Written Statements
Early Years Funding 2025-26
(1 month ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Stephen Morgan)
This Government are clear that whoever you are, wherever you come from, ours should be a country where hard work means you can get on in life. Ensuring that every child has the best start in life is crucial to breaking down barriers to opportunity from the earliest point in our lives.
Early years educators, providers and local authorities are already doing incredible work to meet this mission and expand their provision so that more families can benefit from affordable, accessible and high-quality early education and childcare.
As announced in the 2024 autumn Budget, we expect to provide over £8 billion for the early years entitlements in 2025-26—an increase of more than 30% compared with 2024-25—as we work towards the expansion of the entitlements.
Today we have also published the new early years local authority core funding rates for 2025-26. The national average three and four-year-old hourly funding rates of local authorities is increasing by 4.1%, the two-year-old hourly funding rates is increasing by 3.3%, and the nine months to two-year-old hourly funding rate is increasing by 3.4%. As usual, the hourly funding rates will vary between local authorities, reflecting the relative needs of the children and different costs of delivering provision across the country.
To ensure that providers are set up to deliver 30 funded hours of childcare and early education for children aged nine months to when they start school, and that parents are able to access this across our communities from September 2025, on top of over £8 billion through the core funding rates we will be investing an additional £75 million of revenue funding in 2025-26 through an expansion grant, recognising the significant effort and planning to prepare for the final phase of the expansion. This grant is on top of over £8 billion provided through the core funding rates.
It is essential that high-quality early education and childcare are accessible for all children and families, given the importance of the early years of life. However, currently there are gaps in both provision and quality, especially for disadvantaged children. That is why we are delivering the largest ever uplift to the early years pupil premium, increasing EYPP rates by over 45% per hour in 2024-25 to £1 per hour in 2025-26, equivalent to up to £570 per eligible child per year.
This unprecedented increase is an investment in quality early education for those children who need it most, providing additional support for disadvantaged children to meet development goals at age five.
Eligible children can also receive £938 per child per year through the disability access fund to support reasonable adjustments for children with a disability. We also expect to spend £92.6 million on maintained nursery school (MNS) supplementary funding in 2025-26, in recognition of the additional costs that MNSs face.
It is important that providers can plan ahead. Therefore, we have set the expectation that local authorities communicate their rates to providers by 28 February 2025 at the latest, and we will be working with local authorities to support them to do this. This will become mandatory from 2026-27.
From April 2025, we are increasing the minimum pass-through requirement, meaning that local authorities must pass on at least 96% of funding to providers, as part of a phased approach to a 97% pass-through in the future.
Full details on the 2025-26 local authority hourly funding rates, including step-by-step tables, have been published on www.gov.uk.
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Calais Group
(1 month ago)
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Yvette Cooper)
Today I, jointly with German Interior Minister Faeser, convened Calais Group partners Belgium, France and the Netherlands in London, in the presence of the European Commission and its agencies, Frontex and Europol, to deliver real and tangible results on the fight against the dangerous people smuggling networks that threaten our collective border security.
At this important forum, all Calais Group partners agreed to jointly deliver the Calais Group priority plan in 2025. This plan is testament to our shared commitment to dismantling the people smuggling networks. It builds on our excellent joint working through existing structures and refocuses shared priorities to bring to justice those who undermine our border security.
The priority plan contains actions which will deliver enhanced co-operation in 2025, taking a whole-of-route approach to tackle the end-to-end criminality of migrant smuggling networks, who continue to deploy more dangerous tactics, putting lives at risk.
The key areas of collaboration include:
Co-ordinating preventative communications to deter irregular migrants from paying organised crime groups to facilitate dangerous journeys.
Strengthening our ability to work together, via Europol, to enhance targeting and disruption of prominent OCGs and their criminal supply chains. We will do so through deepening intelligence and information sharing, and ensuring there are effective and robust legislative frameworks criminalising the small boat supply chain, with a focus on evolving tactics and targeting the end-to-end criminality of the Kurdish-Iraqi OCGs involved in smuggling migrants into and across Europe.
Tackling the use of social media by OCGs to recruit and advertise dangerous journeys across Europe and the channel to migrants.
Targeting the illicit finance models of migrant smuggling networks to better target preventative, investigation and disruption efforts in order to take action on criminal finances and ensure that migrant smuggling is not a viable or profitable business.
Enabling reciprocal exchange of the most pertinent information relating to migration flows and border security issues to better understand and respond to emerging trends and migrant flows.
That demonstrates the commitment of near-neighbour partners to breaking the business model of migrant smuggling networks, and reaffirms our resolve to use every tool available to ensure that these criminals are brought to justice.
Alongside this crucial meeting, the Government are also today publishing a statement on delivering border security, setting out our approach to establishing the border security command, tackling organised immigration crime and improving the UK’s border security. The new border security command will lead and drive forward the required step-change in the UK’s approach to border security, including our international response.
Organised immigration crime is a global threat, with no respect for national boundaries. Tackling it requires working closely with international partners. The border security command is scaling up efforts with key near-neighbour partners and the EU, through the Calais Group, to disrupt the people smuggling trade and the criminal gangs that profit from it.
Copies of the Calais Group priority plan and the delivering border security statement will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and will also be published on www.gov.uk later this afternoon.
[HCWS293]
Irregular Migration: UK-Germany Joint Action Plan
(1 month ago)
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Yvette Cooper)
Organised immigration crime is an international problem that requires international solutions. That is why we are substantially scaling up collaboration with international partners to disrupt the people smuggling trade and the criminal gangs that profit from it.
Yesterday, I signed a landmark agreement with the German Federal Minister of the Interior and Community, Nancy Faeser. The UK-Germany joint action plan to tackle irregular migration will deliver strengthened investigative and prosecutorial responses to organised immigration crime, alongside enhanced intelligence sharing between our respective law enforcement agencies, and greater co-ordination of our efforts in source and transit countries to tackle irregular migration at source.
Many of the same criminal smuggler gangs that organise small boats in the channel are also operating in Germany and across Europe, with an impact on the security of all our countries, and therefore stronger law enforcement across borders is essential to tackle the dangerous gangs, illicit finance and supply chains involved.
There is recognition on both sides that activities on German soil that facilitate migrant smuggling towards the UK require a clarified legislative approach. Once enacted, this legal change will make it easier to disrupt and prosecute organised crime, including making it easier to significantly increase the number of arrests and prosecutions made in relation to the supply of small boats equipment—ensuring that those driving this trade are brought to justice.
Germany is a key international partner in our efforts to tackle people smuggling and the organised criminal groups that profit from this trade. The joint action builds on our existing co-operation with Germany and will deliver a new framework for enhancing our joint efforts to tackle organised immigration crime.
Minister Faeser’s visit to London yesterday included a visit to the National Crime Agency’s headquarters for a briefing on the scale of the small boats supply chain, existing operational co-operation between our respective law enforcement agencies, and the further co-operation that UK and German law enforcement agencies can undertake together through the joint action plan.
A copy of the UK-Germany joint action plan will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and will also be published on www.gov.uk.
[HCWS291]