Ukraine: Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration Second Tranche Disbursal
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Darren Jones)
On 1 March 2025, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and her Ukrainian counterpart, Minister Marchenko, signed a £2.26 billion ($3 billion) loan agreement under the G7 extraordinary revenue acceleration loans for Ukraine scheme. The Government are disbursing their contribution to this scheme in three equal tranches over three fiscal years. The first tranche of £752 million was paid to Ukraine on 6 March 2025, with the second tranche paid on 14 April 2025.
The G7 ERA initiative is set to collectively provide approximately $50 billion in loans to Ukraine. This crucial funding will be repaid using future flows of extraordinary profits generated from immobilised Russian sovereign assets, which are primarily held within the EU.
Given the urgent needs of Ukraine and the significant public interest in Ukraine’s defence of its territory, as well as the broader security of Europe and the UK, there is insufficient time to wait for the usual parliamentary process to conclude to allow for the second tranche of UK support under this scheme to be distributed to Ukraine. The final tranche, payable in the next financial year, will be funded in the usual way through the estimates process.
Parliamentary approval for additional capital of £752,667,000 for this new expenditure will be sought in a main estimate for His Majesty’s Treasury. Pending that approval, urgent expenditure estimated at £752,667,000 has been met by repayable cash advances from the contingencies fund.
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2023 Agenda for Change Deal: Non-pay Workstreams
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)
Today I am updating the House on work under way to improve the working lives of NHS staff.
The 2023 Agenda for Change (AfC) pay deal, agreed between the previous Government and the NHS Staff Council, included 10 commitments to look at issues that impact NHS staff. Some of these commitments have already been fulfilled; however, five of the commitments involved representatives from the Department, the NHS Staff Council, NHS Employers and NHS England working collaboratively to produce recommendations for Government to consider.
These five commitments included: identifying ways to support the fair and consistent application of the NHS job evaluation scheme (JES), ways to improve nurse career progression, options to tackle violence and aggression against NHS staff, ways to reduce agency spend through the NHS terms and conditions, and options to improve support for newly qualified healthcare registrants.
I have now carefully considered each of the 37 recommend- ations that have been made, in the context of the extremely challenging fiscal situation and other departmental priorities.
I am delighted to inform Members that I will be taking forward 36 out of the 37 recommendations at this time, which will have a considerable and positive impact on the NHS workforce. The full list of recommendations has been published at https://www.nhsemployers.org/articles/nhs-staff-council-joint-statement-2023-non-pay-commitments I will continue to update my colleagues as we work in partnership with NHS Employers to improve the working lives of colleagues across the NHS.
The NHS should always be a great place to work, regardless of job role or location. Staff should be free from fear of violence, aggression or discrimination and I know that the Minister for Secondary Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol South (Karin Smyth), looks forward to working closely with colleagues in the Social Partnership Forum to implement all the recommendations to better protect staff from the risk of violent behaviour. This includes encouraging a reporting culture where all incidents of violence and aggression are reported, the consistent collection of data, and developing a standard approach to post-incident support for all staff that are impacted.
Supporting career progression for our nurses is another important aspect of this work. As a result of these recommendations, our ethnic minority and internationally educated nurses should receive better and more consistent support for their career progression through six-monthly career reviews and more consistent recognition of their overseas experience. In combination, all the recommendations will have a positive impact on the experience of our highly valued nursing staff.
I wanted to take this opportunity to particularly highlight the importance of accurate and consistent application of the NHS job evaluation scheme (JES). Staff should expect to be paid correctly for the work that they are asked to deliver by their employer, as is their contractual right. That is why I am particularly pleased to be accepting the package of recommendations relating to improving local job evaluation practice.
The NHS JES underpins the AfC contract as the mechanism for determining the pay bands for all posts under the NHS terms and conditions (Agenda for Change). It is the responsibility of each NHS employer to comply with the Equality Act 2010 which mandates equal pay for work of equal value.
All NHS organisations should have the necessary resources and skills in place to be confident that they are correctly and robustly applying the NHS JES; however, we know this is not the case. While I know there are some areas where this is working well, this is not consistent across all organisations. I want to be clear that my expectation is that the NHS JES is applied correctly and robustly throughout the whole of the NHS, underpinned by partnership working between employers and trade unions at a local level, to ensure that all staff are paid correctly for the work they are asked to deliver.
Further information and guidance will be developed with the NHS Staff Council to support local partnerships to apply the NHS JES correctly.
These recommendations will restore confidence in the NHS JES and build essential capacity to enable proper application of the scheme. With the roll-out of a new national job evaluation software solution, we are seeking to monitor banding outcomes and improve efficiency by making the current administrative functions easier and more consistent, which will in turn reduce administrative costs locally.
