Written Statements
(2 days, 9 hours ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
The UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy
(2 days, 9 hours ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Jonathan Reynolds)
I am pleased to announce that today, 14 October, I have published a Green Paper setting out our plans to deliver “Invest 2035: The UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy”.
Growth is the No. 1 mission of this Government. Our vision for a modern industrial strategy is for a credible, 10-year plan to drive sustainable, inclusive and resilient growth and deliver the certainty and stability businesses need to invest across the UK. This is the only way to boost our productivity, reinvest in our public services, create high-quality jobs and ensure tangible impact in communities right across the UK.
The industrial strategy will ensure we can build on our significant and historic strengths—which are the foundations of a vibrant, global economy and position us well to seize the economic opportunities of the coming decade.
To unlock this growth, the strategy will focus on tackling barriers in our highest potential growth-driving sectors. In doing so, the industrial strategy will create a pro-business environment and support high-potential clusters across the country. It will also support our net zero, regional, and economic resilience and security aims. We are prepared to tackle the critical issues head-on and make the choices required to kickstart investment.
We must create a strong pro-business environment that supports businesses to thrive and grow. This industrial strategy will bring forward co-ordinated, sector-specific and cross-cutting policies that support businesses to overcome barriers and make it simpler and cheaper for companies to scale up and invest. These will be founded on four principles: long-term stability, renewing our commitment to free and fair trade, easing the investor journey, and being a strategic, growth-focused state. By considering and listening to businesses and experts, we can identify the most effective levers for our sectors—and clusters—across the country. These policy areas include people and skills, innovation, energy and infrastructure, the regulatory environment, crowding in investment, and international partnerships and trade.
Jobs will also be at the heart of our modern industrial strategy, supporting growth sectors to create high-quality, well paid jobs across the country, backed by employment rights fit for a modern economy. We must also be clear-eyed about the sectors which offer the highest growth opportunity for the economy and businesses, including where the UK has existing and nascent strengths. Our strategy will be ambitious and targeted, taking advantage of the UK’s unique strengths and untapped potential, enabling our world-leading sectors to adapt and grow, and seizing opportunities to lead in new sectors.
Over the last 25 years, roughly 60% of our productivity growth was generated by just 30% of our most productive industries. That is why our industrial strategy has identified eight key growth-driving sectors—advanced manufacturing, creative industries, clean energy industries, defence, digital and technologies, financial services, life sciences, and professional and business services—in which the UK excels today and will excel tomorrow. In the next stage of development of the industrial strategy, we will prioritise sub-sectors within these broad sectors that meet our objectives.
We must also ensure our growth unlocks the economic potential of the UK’s cities and regions, by tailoring policy to specific place-based constraints and opportunities. We will give mayors in England the tools they need to grow their economies and develop ambitious 10-year local growth plans. We will also work in partnership with the devolved Governments to make this industrial strategy a UK-wide effort. In doing so, we will explore how the industrial strategy can identify, select and intervene in the most important industrial sites and sectoral clusters across the UK, making them magnets for globally mobile investment.
But this strategy—and our ambitions—can only be realised in partnership. Too often, the impact of industrial strategies has been concentrated in certain regions and not shared across communities. Businesses tell us that past plans have been short-lived, and often business have felt they were done to, rather than with, them. We will engage widely through the development of this strategy, engaging businesses, trade unions, local and devolved leaders, academics, and international partners.
To underscore this approach, I am also very pleased to announce that we are launching the industrial strategy advisory council, and have appointed Clare Barclay, CEO of Microsoft UK, as chair. Ms Barclay brings a wealth of leadership experience at top-flight UK businesses across technology, innovation and artificial intelligence. Further members will be confirmed in due course, drawn from across business, academia and trade unions to provide a broad range of skills and expertise.
Through the Green Paper, the Government are seeking the views of businesses, stakeholders and parliamentarians to inform the continued development of our industrial strategy and ensure it delivers for people and communities across the UK. I would welcome your analysis and insight, as well as the views of businesses and others in your constituencies.
The industrial strategy and growth-driving sector plans will be published in spring 2025. I will keep Parliament informed as the industrial strategy, and industrial strategy advisory council, continue to develop. I am placing copies of the Green Paper in the Libraries of both Houses.
Reforms to company law
The UK has always been a great place for overseas companies to invest and do business. The Government are committed to taking steps to make the UK a place where foreign companies can easily relocate their incorporation. A UK re-domiciliation regime would increase the ease with which companies could move their place of incorporation to the UK, minimising costs and risks that could otherwise arise from the alternative routes and ensuring that the UK remains internationally competitive. Today, we have published a report by the independent expert panel on corporate re-domiciliation, established to consider how best to implement a framework in the UK. The Government welcome the panel’s report and intend to consult in due course on a proposed regime design. A copy of the report will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.
