out more about what different parties are promising on social care head here

While we've been listening in to Angela Rayner on BBC Breakfast, the Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesperson Layla Moran has been talking to our colleagues over on Radio 4's Today programme.

Asked whether her party plans to raise council tax, Moran says her party have a "progressive" taxation policy and believe big businesses and multimillionaires should be paying more.

And on the topic of housing, Moran says the party is ambitious in its goals to build more housing, focusing particularly on social homes, but that there needs to be local community consent for developments and that building on the so-called 'green belt' should be a last resort.

Continuing to press on the issue of trust, the BBC's Charlie Stayt reads Rayner a social media post she put out four years ago, in which she called the two-child benefit cap "obscene and inhumane".

Asked how she now feels, given the policy hasn't been scrapped in Labour's manifesto, she acknowledges that it's a "fair question" - but says "we can't do everything - the Tories have crashed the economy".

She adds that Labour has promised to give every primary school child free breakfast and that, if she becomes deputy prime minister, she'll push for a strategy to address child poverty having grown up in poverty herself.

Rayner then goes on to defend her party's failure to say by how much it will aim to cut net migration by, saying it's more important to address skills shortages in sectors such as social care.

It's put to Rayner that there could be an issue of trust for voters when they look back at how Keir Starmer backed former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the last election, despite subsequently saying he could never win.

Rayner says both she and Starmer had a "duty" to support Corbyn, as members of his shadow cabinet, but admits Labour were "hammered" in 2019 when the "public felt" the party "didn't put forward a credible case for the country".

She says the experience means that Starmer is now more determined to put forward a credible costed plan, which she says can change Britain for the better .

Pushed on issues of trust, Rayner criticises the Conservatives over the recent betting allegations and goes on to say Labour is the party that can put forward a plan that people can vote for.

Labour's deputy leader Angela Rayner is now speaking to BBC Breakfast and her first question is if she watched the special election edition of Question Time last night.

Rayner says she watched "some of it" - but admits she was also watching the Euros match between England and Denmark.

Host Charlie Stayt puts to her that the two events aired at different times (the football started at 17:00 BST, Question Time was at 20:00), Rayner laughs and says she was "travelling from the pub back home", adding that she did watch Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak as they were the last two leaders to appear.

"That's an honest answer," she jokes.

Rayner is next asked about union donor Unite holding back support for Labour's manifesto. She says the union had two main concerns.

Firstly fire and rehire, which she insists the party is going to end.

The second, she says, was Labour's proposals for the transition to green energy.

Rayner adds that Labour has been very clear that they have committed to oil and gas licences that have already been approved, saying that the two energy sources will be part of the mix for the next three decades.

But, she says, the country will have to transition into renewables - citing energy security as a key factor for that, and Great British Energy - a new public company Labour wants to set up - as the way to do so.

Rayner is pushed on a recent Supreme Court ruling about Surrey County Council - that it should have considered the full climate impact of burning oil when considering planning for new wells - and what it could mean for upcoming projects like Rosebank (an oil field that's been given the go ahead). Rayner says she wouldn't deal in hypotheticals and that Labour would firstly need to go through any ruling and would take advice if needed.

Also on Radio 4's Today programme this morning is Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the Labour Party, who's first questioned about the funding of her party's NHS plans - which include an increase to staffing.

Following last night's Question Time leaders' special, BBC Verify analysis showed that money Labour has allocated to the NHS in its manifesto is primarily for appointments and scanners, rather than staffing.

Asked about this, Rayner says the NHS is losing doctors because they don't feel valued and that the Labour Party's proposed reforms will address this: "If we could value the staff, if we can retain the staff so we're not paying huge agency fees, I actually think we could save money, never mind coming in cost neutral."

Pressed further on whether retention is the real issue and about the costs surrounding increased staffing, Rayner says it's a "scandal" that NHS England's "spending so much money on agency fees and keeping people on trolleys in A&E because we don't have the right support for people at the right time when they need it".

Finally, Conservative candidate David TC Davies is asked about comments made by Chris Skidmore, who resigned as an MP in January and served as an energy minister under Theresa May.

Skidmore has said that he will vote Labour for the first time after accusing Rishi Sunak of siding with "climate deniers" and "deliberately politicising the energy transition".

Davies says that is not the case and that the prime minister is siding with "ordinary working people who can't earn the sort of money Chris Skidmore is now earning in the renewables industry".

He claims that 100,000 jobs would be at risk if the country doesn't continue to extract oil and gas from the North Sea and warns of energy bills going up if the UK relies on other countries for our energy needs.

Next, Davies is asked by the BBC's Mishal Husain whether he's worried about the reputation of the Conservative Party following the betting allegations.

"Of course I am," the Wales secretary responds, adding that he's personally tried to uphold standards by doing things such as taking public transport instead of the ministerial car.

He then brings up the recent vote of no confidence in Welsh Labour First Minister Vaughan Gething, to which Hussain says Gething and Labour leader Keir Starmer are not present to respond.

The first of this morning's media round we're going to bring you is Wales Secretary David TC Davies - he's speaking to Radio 4's Today programme and has been asked about data from Betfair showing a spike in the number of general election bets on 21 May, the day before Rishi Sunak announced it would fall on 4 July.

Four people linked to the prime minister are being looked into over allegations of bets - including the Conservative Party’s director of campaigning and a police officer in Sunak's close protection team.

The spike is concerning, odd and something that needs looking into, Davies says.

Asked if he had known ahead of time that the election was going to be called, Davies says there were rumours, but "put it this way, on the morning of the day the election was called... I didn't know".

Pre-empting a follow up question about placing his own bet, Davies is clear that he has not.

Jack Fenwick
Political reporter

Image source, PA Media

A former Conservative minister has said he’ll be backing Labour at the general election.

Chris Skidmore - an energy minister in Theresa May’s government - has accused Rishi Sunak of "siding with climate deniers".

Skidmore resigned as an MP in January over the relaxation of net zero targets. That triggered a by-election in his Gloucestershire seat, which was won by Labour.

While this isn't the first defection of this campaign, his piece , externalin the Guardian newspaper is blisteringly personal.

In it, Skidmore says the prime minister has deliberately politicised energy transition, a move he describes as perhaps the greatest tragedy of Sunak’s premiership, and one that he says will cost the UK environmentally and economically.

A Conservative Party spokesman accused Skidmore of backing Labour policies that would put up taxes for working families and said the Tories had a practical and affordable net zero plan.