Next steps
I have now instructed officials to work with NHS England, the NHS Staff Council, the Social Partnership Forum and NHS Employers to agree an implementation plan to phase the delivery of the non-pay measures over the next two years. This will minimise the potential impact on resource across the system.
This Government have ambitious plans for the NHS, and we are getting the health service back on its feet through our plan for change, delivering over 2 million extra appointments and cutting hospital waiting lists. A vital part of these plans is to improve the working lives of our NHS staff, and that is why we are announcing this support package to tackle violence and improve career progression opportunities for staff. We recognise that NHS productivity can be impacted by poor workplace experience for staff, which we are addressing through these measures. We are in the process of developing a 10-year health plan and a refreshed long-term workforce plan to set this out comprehensively. This work will ensure that we not only have the right people in the right places to deliver the care patients need, but also that the NHS is a great place to work for our staff.
I am incredibly grateful to all those involved who worked so hard to produce these recommendations.
I will continue to keep Parliament updated on the progress of this work.
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VE Day 80th Anniversary: Licensing Hours Extension
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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The Minister for Policing, Fire and Crime Prevention (Dame Diana Johnson)
The Government will move forward with the proposal to issue a licensing hours order under section 172 of the Licensing Act 2003, following growing and overwhelming support from the public to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. To confirm, this order will extend licensing hours in England and Wales for the 80th anniversary of VE Day.
The order will apply to premises already licensed for the sale of alcohol and late-night refreshments for consumption on the premises until 11 pm. The order will extend the licensing hours for these premises from 11 pm on 8 May to 1 am on 9 May. The territorial extent of the order will be England and Wales.
The Government view VE Day as an event of exceptional national significance, and an extension to licensing hours will enable communities to come together at their local licensed premises to celebrate 80 years of peace since the end of world war two, which millions paid the ultimate sacrifice to achieve. This will also provide support to the hospitality sector by enabling businesses to extend their trading hours should they wish to do so.
The order will be laid in Parliament in due course and an economic note will be published alongside it on legislation.gov.uk.
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Police Accountability and Vetting
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The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Yvette Cooper)
In my statement to the House on 23 October 2024, I announced a number of reforms in relation to police accountability and misconduct, and set out the further work that the Government would be undertaking to restore the confidence of both the police and the public in the current system for holding officers to account.
Since October, the Home Office has worked in partnership with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the Metropolitan Police Service, the College of Policing, the Independent Office for Police Conduct and the Crown Prosecution Service to implement the practical steps I announced last autumn, and develop the further changes that would be required, and I am grateful for their support.
Today, as one of the measures arising from that work, I am laying new regulations requiring all serving police officers to hold appropriate vetting status. Where they do not, it will be grounds for dismissal, thereby ending the unacceptable situation where many officers who are clearly unfit to serve cannot currently be removed.
This action is long overdue. Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Mark Rowley rightly expressed his frustration in February at the lack of progress made on this issue over many decades, and called for new regulations to be put in place
“so that we can deal expeditiously and properly with people who aren’t fit to wear a uniform.”
One of his predecessors, Sir Ian Blair, recently wrote of his experiences in the 2000s seeking to root out corruption from the Metropolitan Police Service. He said:
“We needed the ability to remove officers who had failed vetting and subsequent appeal procedures. That nothing has changed 25 years later is bewildering. Ministers should do what their predecessors failed to do and make clear that vetting failure is a sackable offence.”
That is the action we are taking today.
I intend to lay additional regulations next month to increase the robustness of the police conduct and performance regimes and further strengthen the ability of forces to remove individuals who do not meet the high standards required of police officers. These will ensure that conviction of certain criminal offences will automatically result in a finding of gross misconduct, and that dismissal is the default for any officer found guilty of gross misconduct. Extra measures on mandatory vetting standards and suspension of officers under investigation for allegations of violence against women and girls will be introduced later this year. I will also shortly announce the chair and terms of reference for a review of systemic barriers to timeliness in the misconduct system, including learning lessons.
In addition, we are continuing to make rapid progress on a number of the other reforms set out in my statement in October. As I set out then, the British policing model relies on mutual bonds of trust between the public and the police. For our policing model to work, it is essential that the police have the confidence of the communities they serve, and also that officers have the confidence that they need to do their vital and often extremely difficult job of keeping us all safe. As well as the new action set out above to rebuild public confidence in policing by ensuring the highest standards are upheld and maintained, we have also progressed work to boost the confidence of police officers in the systems holding them to account by tackling unacceptable delays and confusion in the process, protecting officers’ identities during court proceedings following the discharge of a firearm, and ensuring that the complexity of specialist operations is considered at an early stage.