I can confirm that my Department will lay legislation by the end of the year that will save companies £240 million per year by removing redundant reporting requirements and uplifting the monetary size thresholds for micro-entities and small and medium-sized companies, as well as making technical fixes to the UK’s audit framework. The changes will benefit up to 132,000 companies who will move to a smaller size category, with lighter-touch accounting and reporting requirements more proportionate to their size. These changes are the first step toward modernising the UK’s reporting framework, so it is simpler and better for business, supporting the Government’s aim of having the highest sustained growth in the G7. My Department will also launch an ambitious consultation next year aimed at simplifying and modernising the UK’s non-financial reporting framework. Efforts to modernise will also include examining the potential for updating shareholder communication in line with technology and clarifying the law in relation to virtual annual general meetings.
The Government are also announcing their commitment to speeding up the process for raising share capital. The “Financing Growth” paper committed the Government to implementing the outstanding recommendations from the “Secondary Capital Raising Review”, published in 2022. The changes will be welcomed by business and shareholders and will speed up and simplify the process for companies raising new share capital, for example by reducing from 10 to seven working days the minimum time in which a company must offer new shares to existing shareholders before offering them to the wider market.
[HCWS126]
National Wealth Fund
(2 days, 9 hours ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Rachel Reeves)
This Government have been clear: our No. 1 mission is driving economic growth to improve the lives of the British people. To grow our economy, we need more high-quality, long-term investment. This means creating a new partnership with businesses and making sure Britain is the best place in the world to invest.
The Government are today creating the national wealth fund, the UK’s new impact investor, that will mobilise billions of pounds of investment in the UK’s world-leading clean energy and growth industries, taking forward the recommendations of the NWF taskforce.
To mobilise private investment at pace, the Government are turbocharging the UK Infrastructure Bank to become more catalytic and from today it will operate as the “national wealth fund”.
As the UK’s impact investor, the NWF will have a broader mandate, extending beyond infrastructure to support delivery of the wider industrial strategy in areas where an undersupply in private finance exists, working alongside the British Business Bank. A revised mandate and future priorities will be set following legislation, planned to be brought forward later this Session.
Building on UKIB’s leadership and expertise, the NWF will go further to catalyse more private investment.
The NWF will be empowered to make investments that maximise the mobilisation of private investment with an expansion of UKIB’s offer, including an expanded suite of financial instruments such as performance guarantees and trialling new blended finance solutions, with Government Departments, that take on additional risk to facilitate higher impact in individual deals.
The NWF will have a total capitalisation of £27.8 billion to catalyse investment that would not have otherwise taken place. It will inherit UKIB’s existing capitalisation and have an additional £5.8 billion, which will be committed over this Parliament. The Government previously announced that £7.3 billion additional funding would be allocated through the NWF—the remaining £1.5 billion has been reserved to maintain flexibility in how the Government can best deliver against our aims for the NWF. At least £5.8 billion of the NWF’s capital will focus on the five sectors announced in the manifesto: green hydrogen, carbon capture, ports, gigafactories, and green steel.
The NWF will have a larger amount of economic risk capital to free it from previous constraints. This will be used to direct the NWF’s investments towards having greater economic impact by taking risk in service of the Government’s industrial strategy, clean energy mission and growth mission.
The NWF will adopt a proactive approach, with increased resources and focus on conducting more outreach to identify expanded project pipelines and structure innovative transactions with project sponsors, industry, local authorities and Government Departments.
The NWF will have a strong regional mandate to unleash the full potential of our cities and regions to be reflected in its statement of strategic priorities and how it measures success. It will work in close partnership with Mayors to support investable propositions in their local growth plans, devolved Governments, and other local leaders to support their investment plans and priority sectoral clusters across the UK.
Finally, the NWF will review its range of success measures to demonstrate the impact of its additional capital and realising of investment, impact and outcomes across the economy.
Together, these changes will ensure that the NWF can catalyse additional investment and address the key barriers identified by the taskforce. This will result in the delivery of impactful projects that otherwise would not have happened, unlocking growth opportunities across the UK.
British Business Bank
Alongside this, the Chancellor, together with the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, announced that the Government are strengthening the British Business Bank’s ability to support the UK’s fastest growing, most innovative companies by establishing the British growth partnership.
