Written Statements

Monday 4th June 2018 Written Statements

Monday 4 June 2018

Serious Fraud Office

Monday 4th June 2018 Written Statements

[The Attorney General (Jeremy Wright)]

I am today announcing the appointment of Lisa Osofsky as the next Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

Under the Criminal Justice Act 1987, I appoint a person to be the Director of the Serious Fraud Office, who shall discharge their functions under my superintendence. The Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary have been notified of this appointment.

This appointment has been conducted in line with civil service guidance and the process has been overseen by a civil service commissioner.

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School Places

Monday 4th June 2018 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Education (Damian Hinds)]

My noble Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the School System (Lord Agnew) has made the following written ministerial statement.

The Government are committed to creating more good school places through a diverse education system, to ensure that parents have choice and that children of all backgrounds have access to the best education.

We are investing £7 billion from 2015 to 2021 to create new school places. This forms part of our wider plan to invest more than £23 billion in the school estate by 2021. By continuing to announce the profile of allocations ahead of time, we recognise that good investment decisions require certainty.

As part of this, I am announcing a total package of £730 million of capital funding to create new school places. This includes £630 million of basic need allocations to create the places needed by September 2021. Announcing these allocations means local authorities can plan ahead with confidence, and make good strategic investment decisions to ensure they deliver good school places for every child who needs one.

We recently published the 2017 School Capacity Survey, which highlights the progress to date in providing new school places. By May 2017, our investment had already helped to create 825,000 additional school places since 2010, with 90,000 delivered in 2016-17 alone.

The vast majority of these new places are being created in good or outstanding schools. This is demonstrated through the latest school place scorecards released, which show that 91% of the new places added between 2016 and 2017 in both primary and secondary phases were created in schools rated as good or outstanding by Ofsted.

The Government are also committed to investing in school places for children with special educational needs and disabilities. As part of this, I am announcing a further £50 million top-up to the special provision capital fund to take our total investment to £265 million across 2018-21. This additional funding will help local authorities to create further school places and facilities for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.

I am also announcing £50 million of basic need funding, contributing towards the capital costs of building a new mainstream secondary presumption free school in a targeted number of local authorities.

Details of this announcement will be published on the www.gov.uk website, and copies will be placed in the House Library.

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Social Work England

Monday 4th June 2018 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Nadhim Zahawi)]

My hon. Friend the Minister for Care (Caroline Dinenage), for the Department of Health and Social Care, and I have today published the Government response to the public consultation on the policy to establish the regulatory framework for Social Work England, the new, specialist regulator for social workers in England. Alongside this Government consultation response, we have laid regulations that, subject to parliamentary approval, will enable Social Work England to operate.

The consultation, which ran from 8 February to 21 March, sought views from everyone with an interest in social work and professional regulation on the policy underlying Social Work England’s secondary legislative framework. The aim of this regulatory framework is to enable Social Work England to protect the public by operating streamlined, proportionate and efficient systems and processes which adapt to emerging opportunities, challenges and best practice. This will ensure the professional regulation of social workers in England reflects the changing reality of delivering social work practice safely and effectively—building public trust and confidence in the profession.

We received 198 responses to the consultation from a wide variety of interested stakeholders, including representatives from social worker networks, local authorities, unions, charities, education providers, service user groups, regulatory bodies and individual social workers. During the consultation period, officials also held 11 events, consulting with social workers, education providers and interested parliamentarians and met again with both the Regulatory Expert Group^[1] and the Advisory Group^{[2] .}

Overall, respondents supported the majority of proposals. The consultation response summarises respondents’ views, areas of concern raised and the changes made to address those concerns. We have taken clear and practical steps to respond to what experts, professionals and the sector told us to further strengthen and refine the proposed secondary legislative framework for Social Work England.

A number of respondents also requested further clarity on the role of Government in relation to Social Work England; expressed strong support for collaboration between Social Work England and the sector; and highlighted the importance of minimising disruption to the profession during the transfer of regulatory functions. Many recognised the potential benefits a specialist, single profession regulator will bring to social workers and for the social work profession. Respondents also provided wider comments on the way in which Social Work England will operate as the regulator on a day-to-day basis, and how it might consider effective and efficient ways to discharge its functions. While these responses fall outside of the scope of the consultation on the secondary legislative framework, we do expect Social Work England to work closely with the sector through its consultations on standards and regulatory rules, and as it establishes itself as the new regulator for social workers in England. We hope that respondents will welcome the opportunity to contribute further to such consultation.

Finally, we can announce today that Colum Conway has been appointed as the new Chief Executive of Social Work England. Colum is currently Chief Executive of the regulatory body for the social work profession and social care workforce in Northern Ireland. Alongside his Social Work England experience of running a regulator, he has a background in social work and has many years’ experience working in senior leadership roles. We are confident that he will bring a wealth of relevant experience to this role and we look forward to working with him, and Social Work England’s Chair Lord Patel of Bradford, to make Social Work England a success.

Copies of the Government response are available on www.gov.uk. I will place copies of the consultation response in the House Library.

^[1] The Regulatory Expert Group includes representatives from the General Medical Council, the Banking Standards Board, Professional Standards Authority and the Legal Services Board.

^[2] Social Work England Advisory Group membership includes key organisations from across the social work sector, employer representatives, education providers and service users including the British Association of Social Workers, Association of Directors of Children’s Services and the Association of Professors of Social Work.