At the end of 2024, the Director of Public Prosecutions completed his review of CPS guidance and processes in relation to charging police officers for offences committed in the course of their duties. The review considered three pieces of guidance: deaths in custody, fatal road traffic offences and allegations against the police. Working with the police and stakeholders, it sought to provide greater clarity when explaining the approach to decision-making and to set out all relevant considerations which are to be addressed when deciding to charge. This includes taking account of the dynamic and fast-moving circumstances that police officers face, particularly firearms officers. Revised guidance was published on 31 January.
Sir Adrian Fulford and Tim Godwin will shortly be completing their rapid review examining the legal test for use of force in police misconduct cases and the threshold for determining short-form conclusions of unlawful killing in inquests. Once received, the Lord Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), and I will consider their recommendations before announcing the Government’s response.
Later this week, we will table an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to provide for a presumption of anonymity for firearms officers who are subject to a criminal trial following a shooting. This is intended to address specific concerns raised during the accountability review about the risks firearms officers face from criminals seeking revenge and will protect them, and their families, against any such threat.
In February, three other measures were set out in the Crime and Policing Bill arising from the accountability review: (i) to align the threshold for police and Independent Office for Police Conduct referrals of officers to the Crown Prosecution Service to that used by the police when referring cases involving members of the public; (ii) to allow the IOPC to send cases to the CPS where there is sufficient evidence prior to their final investigation report; and (iii) to put the IOPC’s victims’ right to review policy on a statutory footing. Those measures are due for debate during Committee next month.
In addition, the IOPC and National Police Chiefs’ Council have developed a new protocol regarding the investigation of deaths or serious injuries on the roads involving police officers. Where the input of a subject matter expert is required, that input will be requested at the earliest opportunity to expedite investigations. Further work relating to use of force investigations will begin in due course and I will provide further updates to the House once that work concludes.
Finally, the College of Policing is taking forward the plans I announced in October to establish a national database of the lessons learned when deaths or serious injury happen after police contact or pursuits, so that when these tragic incidents occur, the lessons are incorporated into the development of police training and guidance to help prevent their repetition. Further details will be set out in due course.
In these and other areas, the Government remain determined to take the necessary action to strengthen public confidence in the police, and to strengthen the confidence of the police when they are out on the street doing the difficult job of keeping us safe. Those are the twin goals that we will continue to work towards, building on the strong progress we have already made since my statement in October.
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Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects Regime: Further Reforms
(1 day, 12 hours ago)
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The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)
Sustained economic growth is the only route to delivering the improved prosperity our country needs and the higher living standards working people deserve. That is why it is this Government’s No. 1 mission and why our plan for change committed us to fast-tracking 150 planning decisions on major infrastructure projects by the end of this Parliament.
While nationally significant infrastructure projects applications are already being processed on average 50 days quicker than in the last Parliament, achieving that milestone is going to require the planning regime for NSIP to be firing on all cylinders. Yet we know that the current system is too slow and that its performance has deteriorated sharply in recent years. Inefficiencies in the system are delaying the delivery of much-needed infrastructure and driving up costs for industry, billpayers and taxpayers.
The Government are determined to improve the system and to that end the Planning and Infrastructure Bill includes a range of measures—from mandatory and faster updates to national policy statements to reducing the scope for meritless judicial reviews—designed to deliver a faster and more certain consenting process for critical infrastructure.
As the Deputy Prime Minister and I made clear on Second Reading, the measures included at introduction are not the limit of our ambitions when it comes to streamlining the NSIP regime. In responding to the debate, I committed to giving further consideration to addressing the significant elongation of pre-application periods resulting from the way in which statutory procedures are now being applied and made clear that the Government would not hesitate to act boldly if there is a compelling case for reform in this area. Having considered the matter further as promised, we have decided to act.
A key objective of any planning consent regime must be to encourage the submission of high-quality applications that deliver benefits at both the national and local level. High-quality applications should be underpinned by early, meaningful and constructive engagement with those affected—including with local authorities, statutory consultees, landowners, and local communities. When such engagement does take place, the benefits are felt in terms of better schemes, greater local benefits and improved mitigation.
However, the successful functioning of any planning consent regime also requires that it ensure proportionate and timely processes for decision making. This is particularly important for the NSIP regime, which is the primary route for consenting critical infrastructure projects in the national interest. Yet the evidence clearly indicates that the system’s performance has deteriorated sharply in recent years.