The British growth partnership is a new, pathfinder approach to the partnership between the British Business Bank and institutional investors that will further the Government’s goal, as set out in the pensions investment review, of encouraging more UK pension fund investment into UK growth assets.
Additionally, we will implement a set of reforms to the British Business Bank’s financial framework that will increase its impact and increase its ability to respond flexibly to the market, including by putting the British Business Bank’s £7.9 billion set of commercial programmes on a permanent footing.
The British Business Bank, the UK’s largest domestic venture capital investor, will launch this new fund, the British growth partnership, to attract pension and institutional investment into venture capital and innovative businesses. These long-term investments will be made independently of Government on a fully commercial basis, leveraging the British Business Bank’s market expertise. The British Business Bank will in the coming months seek to raise hundreds of millions of pounds of investment for this model, supported by a cornerstone Government investment, with the aim of making investments by the end of 2025.
In parallel, the Government can announce that we expect both successful bidders of the Long-term Investment for Technology and Science competition, Schroders and ICG, to begin making investments via their new funds in late 2024, supported by pensions capital from Phoenix Group, with the aim of generating over a billion pounds of investment into UK science and technology companies.
Through LIFTS and the British growth partnership, the Government are acting to make the investment of UK institutional capital into high-growth companies easier. This is set to unlock greater wealth for future pensioners and higher growth in the economy.
[HCWS130]
Bank Ringfencing Reforms
(2 days, 9 hours ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Tulip Siddiq)
The statutory independent review of ringfencing and proprietary trading led by Sir Keith Skeoch, which reported in March 2022, made recommendations to improve the operation of the ringfencing regime.
The Government will implement a package of reforms as soon as parliamentary time allows. The reforms will improve competition and competitiveness in the UK banking sector and support economic growth, while maintaining financial stability.
The reforms will include:
the introduction of a secondary threshold to exempt retail-focused banking groups from the regime—where investment banking activity accounts for less than 10% of Tier 1 capital;
new flexibilities to allow ringfenced banks to operate globally, subject to Prudential Regulation Authority rules;
measures to encourage more investment by ringfenced banks in UK small and medium-sized enterprises;
measures to reduce the compliance burdens associated with the regime; and
an increase in the primary deposit threshold for ring-fenced banks from £25 billion to £35 billion.
[HCWS125]
South Atlantic Co-operation
(2 days, 9 hours ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Stephen Doughty)
On 24 September, the Foreign Secretary met Diana Mondino, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic, in New York.
Following this meeting, the Foreign Secretary and Foreign Minister Mondino were delighted to announce a package of co-operation in the South Atlantic, which was published on the gov.uk website.
The package of co-operation includes the following commitments:
To resume co-operation on fisheries where fishing stocks are shared between Argentina and the Falkland Islands;
To develop a more ambitious agenda for co-operation, under the sovereignty formula, aimed at promoting human and economic development and strengthening links between the islands and the continent;
To resume negotiations to complete the third phase of the humanitarian project plan to identify unidentified Argentine soldiers killed in 1982;
To organise a trip to the islands by next-of-kin of fallen soldiers before the end of 2024, so that they can visit the graves of the soldiers laid to rest in the Falkland Islands;
To resume the weekly São Paulo—Falkland Islands flight that stopped once a month in Córdoba, Argentina, as established in 2019.
It was agreed that the formula on the safeguards of sovereignty, in paragraph 2 of the joint statement between the UK and Argentina of 19 October 1989, applies to this agenda and to its outcomes.
The Falkland Islands Legislative Assembly was consulted throughout the negotiations and has issued a statement welcoming this package of co-operation. It has no impact on the UK Government’s commitment to defending our sovereignty in the South Atlantic, or on defending the Falkland Islanders’ right of self-determination.
The United Kingdom and Argentina will celebrate the bicentenary of diplomatic relations in 2025, and the United Kingdom looks forward to a new era of constructive co-operation, characterised by improved dialogue and confidence-building measures.
[HCWS128]
Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024: Implementation
(2 days, 9 hours ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister for Security (Dan Jarvis)
The first duty of Government is to keep our citizens safe. The UK faces an evolving threat from terrorists, hostile actors and organised criminal groups, and it is vital that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies have the powers and capabilities they need to target these individuals and groups.
The Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024, which received Royal Assent earlier this year, makes targeted updates to the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, to ensure the UK’s investigatory powers framework remains fit for the purpose of protecting our national security. Much of the operational detail is necessarily set out in guidance, rather than on the face of the primary legislation. This is delivered through statutory codes of practice, which are brought into force via secondary legislation, and which public authorities must have regard to when exercising functions to which the codes relate. The secondary legislation to bring the codes into force will be subject to the affirmative parliamentary procedure.