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Breast Cancer Screening

Monday 4th June 2018 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Mr Jeremy Hunt)]

On 2 May 2018 I informed the House of a serious failing in the national breast screening programme in England, which resulted in thousands of women aged between 68 and 71 not being invited to their final breast screening between 2009 and May 2018. This statement provides an update on the specific commitments I made in my oral statement and the actions we are now taking to support those affected and prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

First, in my original statement, I committed that the NHS would offer an appointment for screening to all women who missed their scheduled appointment as a result of this error, and that we would provide clear information and advice for anyone with concerns. I asked Public Health England to work with the NHS to contact women who missed their screening by the end of May. I can now confirm that Public Health England met this deadline by 18 May, contacting 195,565 women registered with a GP in England. In addition, all the affected women known to have moved to Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland were also written to by 1 June 2018.

The result of this is that as of 1 June 2018, 26,774 women have now received an appointment for screening, with hundreds already screened. I am providing detailed information on how many women have been contacted in each English constituency, alongside the confirmation that we have written to all those women now registered with a GP in one of the devolved administrations— 503 women in Scotland, 94 women in Wales and 72 women in Northern Ireland. In addition, a dedicated helpline was established on 2 May 2018 to support women who may have concerns. This helpline operates from 8am to 8pm, 7 days a week, and has received over 46,000 calls.

Secondly, I made clear that no one would face delays to their routine screening as a result of the NHS catching up on these additional appointments. I can confirm that, over the last four weeks, the NHS has put in place an additional 68,000 screening appointments nationally and is on track to ensure that all women affected who want a screen will be seen by the end of October, without impacting on other patients. I want to put on record my enormous gratitude to clinical staff who have worked tirelessly to offer additional appointments and to management teams who have co-ordinated and pooled their resources across different centres, or looked to other private providers, to expand capacity to manage the extra demand.

Thirdly, I explained to the House that we were still attempting to understand how many women had been affected and how many had experienced harm as a result. I made it clear that some of the figures I provided were provisional estimates and undertook to provide a further update. I can now confirm, based on analysis by Public Health England, using data provided by NHS Digital that up to 174,000 women were affected by this issue, of which we know that up to 130,000 are still alive. As a result, the numbers who may have had their lives shortened as a result of missing their screening is now estimated to be fewer than 75. While this figure is lower than the original estimates given in my statement, this does not lessen the devastating impact that this has had on some people’s lives.

Finally, the most important thing we can do in cases of serious error is to ensure there is a robust and thorough process to investigate, understand and learn from what went wrong. In my original statement, I also announced an independent review, chaired by Lynda Thomas, chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, and Professor Martin Gore, consultant medical oncologist and professor of cancer medicine at the Royal Marsden with Peter Wyman from the CQC as the Vice Chair. I can now confirm that we have agreed the terms of reference for this review, details of which are attached to this statement. The Chairs are considering how best to involve affected women, their families and wider stakeholders and will release information on this when it is available.

Our cancer screening programme is widely recognised as world-leading, but on this occasion a number of women have been let down. It is now clear that this may have resulted in significant harm for a small number of women, while thousands more have faced unnecessary distress and anxiety as they waited to hear if they have been affected. I would like to repeat my wholehearted and unreserved apology to the women affected and their families—and above all reassure them that we are working hard to understand what went wrong and what we need to do to stop similar incidents from happening in the future.

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Counter-terrorism

Monday 4th June 2018 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sajid Javid)]

The Government’s first priority is to keep families, communities and our country safe. Today, I have published an updated version of “CONTEST: The United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering Terrorism”. The new strategy has been laid before Parliament as a Command Paper (Cm 9608), and copies are available in the Vote Office and on www.gov.uk.

The threat from terrorism, globally and in the UK, is higher than when we last published “CONTEST” in 2011. The threat from Islamist terrorism, in particular that inspired by Daesh and al-Qaeda, remains the most severe. Northern Ireland-related terrorism continues to pose a serious threat in Northern Ireland and Great Britain, and there is a growing threat from extreme right-wing terrorism. In 2016, we proscribed an extreme right-wing terrorist group, National Action, for the first time.

In 2017, we saw a significant shift in the terrorist threat to the UK. Five attacks in London and Manchester led to the deaths of 36 innocent people, and many more injured. We responded decisively, rapidly adapting our priorities and capabilities, to break the momentum of these attacks. Since March 2017, the police and the security and intelligence agencies successfully foiled a further 12 Islamist plots, and disrupted four extreme right-wing plots.

This strategy is the culmination of a detailed review of the UK’s counter-terrorism arrangements, led by the Home Office. We have designed a new, more agile, flexible and co-ordinated approach to respond to the shifting nature of the threats we face, including terrorist exploitation of new technology, the increase in attacks in Europe, including the UK, as Daesh is forced into retreat in Syria and Iraq, and the speed with which people are being radicalised and plots developed. We will introduce new counter-terrorism legislation to disrupt terrorist threats in the UK earlier, taking account of the scale of the threat and the speed at which plots are now developing. We will share information more widely and support more local interventions with individuals in our own communities who are being groomed or incited to commit or support acts of terrorism. We are piloting multi-agency centres to do this in London, Manchester and the west midlands. We will enhance our efforts to disengage and rehabilitate those already involved in terrorism, including through the expansion of the desistance and disengagement programme. And we will continue to work in partnership with the aviation industry and international partners to deliver robust and sustainable aviation security in the UK and overseas.

This strengthened strategy sets out how we will build on the UK’s formidable capabilities, experience and expertise to tackle the growing and changing threat from terrorism in all its forms.

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