In 2021, it took on average 4.2 years for a project to secure development consent, compared with 2.6 years in 2012. The National Infrastructure Commission has highlighted that uncertainty around the time and volume of consultation required resulted in the doubling of the preapplication period for Hinkley Point C to Sizewell C from three to seven years. An Anglian Water application for a new Fens reservoir—to supply 250,000 homes with water—has spent over 1,000 days in pre-application stage. It is essential that we take all necessary steps to drive timescales of this kind back down.
Unique to planning consent regimes, the NSIP system established by the Planning Act 2008 includes statutory requirements for applicants to undertake consultation before submitting an application. These statutory pre-application procedures were created for a regime that originally saw decisions taken by commissioners rather than Ministers. Subsequent to that democratic deficit being addressed through the Localism Act 2011, they were retained on the basis that they helped improve applications prior to submission.
However, there is considerable evidence to attest to the fact that these statutory requirements are driving perverse outcomes. Rather than providing a means by which engagement drives better outcomes, statutory pre-application procedures have become a tick-box exercise that encourages risk aversion and gold-plating. The result is consultation fatigue and confusion for communities, longer, more technical and less accessible documentation, and an arrangement that actively disincentivises improvements to applications—even if these are in a local communities’ interest—because applicants worry this will require a further repeat consultation.
The Government have concluded that these statutory requirements, absent from other planning regimes, including those used to determine applications for new housing, now serve to slow down projects and deter improvements to them—wholly contrary to their nominal purpose of producing better outcomes.
I am, therefore, today announcing that the Government will amend the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to remove the statutory requirement to consult as part of the pre-application stage for NSIP applications, bringing requirements in line with all other planning regimes. This will include removing the requirement for developers to prepare and consult on preliminary environmental information, which currently often leads to applicants duplicating content already required through existing environmental regulation.
This change could reduce the typical time spent in pre-application by up to 12 months, speeding up the delivery of major economic infrastructure—including our electricity networks and clean energy sources, roads, public transport links and water supplies—that is essential to delivering basic services, growing the economy, supporting the UK’s mission to achieve clean power by 2030, and enabling 1.5 million safe and decent homes to be built over this Parliament. Over this Parliament, the change could result in a cost saving of over £1 billion across the pipeline of projects. By speeding up delivery, increasing capacity and reducing constraint costs, it will also contribute to lower household bills.
Following these changes, affected local communities and local authorities will, of course, still be able to object to applications, provide evidence of adverse impacts, and have their say as part of the post-submission NSIP process. The Government are clear that removing these statutory requirements does not signify that pre-submission consultation and high-quality engagement is no longer important—such engagement and consultation will remain vital to delivering successful major infrastructure projects. However, the current system is not working for communities or developers.
We still want the NSIP regime to function on the basis of a front-loaded approach in which development proposals are thoroughly scoped and refined prior to being submitted to the Planning Inspectorate. And we still expect high-quality early, meaningful and constructive engagement and consultation to take place with those affected as part of that process, thereby enabling positive changes to be made to proposals without causing undue delays. Given that such engagement and consultation routinely takes place and leads to improved proposals in other planning regimes without such statutory requirements, and because the development consent order examination procedure rewards high-quality applications, we are confident that developers will continue to be incentivised to undertake it.
To support this change, the Government intend to publish statutory guidance setting out strong expectations that developers undertake consultation and engagement prior to submitting an application. We will work with stakeholders to design this guidance, launching a public consultation in the summer, so that it encourages best practice without recreating the flaws of the current system.
Principles that we intend to reflect in this guidance will include the benefits of consultation to developing high-quality schemes and the importance of developers taking a proportionate approach to avoid repeated consultations. As the NSIP process will continue to be one built on the principle of front-loading engagement, pre-application services provided by the Planning Inspectorate, statutory consultees and local authorities will continue and be encouraged by guidance, but these services will be reshaped to reflect a renewed focus on the quality of applications and their readiness for examination rather than meeting a statutory test.
Alongside these changes, we will retain the invitation to local authorities to submit a local impact report to the Planning Inspectorate in advance of an examination. We will also retain the requirement for applicants to notify the Planning Inspectorate when they intend to submit an application and extend this requirement to include host local authorities. Publicity requirements, essential to support good quality engagement, will remain in place.
The Planning Inspectorate, on behalf of the Secretary of State, will continue to assess whether applications are suitable to proceed to examination. We expect guidance to emphasise that without adequate engagement and consultation, applications are unlikely to be able to proceed to examination. Both guidance and advice from the Planning Inspectorate will be aimed at helping applications demonstrate that they are of a satisfactory standard.
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