As part of the Home Office’s work in implementing the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024, today we are launching a public consultation to seek views on the proposed revised codes. The consultation will run over a 12-week period and provides an opportunity for stakeholders to have their say.
The consultation will seek views on three new codes (on bulk personal datasets with a low or no expectation of privacy, third-party bulk personal datasets and the notices regime) and updates to five existing codes (on bulk personal datasets, communications data, bulk communications data, equipment interference, and interception). It will also seek views on a set of draft notices regulations, which will specify what types of changes may be included in the new notification notices, introduce timelines for the review of technical capability, data retention, and national security notices, and amend existing regulations in relation to notice processes with regards to membership of the technical advisory board.
Alongside publication of this consultation, I have also signed the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024 (Commencement No. 1 and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2024. These regulations commence the majority of the 2024 Act’s provisions, ensuring that important measures such as additional journalistic protections within the bulk equipment interference regime are commenced as soon as possible. The Home Office will encourage public authorities which exercise functions under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 to have regard to the new draft codes from this point onwards. This approach is being taken to provide clarity to public authorities, both in situations whereby the existing codes do not make provision for new measures within the 2024 Act (such as those relating to bulk personal datasets where there is a low or no expectation of privacy or third party bulk personal datasets) and in situations whereby the draft codes include important updates to the existing codes (such as on what amounts to lawful authority for acquiring communications data). There will still be scope to amend the draft codes based on responses to the consultation, ahead of final versions being brought into force through secondary legislation. The Home Office will carefully consider responses to the consultation in advance of the introduction of the relevant secondary legislation, which will be progressed when parliamentary time allows.
Certain aspects of the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024 have not been included within the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024 (Commencement No. 1 and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2024 and will instead be commenced at a later date. In particular, some of the notices provisions will only be commenced once the consultation has been concluded. Further, commencement of the requirement to have a warrant to examine a third-party bulk personal dataset will be delayed for six months, allowing sufficient time for warrants to be prepared and staggered, thereby avoiding a situation whereby they all fall to expire on the same day.
The Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024 will bring the investigatory powers regime up to date with the modern age. This approach to implementation will allow for consideration of a wide range of stakeholder views, while providing certainty to public authorities in exercising these powers.
A copy of the consultation and the associated annexes will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and published on www.gov.uk.
[HCWS124]
Use of Animals in Science: Strengthening Regulation
(2 days, 9 hours ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Minister for Security (Dan Jarvis)
My noble Friend the Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) has today made the following written ministerial statement:
This Government are committed to partnering with scientists, industry and civil society to work towards the phasing out of animal testing. As we move towards this goal, we recognise that the development of safe and effective medicines, the protection of humans and animals, and the protection of the environment still relies on the limited and strictly regulated use of animals. We are committed to maintaining the UK’s history of strong laws and strengthening our regulatory framework to assure protections to animals used in science. Strengthening our national regulator is important to maintain our position at the global forefront of welfare and support the UK’s life science sector to innovate and grow.
To this end, the Great Britain animals in science regulator will make reforms to its organisational design to most effectively deliver its purpose of protecting animals through maintaining compliance with the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. Reforms will ensure that the life sciences sector is supported to grow through regulation which is proportionate, targeted, clear, and consistent, as well as robust and effective. The reforms will allow the regulator to be flexible to developments in the scientific and regulatory landscape, so that it is adaptable and resilient over the long-term.
Changes to the regulator’s organisational design are focused on ensuring the regulator has the right capacity and capabilities in the right places to meet best practice standards for regulators. The changes are designed to facilitate the regulator in adopting an operating model which has an increased emphasis on data, analysis and quality monitoring, and an improved provision of guidance and communication to the life science sector on how to comply with the law to protect animals. These changes will achieve stronger protections for animals; increase adherence to the principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement; provide an enhanced quality of service for the science sector; and increase assurance to the public of the protections the UK continues to deliver for animals in science.
[HCWS127]
Attracting Investment
(2 days, 9 hours ago)
Written StatementsRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Prime Minister (Keir Starmer)
I am making this statement to bring to the House’s attention the following machinery of government change.
In support of the Government’s efforts to make the UK a great place to invest, the Office for Investment will be expanded, and will now report jointly into HM Treasury, the Department for Business and Trade and No. 10. A new joint HM Treasury and Department for Business and Trade Minister for Investment will oversee this work.
Accounting officer responsibilities for the Office for Investment remain with the Department for Business and Trade. This change is effective immediately.
[HCWS129]