The shadow chancellor is running through all of Labour's key policies to make, as he puts it, the lives of working families better. They include freezing energy prices, building more homes, increasing the free hours of early years education for all children from 15 to 25.

He also continues to insist that the Conservatives will put up VAT if re-elected - despite David Cameron insisting otherwise a couple of weeks ago.

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BBC Radio 5 Live

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Ed Balls cites figures from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies to support his case. He says the think tank has calculated that average household incomes have fallen by £1,100 a year since 2010. The IFS "also exposes how families with children have been hit hardest", he adds. 

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls has just started speaking in a very sunny Leeds. He says he wants to set out "the true impact" of the tax and benefit changes the government has made in the last five years - and "Labour's better alternative".

Carole Walker
Conservative campaign correspondent

Image source, Getty

David Cameron and George Osborne will both be out campaigning in south-west England today, where the PM will be meeting some carefully selected voters who will benefit from the government's tax changes.

The PM will say there is not just an economic case but a moral case for low taxes, and this goes to the heart of what he believes in as a Conservative.

However, while few of us want to hand over more of our earnings in taxes, as we saw in last week’s television debate, some of his political rivals are mounting strong arguments that taxes should be raised for higher earners.

And there is another flipside to the commitment to low taxes. The Tories need to save £30bn to eliminate the deficit by 2017/18 and if they won’t put up taxes, all the money will have to come from spending cuts. They have said they will save £5bn by cracking down on tax avoidance, £13bn from departmental spending and £12bn from welfare. But there remain big unanswered questions on which benefits and which government projects will have to be axed.

Nicola Sturgeon is visiting a care home this morning in East Dunbartonshire to launch the SNP's Pensioner Plan.

Among the key tenets are:

• Retention of the triple lock to ensure the state pension increases every year either by inflation, in line with wages or by 2.5% - whichever is higher
• A single tier pension rate of at least £160 to lift pensioners out of means-tested benefits
• A guarantee that there should be no further increase in the state pension age in Scotland while life expectancy still lags behind the rest of the UK and Europe
• A pledge that the SNP will oppose any attempts to end the Winter Fuel Allowance 

BBC News Channel

Priti Patel was referring to a story in the Independent, external in which Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander claims he heard a senior Conservative tell a Lib Dem colleague, "You take care of the workers and we'll take care of the bosses." Ms Patel, a Conservative, adds: "We are in an election campaign so it's not surprising that comments like that are being made by other political parties."

Mike Whitehead's profile wasn't just lingering on the local Conservative website. According to Darren McCaffrey at Sky News, external, it was still on the main party one too this morning.

This is what you get now.

Image source, Conservatves

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We at Politics Live might be surgically attached to Twitter, but are British general elections more broadly stuck in the 1950s? That's the question our colleague Brian Wheeler has been considering - read his piece here.

Let us know what you think by emailing politics@bbc.co.uk, external.

Mike Whitehead might have been sacked by the Conservatives last week, but his profile as candidate was still on the Hull branch of the party's website this morning.

Image source, Conservatives

Despite the downplaying from the Conservatives, Labour's Jon Trickett, shadow Cabinet Office minister, insisted the defection was "another huge blow for David Cameron’s authority".

Mike Whitehead wont be standing as a parliamentary candidate for UKIP - they already have one. But he won't be standing for the Conservatives either - and will be running to be UKIP councillor. The Conservatives might play this down, but it'll definitely give Nigel Farage something to smile about, especially as we've reported on plenty of stories about his candidates making headlines for the wrong reasons.

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UKIP might be claiming a scalp, but the Conservatives say they had already sacked Mike Whitehead. A spokesman said: "He refused to support the local Conservative council candidate - and so we wrote to him last week to say that his position was untenable and could not stand for us at the general election. We were already selecting a new candidate for this constituency.

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